In-House Counsel

Four Predictions For 2022

Some are surprising, and some are not so surprising at all.

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Happy new year!

What better way to celebrate than with predictions for the coming year?

I’ll start with a prediction you weren’t thinking about: Ron DeSantis will lose his race for governor of Florida in November.

I see two reasons why DeSantis will lose. First, an awful lot of people have died from COVID-19 in Florida, and thousands more will die in the coming months.  It’s going to turn out that repeatedly saying stupid things that result in the death of your constituents is not a good political strategy. The friends and families of all those dead people will remember that DeSantis is partly to blame, and they’ll hold it against him at the polls.

Couple the COVID-19 problem with DeSantis’s likely abortion problem. The Supreme Court will upset the Roe applecart during the first half of this year. DeSantis is pro-life, but Florida generally tilts the other way, and this will pose a problem for DeSantis. Combine a silly response to COVID-19 with a politically untenable response to abortion, and you have the surprise of the season:  DeSantis will lose his governor’s race, and with it any chance to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

What other predictions do I have up my sleeve?

My second prediction is less surprising than the first: Liz Cheney will lose her seat in the House of Representatives in November.

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I have a lot of respect for Liz Cheney, and probably many elected Republicans respect her, too; they just can’t say so out loud. Cheney has made her small mark in the history books by daring to suggest that inciting a crowd to attack Congress is somehow wrong.

But earning your place in the history books and earning votes in today’s Republican Party are two different things.

In heavily Republican Wyoming, the person who wins the Republican primary will of course win the general election for a seat in the House of Representatives.  But Cheney will not win the primary, and she’ll be out of office come January.

No surprises there.

Prediction number three: Trump’s legal woes will catch up with him in 2022.

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A lot of people have been trying to get Trump under oath for a long time: The New York attorney general, many plaintiffs in civil cases, and the like.

It’s possible to stall the legal system for a while, but it’s not possible to block it entirely — unless you’re the president, which Trump no longer is. Trump’s federal lawsuit seeking to prohibit the New York attorney general from deposing Trump is doomed to fail, as anyone who’s read the Anti-Injunction Act would know.  Trump will be forced to appear for his deposition.

But Trump would be a fool to testify to anything substantive. He’ll plead the Fifth Amendment, and then he’ll say that he never did anything criminal. He’ll say he had to plead the Fifth to evade a Democratic witch-hunt.

But that’s not all!

The plaintiffs in some of the civil cases will also finally get Trump under oath.  Plaintiffs’ counsel in those cases will know the threat that expansive testimony poses to Trump, so those lawyers will of course encourage expansive testimony.

But that’s not all!

The assorted prosecutors investigating Trump will also continue to pursue him during the year. My guess is that at least one of those prosecutors will indict him.

I can’t foresee the precise result of all that testimony and all those cases, but it won’t be good for Trump.

Finally, COVID.

I must say: I see two possibilities for the pandemic. One possibility is that several billion people are infected with the omicron variant in the coming months. That gives the virus billions of opportunities to mutate. Naturally, it does. Something far worse than omicron emerges from these rampant infections, and we’re back to April 2020 all over again.

The other possibility is that omicron is in fact less severe than the original virus.  Omicron infects billions of people with a less dangerous illness, and those people all develop some level of resistance to future infections. (Health care systems around the world may well be challenged while that process runs its course, but I’m looking longer term than that.)

In the United States, Democrats’ electoral success is tied to how well Biden handles the virus. He can’t let the virus run wild and so imposes every vaccine requirement that the courts will permit. The vaccination programs, coupled with the natural spread of the disease, puts the country, and the world, in a much better place by the end of the year.

Although you can’t always tell from my columns at Above the Law, I’m an optimist.

I’m going with the second version of my COVID-19 visions, and I’m predicting that the country, and the world, will be nearing the end of the COVID-19 pandemic by December 31, 2022.

And if I’m wrong?

I’ll be so terribly depressed that my regret for one silly prediction will be lost in the sea of melancholy.

So instead let’s end on a bright note:  I hope your 2022 is a happy and healthy one!  Or, as someone recently said, “Stay positive. Test negative.”

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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