Recently, lifelong Republican and torture enthusiast Dick Cheney joined his daughter Liz and endorsed Kamala Harris for president, citing the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump. Harris said she was “honored” to have the backing of such “respected” people, and touted the Cheneys’ support at last week’s presidential debate.

But there was more to come. Last Thursday, former Bush attorney general and—you guessed it—torture apologist Alberto Gonzales also endorsed Harris, expressing his “faith in her character and judgment” and calling her opponent “the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation.” (Trump responded to Cheney by calling him an “irrelevant RINO,” but he didn’t mention Gonzales at all, which tells you everything you need to know about his relevance.)

As someone who has represented tortured clients at Guantánamo Bay, the sight of these two men, both of whom played such key roles in advancing the Bush administration’s embrace of torture, endorsing Harris is distasteful enough. To see Harris embrace the support of such people is even worse.

These developments raise certain questions, among them: What does it say about our current political environment that men who endorsed torture can’t hold their noses and vote for Trump? What are democracy and the rule of law good for, if not preventing the kind of torture regime they are responsible for? And what should it tell us about Harris that the Dick Cheneys of the world have found a welcoming political home with her campaign?

I think that what’s really happening here is that the very public vulgarity of Trump and the people surrounding him is what truly offends these classic establishment figures. In other words, it’s not what Trump does but how he does it. Medieval-style sexualized barbarism is OK as long as it’s hidden away in secret CIA black sites; misogyny and overt racism, out in the open on a debate stage, are not. International torture networks, the destruction of civil liberties, wars based on lies, even stolen elections (remember 2000?) are fine as long as they can be contained within certain institutional bounds. Assaulting democracy by sending the rabble to storm the Capitol, on the other hand, is a bad look.

It reminds me a bit of the reaction of the establishment “white-shoe” law firms to the gleeful lawbreaking of the Bush White House in the early years of the Global War on Terror. Hardly any of the big firms wanted to help us fight our cases, especially the ones at Guantánamo, for the first two years after 9/11. (There were exceptions.) The Bush administration officials on the other side of those cases looked like competent technocrats just doing their thuggish best to keep us safe, legal niceties be damned. In contrast, with Trump the mainstream bar was ready to file cases against him from day one.

Having watched each situation play out in real time, I can’t help thinking that, for establishment authority figures like Cheney, Gonzales, and indeed the big law firms, the inept, déclassé nature of the Trump administration seemed like more of a threat than anything Trump actually had a chance to accomplish.

Current Issue

April 2025 Issue

Notably, most of those firms again seem unwilling to get involved with representing students, faculty, and organizations doing Palestine advocacy on university campuses—an issue on which there seems to be zero daylight between the Republican and Democratic establishments. What the white-shoe firms are to capitalism, the “national security establishment” is to foreign policy. And one also suspects that the Cheney types—the crew who brought you the Iraq war, and wholeheartedly support the genocidal war in Gaza—find Trump poses a grave threat to their vision of “national security.” Again, the irony is rich—but perhaps the more important point is that Harris doesn’t pose a fundamental threat to their vision for projecting American power in the world.

There are quite a few other Bush Republicans for Harris. J. Michael Luttig announced in August that he would vote for Harris, apparently mad that Trump wants to “terminate” parts of our sacred Constitution—the same Michael Luttig who, as a judge, terminated quite a few provisions of the Constitution in 2005 by deciding that a US citizen could be held as an “enemy combatant,” even inside the US. There is also a letter signed by a veritable Army of Darkness—200 figures in past GOP administrations and campaigns, mostly notable because I have never heard of any of them (“Nobodies for Harris”?). Harris even got a posthumous endorsement from Ronald Reagan over the weekend. (We haven’t heard from Undead Kissinger yet; he might be holding out for more genocide).

It’s fair to ask why other Bush administration lawyers—most of whom also fancied themselves legal intellectuals, members of the dignified establishment elite—haven’t endorsed Harris. Is Torture Memo author (and current Berkeley Law School professor) John Yoo waiting for Harris to clarify her position on crushing the testicles of a suspect’s child? Is former attorney general (and current white-shoe law firm partner) Mike Mukasey waiting for her to say waterboarding might not be torture after all? What about former president Bush himself, a man clearly disturbed by Trump, but never really all that classy himself? Is he holding off to see where the wealth tax thing goes? Or is he worried he’s just two seats on the Supreme Court away from losing constitutional war crimes immunity?

Thanks to our sacred Constitution, my vote here in New York doesn’t really count, and for the first time in my life I won’t be casting it for the Democratic candidate—because of Gaza. But there’s another issue of surpassing importance to me on which neither Harris nor the Democratic platform has said anything: closing Guantánamo. The prison today still houses 30 men whose presence there is a legacy of torture.

The majority of the 16 men currently cleared for release would have left years ago but for the fact that they carry in their heads a record of what happened in those secret CIA dark sites. Four presidential elections ago, there was also bipartisan consensus on the fate of Guantánamo: Bush, Obama and McCain all agreed that it should be closed because it hurts our national security. Indeed, ISIS tortured its own hostages on video in Guantánamo-orange jumpsuits. Now that he’s a lame duck with little to lose, Biden can close the prison down, if—unlike seemingly everyone else—he remembers it’s still open. Doing so would be an important step in placing support for torture back outside the limits of respectable political debate.

The opinions expressed herein are solely Shayana Kadidal’s own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer.