The Scene
PITTSBURGH — Conor Lamb is not running for anything. Three years after the former congressman lost a primary to Sen. John Fetterman, he is practicing law here, raising a family, and accepting invitations to talk to worried Democrats.
On Wednesday night, Lamb took a seat onstage at a Mennonite church here for what the progressive group Indivisible calls “empty chair town halls” — public gatherings where elected leaders are invited, but not expected to show up, as other guests discuss how to organize against the Trump administration. Some attendees brought milk cartons with Fetterman’s face on them; some, either accidentally or meaningfully, called Lamb “senator.” Again: He was not actually running.
“You see the most powerful people in our country using their power to get access to Trump, to please him — not to challenge him,” Lamb said. He repeatedly called El Salvador’s CECOT prison a “gulag,” and warned that “if Trump defies the Supreme Court in a visible enough way, what happened last week with tariffs is going to happen all over again.”
What was Lamb doing? He had criticized Fetterman on X, but didn’t suggest that he was challenging him; he appreciated it when attendees said they voted for him, but quickly changed the subject. He’d just recruited some fellow attorneys to help with 30 young non-citizens who were losing their legal representation after a Trump administration cut to charitable funding. On Thursday, he took a break in his law office to talk about why he had returned to the political arena, sort of; this is an edited transcript of the conversation.
The View From Conor Lamb
David Weigel: Why did you decide to start doing these empty chair town halls?
Conor Lamb: I was running into a lot of people who just were so discouraged about everything Trump was doing. They felt like there was a lack of people speaking out and telling the truth. And then came the law firm thing — that really affected me. I know people at those firms. It is just so contrary to what we’re supposed to be, as a profession, that they would be paying off Trump just to be allowed to practice law. When I reflected on that a little bit, I thought: Well, if I think they should be telling the truth and saying something and speaking out, I should do that too. I’d been quiet for a few months since the election, so I decided it was time to change that.
One argument I’ve heard for these law firm deals is that they’re looking for balance — they are trying to get law firms that were doing pro bono work on liberal causes to be more bipartisan, and set that standard.
For one thing, that’s just not how America works. The president doesn’t just get to boss around private corporations to do his bidding as he sees fit. Secondly, I think that’s just wrong about the type of pro bono work that a lot of these law firms do. They tend to help a lot of veterans. My wife worked at a law firm where they were representing the Catholic Church. Believe me when I tell you that there are plenty of conservative lawyers and law firms out there who are willing to take up the mantle, if there’s any lack of representation of conservative causes. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s just not up to him.
On the town hall here: Were you surprised at how many questions focused on Kilmar Ábrego García?
No. This is a horrifying situation. How could it not shock the conscience of anyone who believes in law and order? There’s a process here. If you want to accuse someone of something terrible, you have to be willing to walk into a courtroom and obey the rules and prove it to someone. And we have never, ever been in favor of foreign gulags. You could be as anti-immigrant as possible and think we should deport every single one that’s here. There’s no justification for locking them up in a prison in another country, a prison that no one has ever gotten out of, as far as we know. And this guy did not commit a crime in El Salvador.
One reason I ask is because that question clearly animated the crowd, but there’s a discussion among Democrats right now about how much to focus on it. Is that a fair question, whether Democrats should be pivoting?
I just don’t think this is a political question at all. I really don’t. I know that’s convenient for me to say, because I’m not in office. But one criticism of the Democratic Party has been that people don’t know, at its core, what the Democrats stand for, as well as they do Trump — whether that’s right or wrong. When we see something as wrong as this is, do we have the courage to stand up and say that? It seems to me, everything else we say we’re fighting for is diminished if we’re not able to speak up against the idea of throwing someone away in a foreign jail without any proof that they did anything wrong.
What risk do you see in the deportations of foreign students, who had visas but got them taken away, in some cases for Gaza op-eds?
The Republicans spent the last four years whining about free speech in the First Amendment. It’s not actually a question if Americans value free speech or not. It’s pretty clear. A lot of people on both sides do. The risk is that when you erode the right to free speech, like these people have, it’s eroded for everybody. Rümeysa Öztürk has the right to free speech under the First Amendment while she’s here, going to Tufts, even if she’s not an American citizen. That’s black letter law. DHS lawyers admitted that, by the way. So if Trump can do that to Öztürk, he can do it to a student who is American — he can just say, we’re gonna send them to jail because they’re causing too much public unrest. That just isn’t how the First Amendment works.
What else are you taking away from these public meetings?
It’ll be interesting for me to see how sustained this energy is, and whether we can really make it into something like the Tea Party. I probably have 10 town halls around the state scheduled at this point. People are clearly psyched, and the groups are going to do everything they can to get people there. That’s gonna take me through June, maybe. The question is, like, where does that go? Can we get more people at events after that? Can it grow in a way that’s not just about tearing it all down? Because clearly, we’re trying to build something.
The whole question that Democrats are asking is: What’s our alternative vision? My hope is it kind of arises organically out of all this, because it would probably be better than anything a consultant could devise. I remember when Parkland happened, and the March for Our Lives started. I was talking to those high school students and said: Hey, you guys are all gonna go to college next year, and if you lose interest in this, that’s a huge problem. A lot of them did lose interest. I hope that people who are really involved in these town halls don’t lose faith in them, because people are gonna make fun of them and say that they’re wasting their time. They’re not. It means something.