How Devin Nunes loves filing those big lawsuits he opposes for others

With the tantrums of the Mad King sucking the oxygen out of every news cycle, it's easy for the chaos to overshadow even the swampiest behavior of swamp creatures in Washington D.C.

Take Congressman Devin Nunes. Please.

Nunes isn't receiving nearly the attention he deserves for his continuing abuse of the judicial process. Over the weekend, Federal Judge Amit P. Mehta dismissed an absurd defamation suit against the Washington Post that had sought $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages.

But the real story isn't that Nunes lost a stupid lawsuit. It turns out this is just one in a long line of stupid lawsuits that he keeps losing, only to come back unbowed for more. And worse yet, curtailing other people's rights to use the court system in the name of "tort reform" is one of Nunes' proudest legislative priorities.

It doesn't get much more hypocritical than that. But that doesn't mean Nunes is likely to get tired of losing. Consider that the most recent loss to the Washington Post comes on the heels of his filing still another suit against the Post, as reported by lawandcrime.com:

"Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sued the Washington Post (again) on Tuesday, alleging that the newspaper and reporter Ellen Nakashima published defamatory statements about a late-night White House visit in 2017 and claims that the Obama administration "spied" on Donald Trump and his associates in Trump Tower.

Nunes's lawsuits have repeatedly been rejected by courts, but the litigious congressman—who infamously attempted to sue a fake cow and parody of his own mom—appears hell-bent on continuing to pursue litigation that is almost certain to fail."

The Post's lawyers most surely be growing weary of Nunes and his lawyers. But it's not as if the newspaper is the congressman's only legal adversary.

As lawandorder.com also reported, in February, Dunes had a $9.9 million racketeering lawsuit over the Steele Dossier tossed by Federal Judge Liam O'Grady. But that one was so bad that the judge hinted at sanctions and against Nunes and his attorney should he persist.

It's virtually impossible to track how many lawsuits Nunes has filed against the Post, Twitter, his hometown newspaper, you name it. But the real question is whether Nunes has filed as many lawsuits as he's cast votes for tort reform in his tragic 18-year career.

There's rarely time for the news cycles to slow down long enough to provide much context for Nunes' chutzpah. One exception was a 2019 piece in The Washington Monthly after one of his multiple absurd lawsuits against Twitter for allowing people to say bad things about him.

The magazine used the occasion to note that Nunes had been a co-sponsor of the 2017 "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act" which, among other things, would have required judges to award legal fees to the prevailing parties in actions brought over the Clean Water Act.

The magazine, apparently not too fearful of Nunes' legal wrath, observed:

"The primary purpose of the bill, aside from poisoning the water supply, is to discourage people from suing polluters by assuring that they'll get saddled with the defense's legal fees if they don't prevail in court. That would assuredly eliminate frivolous suits, but it would also eliminate valid ones by heightening the financial investment and risk tolerance required to initiate them.

In any case, Devin Nunes co-sponsored this bill because he likes getting financial support from polluters and he wanted to sound tough on frivolous law suits for the "tort reform" fanatics. Rep. Rice's proposed bill went nowhere. It was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment where it died. The polluters and right-wing legal lobbyists approvingly noted who co-sponsored it, and that's about all the impact it had."