Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
In law, the word "remedy" encompasses all the means that a court has within its power to attempt to cure the harms that the defendant caused to the plaintiff.
The legal system recognizes that not all harms can be fully cured nor the status quo ante restored.
In our American Tribunal, we must recognize that we cannot fully remedy the harms caused by the Trump/Maga government.
The general concept of lustration is clearly supported by our Constitution - Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment imposes lustration for "insurrection" and "rebellion".
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
This limited form of lustration could be expanded to deny government positions to those who held (or continue to hold) political or non-civil-service roles in the Trump/MAGA administration.
The term of the ban could vary- low-level actors might be banned for a few years; principals, particularly those who held roles normally subject to Senate confirmation, could be banned for life.
Care ought to be taken not to include those who were merely private actors exercising First Amendment rights.
Civil Style Remedies
The civil side of our legal system is intended to be remedial rather than punitive.
(Civil remedies may sometimes permit punitive damages to be levied. We sometimes see judges or juries award very large punitive damages in cases where the actual, proved damages are relatively small or difficult to measure.)
Fines
Courts may issue civil fines (payable to the court) to incent a person to act or to disgorge ill-gotten gains. Civil fines are intended to be corrective rather than punitive, although clearly they have both corrective and punitive effects.
Compensatory
Courts may issue civil judgments that require that a defendant pay money, transfer property, or convey contract rights to a plaintiff or injured party.
The size of these actions is intended to be related to the size of the injury.
Equitable Transfers And Restraints
English common law evolved in the context of fights over power and authority between the King and the regional nobility. To limit the power of that nobility, the King (and Parliament) enacted statutes that were very detailed, thus curtailing the ability of the nobles to expand their powers through expansive or self-serving judgments in the local courts.
For example, the old definition of burglary was complex and contained many conditions, all of which had to be met in order for there to be the crime of burglary.
The breaking and entering the house of another in the night time, with intent to commit a felony therein, whether the felony be actually committed or not.
This rigid system left some obvious crimes and torts beyond the power of the local/noble-run courts to redress. (For instance, consider if that breaking and entering of that house, above, happened during the day, or the door was not locked [and thus no "breaking"]. Under those conditions, the act was not a "burglary".) So the King created a parallel legal system that would step in when the law-courts could not do justice. This new system was called "equity".
There are various kinds of orders from a court designed to coerce a person to act or to refrain from acting.
These orders are usually backed by civil or criminal contempt.
Orders to act:
Specific performance
Orders to refrain from acting:
Temporary restraining orders (TRO) - TROs are intended to be a quite short (usually no more than a few weeks) means to preserve the status quo pending further court actions.
Preliminary injunctions - These are much like a TRO, but for a longer duration.
Injunctions - An Injunction is usually issued after a judicial decision. Injunctions can persist for a long time.
There are two forms of contempt of court: Civil and Criminal. Both forms tend to involve fines (often on a daily basis) or incarceration.
Civil Contempt
A means for a court to compel obedience to its orders
Usually by a fine (perhaps a daily fine) or incarceration.
The contempt ends when the contemptuous person complies. (There may be statutory limits on the duration.)
The contemptuous person is often said to "have the keys to his cell in his own pocket"
Criminal Contempt
Intended to be a means to punish those who overtly disobey court orders.
May require a trial.
Resulting incarceration is for a fixed maximum period.
Civil contempt can be more Draconian than Criminal contempt - consider the fate of Little Dorrit's father, spending decades in debtors' prison in Dickens' book "Little Dorrit".)
A trust is a structure in which one person (a "trustee") manages property on behalf of another (the "beneficiary".
Trust obligations of a trustee are subject to one of the highest of all tiers of responsibility: fiduciary responsibility.
Courts of Equity were sometimes faced with a situation in which an ill-doer became the "owner" of property in a way that violated the rights of another. What the court did was to create a trust and make the ill-doer the trustee and the damaged person the beneficiary. This left the technical "ownership" of the property in the hands of the ill-doer, but that ill-doer was constrained to manage and maintain the property not for his benefit but for the benefit of the beneficiary.
