The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court
by Senator Eric Schmitt
Broadside Books
272 pps. $32.99
It’s fitting that in his forthcoming book, The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court, Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) quotes Milan Kundera. Kundera is best known as the Czechoslovakian dissident who came to the West after being stripped of his citizenship by the Communists in 1975. He is the author of The Joke, an indictment of totalitarian societies that imprison people for telling jokes.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That’s the quote Schmitt used in The Last Line of Defense. Like Kundera, Schmitt does not like the totalitarian impulses of the left, and he wants people to remember their malevolence so that we avoid the kind of oppression we witnessed in 20th-century communist nations. Like Kundera, he is also a funny and insightful writer, even if he doesn’t have Kundera’s poetic brilliance. While The Last Line of Defense is a book about the law, it also happens to be a fun and informative read.
The Last Line of Defense argues persuasively for a strategy of using litigation and the courts to fight the agenda of the left. The irony, of course, is that for decades, this has been precisely the agenda pursued by liberals who have used activist courts and judges to implement policies that never would have won the approval of voters. Conservatives have ceded this turf, assuming that the course belonged to the left and we couldn’t fight back on equal terms.
Recently a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on a bill Congress had passed removing Planned Parenthood from Medicaid payments. Another judge blocked President Trump’s executive order about birthright citizenship. Left-wing activists like Democratic attorneys Norm Eisen and Marc Elias bring hundreds of lawsuits to friendly judges, blocking the will of the people. Yet just as many of President Trump’s executive orders are being blocked by judicial injunctions, the Supreme Court is overruling many of these decisions.
Like liberals, Senator Schmitt would like to use the courts to fix bad policy. Unlike the left, however, he only wants to do so to make sure the policy is in accordance with common sense—and more importantly, the Constitution. He’s advocating using the courts to restore the rule of law.
In 2020, Schmitt noticed that leftist activists were challenging Missouri’s commonsense election integrity laws, like voter ID and proper checks on mail-in balloting. “For months now,” Schmitt writes,
we had seen some of the dirty tricks that the Left was willing to play to secure victory in November 2020. Every day brought a new change to the election procedures, and those changes all seemed to favor Democrats. In almost every case, the Left was claiming that Covid-19 had made it necessary for us to run the 2020 election in a way we’d never run an election before. Elias and his crew claimed that Missouri, like other states, needed to extend the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots; that we needed to drastically lower the standards for voting; and that things like signature matching (which had been used to determine the validity of ballots for years) were no longer necessary. In reviewing these lawsuits, I could see that they would be easy to beat back, especially with the great team I had assembled in the AG’s office. But I wondered why they had come so quickly, and why it seemed that the organizations behind them were so well funded. The answer, I knew, was the long-cultivated liberal dark money machine.
Schmitt fought back:
So, to recap: In advance of the most historic election of our lifetimes—one that was taking place against the backdrop of lockdowns pushed largely by Democratic politicians—a left-wing operative who had once used Russian disinformation to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president in the first place was filing a lawsuit against my state to alter Missouri election law to ensure the election of 2020 was conducted fairly and without any interference. If the stakes weren’t so high, I would have laughed. But the stakes were high.
In the end Schmitt and Missouri were able to “beat back all election-law lawsuit challenges.”
More recently, in 2024, the courts ruled against Elias and his dubious legal challenges to election laws. As Trevor Stably wrote in the Washington Times,
In 2017, when control of the Virginia General Assembly was at stake, Marc Elias—the partisan Democratic lawyer sanctioned by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for violations of the ethical guidelines covering a lawyer’s conduct—sued to overturn the result of a valid election, used political operatives to pressure the state board not to certify election results, and deployed lawyers seeking to prevent the counting of a single legal vote that could sway the outcome of the pivotal election. Mr. Elias’ unhinged legal assault resulted in a strong rebuke from a panel of judges objecting to the legal strategy.
Calling Elias out, the court wrote: “The right of a citizen to cast a free vote has been secured to us by the blood of patriots shed from Lexington and Concord to Selma, Alabama. The manifest injustice against which we must always guard is the chance that a single vote may not be counted.”
“The policies we challenged under Biden were radical,” Schmitt adds,
and American voters would never have approved them in a straight up-or-down vote: the reckless green agenda, open-border policies, secretive government censorship programs, and tyrannical mask and vaccine mandates. These initiatives contradicted fundamental American values. By contrast, the policies the Left and their judicial allies are now attacking—securing the border, restoring energy independence, eliminating waste, and defending free speech—are deeply popular with the American people.
Schmitt even sued China. At the height of the COVID pandemic, Schmitt sued China for causing and exacerbating the spread of COVID-19 across America. Schmitt narrowly tailored his case, accusing China of hoarding protective equipment and selling an inferior product to the rest of the world. To Schmitt, whose son has health issues that require medical equipment to treat, it was personal. In 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed the dismissal of one of Schmitt’s claims, allowing the case to proceed.
When you read about Schmitt and his team racking up win after win in court, the obvious efficacy of his strategy become evident. As he notes:
If it hadn’t been for our careful research into the nature of the relationship between the White House and Meta, among other social media companies, we might never have seen a blatant admission from Mark Zuckerberg that he’d engaged in censorship. In hindsight, our willingness to take this fight on before anyone else led to the unveiling of an Orwellian scheme to silence the American people on a scale never seen before. By revealing the truth, we’ve now seen a resurgence and a revitalized commitment to free speech in America. If we hadn’t stood up against the vaccine mandate and won at the Supreme Court, the Covid tyranny would have raged on, devouring livelihoods and individual liberty on a massive scale. If we hadn’t stood up to the student loan debt forgiveness scheme and won at the Supreme Court, American taxpayers would have been on the hook for another half a trillion dollars. If we wouldn’t have exposed the woke ideology in our schools, the American people wouldn’t have had that issue on the ballot to reject. History will show the first two years of the Biden Administration brought the most aggressively liberal, authoritarian, and anti-liberty excesses of government that America has ever seen.
The Last Line of Defense is a terrific book. Informative, well-written, funny and with plenty of Midwestern horse sense, it proves a strategy that conservatives have ignored for too many decades. With the Constitution as its co-counsel, the right can go to court and win.