Surprise!

If you want to keep people on their toes, make them think you're constantly watching.What if every day was a surprise?Wouldn’t that keep you on your toes?Persistence, after all, usually pays off. Consider, for example, the lawyers you know who may not be all that bright but do well anyway because people will do anything to make them go away.This occurred to me after a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration can’t bar members of Congress from making unannounced visits to immigration detention facilities (aka concentration camps, depending on your point of view).The Department of Homeland Security had been requiring seven days’ notice for congressional visits.What do you think they were doing during that seven-day period? Vacuuming? Cleaning up the dog hair?Or maybe, if you’re being cynical, they’re hiding the real conditions in those prisons.I won’t presume, but it seems to me that concerned Congresspeople aren’t going about this the right way. They might win in court — at least until the endless appeals kick in — but the occasional surprise visit isn’t going to make a lot of difference.Congress needs to visit every day. Every single day. Twice a day if possible.It’s not that hard. I know it seems hard, but it’s not really if you go about it properly.Prior to last week’s election there were 214 Democrats in the House. Now there are a lot more. There are approximately the same amount of ICE detention centers. You only need one Congressperson per facility.Forget litigating the week’s notice requirement. Just provide those notices for every single day for every detention center after the first week. They’ll have to clean up every single day.Yes, there’s a lot of ground to cover but, remember, these inspections should be surprising. It’s just as much of a surprise if you don’t show up. Consider how annoying it is for your in-laws to cancel after you’ve spent the week tidying up.And, yet, you now have a tidy home.Keep them on their toes. Deploy those hundreds of overseers in a random, unexpected way. Cover as many detention centers as possible — some on consecutive days, others when least expected. Use every bit of your personpower (that should be a word, shouldn’t it?).Get serious, organize, and be as annoying as possible.OK, I realize this won’t happen, but the point is that litigation isn’t always the right answer. You just have to be loud, annoying and incredibly persistent.The election . Maybe Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission wasn’t such a bad thing after all.As most of you probably know, that was the 2010 Supreme Court decision that money was a form of speech that could be endlessly spent on elections. A lot of people have been moaning about the corrupting influence of money on politics ever since.But look at what happened last week: Candidates backed by enormous amounts of money got beat. Many of them got beat badly, at least in part because voters were mad about the insanely rich people backing them.So we should be encouraging billionaires and a trillionaire to keep on trying to buy elections. It’s self-defeating.And if nothing else, it makes them slightly less rich.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads