Comment by rayiner

I'm not talking about paper credentials, I'm talking about accomplishments. 90% of lawyers in DC are liberals. Conservative lawyers can get credit for being "one of the good ones" so long as they don't attack the core tenants of liberal universalism or advance conservative social change in any meaningful way.[1]

Obama's DOJ did stuff like go after Catholic nuns to make them offer birth control, to vindicate liberal principles like supremacy of secular values over religious values. Guys like Barr never did anything like that. Trump and his merry band of chuckleheads have achieved more legal wins for conservatism in a year than anyone in the Bush administration did in eight years.

[1] It's not necessarily apparent from the outside where those lines are drawn. Bush's $8 trillion effort to blow up the Middle East was far less controversial among D.C. lawyers than Trump's effort to restrict immigration from the Middle East. Liberal universalists agreed with Bush's fundamental premise, if not his approach. Both believed that Iraq was the way it is due to external factors like Saddam, not internal factors like Iraqi culture. Even if liberals thought it was a terrible idea to go to war to topple Saddam, they didn't disagree with the core premise that Saddam was the barrier to Iraq becoming just like Iowa.