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SCOTUS Declines LOLsuit Appeal By St. Louis Lawyers Sanctioned For Waving Guns At Peaceful Protesters

All publicity is good publicity, right?

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Screenshot via Twitter

Are Mark and Patricia McCloskey’s 15 minutes almost up? We can only hope! But at least we will all be spared the tedium of watching them ply their schtick at the Supreme Court.

The McCloskeys rose to fame after toddling out on the veranda of their recently restored palazzo in 2020 to wave guns at racial justice protesters demanding the resignation of St. Louis’s mayor. The missus appeared not to know how to wield the Bryco pistol she brandished at the crowd, but her husband’s handling of an AR-15 pointed at unarmed protestors simply walking down his street earned him kudos from Republicans, who spent the run-up to the election pretending that entire cities were being burned down by Black Lives Matter supporters.

Mark McCloskey parlayed his fame into a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and a Senate candidacy. But you have to get up pretty early in the morning to out-odious former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who was forced to resign after a woman accused him of tying her up and taking a naked picture of her which he threatened to publish if she revealed their extramarital affair. Greitens has consistently led in the polls, despite allegations from his ex-wife that he abused her and their children. Nice job, Missouri!

Seems unlikely that Missouri voters will be sending Mark McCloskey to DC. But the trial lawyer set his sights on getting there anyway via the Supreme Court.

See, last year the couple pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, paid a couple thousand dollars in fines, and handed their guns over to Johnny Law. Republican Governor Mike Parsons immediately pardoned them, but that didn’t stop the state bar from putting their licenses on probation for a year and ordering them to provide 100 hours of pro bono legal services to needy Missourians.

The Missouri Supreme Court refused to intervene and even went so far as to refuse the McCloskeys’ bid to perform their service by donating time to conservative activist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, who once attempted to lure a female reporter onto a boat kitted out with sex toys and hidden cameras, seduce her, and release his homemade sex tape to discredit her reporting.

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“If Project Veritas doesn’t meet the standard then I don’t know what does because they pursue the interests that ordinary people can’t afford to pursue,” McCloskey complained to the AP, adding that, “I’m going to look to see if there’s some good anti-critical race theory community service organizations I can work for, and we’ll see what they say about that.”

McCloskey filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court on the burning question of “Whether the Second Amendment and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution permit an attorney to be sanctioned for professional misconduct based upon a finding of ‘moral turpitude,’ where the attorneys were exercising lawful rights to bear arms in defense of their person, family, and home, and the resulting misdemeanor conviction for each attorney was subsequently commended by the President of the United States and pardoned by the state’s governor.”

Sadly, the world will have to wait a bit longer for clarity on the pressing legal of issue of whether a lawyer can be sanctioned if Trump tweets nice stuff about him, because the Justices declined to take the case after it was distributed for conference on June 2.

“I was a little disappointed because I thought that the concept of a lawyer being sanctioned for doing no more than just defending himself and exercising his Second Amendment rights would be an issue that the Supreme Court might find significant,” McCloskey told the AP.

And then he wandered off back into his McMansion never to be heard from again.

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HAHA, we wish.

High court won’t hear appeal over McCloskeys’ law licenses [AP]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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