The English (and we Americans) have elevated the concept of "property" to have an almost celestial level of protection. As such, English law (and US law that copied the English common law) found itself having difficulty dealing with situations in which "property" had been transferred by some legal mechanism, such as a contract, but in a way that offended our moral sense, such as a contract induced through fraud.
As a consequence, the courts of Equity created some solutions, such as Specific Performance, Injunctions, and Trusts.
In the United States, the rules of Equity have largely been merged into our regular legal structure, but the concepts and methods are still present and viable, although some high hurdles must be overcome in order to obtain these kinds of remedies.
Forced Transfer of Property - Specific Performance
Specific performance is an order to do a specific act. Usually that act is the transfer of property.
When a court orders Specific Performance, the theory is that the court itself is not making a transfer of ownership; rather, the court is ordering the owner to make the transfer. It is a subtle distinction.
Injunctions
Like Specific Performance, an Injunction is an order by a court of Equity (now a court of law) to a person (or legal person, such as a corporation) to do something or to refrain from doing something. If the person refuses, the court has the power to hold that person in Civil or Criminal contempt.
Transfer of Control of Property - Placement of Assets Into Trusts
Courts use the civil remedy of trusts when it is hard to untangle "ownership" of property. In such cases, the court creates the legal structure of a trust, puts the property into the trust, makes the plaintiffs the beneficiaries of the trust, and makes the defendant the trustee, subject to the heavy burden of fiduciary obligations to protect the interests of the beneficiaries.
Civil courts use trusts for other purposes as well. For example, when the plaintiff is injured or disabled, the court may create a trust, with the injured person as the beneficiary and the wrongdoer as trustee.
Trusts can be quite simple in structure or can be deeply complicated.
Civil asset forfeiture is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing.
Criminal Style Remedies
There are some Trump/MAGA actors who have committed the kind of heinous acts that have, in the past, been adjudged as deserving capital punishment. There are many among us who believe that Stephen Miller, Christie Noem. Pete Hegseth, Gregory Bovino, as well as several members of ICE and CBP, deserve this.
Capital punishment is likely to result in the creation of martyrs who are often more powerful as mythical figures than they were in life.
However much our emotions and desire for retribution cry out, we ought, and we must, refrain.
There is much debate about capital punishment.
There is no need to dilute our national recovery from Trump/MAGAism by detouring into the debatable morality and the definite costs and expenses of capital punishment.
Reversal of Fraudulent or Corrupt Elections.
Elections are the bedrock of democracy, direct or representative. Elections must be accurate, but they also must be final except in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
It is clear that both Federal, state, and local elections have been wracked with everything from groundless claims (such as Venezuela controlling voting machines) to claims with better evidence (such as Russia trying to influence the 2016 Presidential election) to overt manipulation by legislatures bent on racial (oops, the cover euphemism used by those legislatures and SCOTUS is "political") Gerrmandering of voting districts after permission to do this has been granted by SCOTUS.
What criteria ought we to use to say when we accept election results and when the taint is too deep and too obvious to ignore?
International Actions
International Criminal Court (ICC)
The United States has not (yet) ratified the treaties that create the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, there is nothing to prevent a future, non-Trump/MAGA administration from doing so.
Even in the absence of such ratification, a future administration could refrain from objecting should another country take custody of a Trump/MAGA principal and hand that person over to the jurisdiction of the ICC. (To do this, the United States may have to revoke the US citizenship of that person, in which case it would be ironic if these people were protected from the ICC by the birthright citizenship right that they so oppose.)
This writer considers it likely that after the end of the Trump/MAGA administration, many of its worst actors may, like Nazi's after WWII, leave the US to take up putative residency (and perhaps new names) in other countries that are not ICC signatories, such as North Korea, Russia, Israel, Qatar, or Turkmenistan.
