The following column by Michael Hiltzik originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times.

“If the law is against you, talk about the evidence. If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, … if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell.”

Thus the poet Carl Sandburg’s version of an ancient lawyer’s adage in his epic poem, “The People, Yes.” It isn’t his fault that his rendering is incomplete, since he was writing in 1936 and the modern legal mind has cooked up a further advisory, applicable when the entity against you is a government agency: If pounding the table and yelling won’t succeed, then get your adversary declared unconstitutional.

That’s the weapon being wielded at this moment against the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The first was created by Congress in 1935 to protect workers’ organizing and bargaining rights, the second in 2010 to protect consumers from ripoffs by financial service firms.

Continue the column here.