Great Op/Ed Piece on "Lawyerization" of the Democratic Party:
www0.mercurycenter.com
Reliance upon lawyers may backfire for Democrats
BY JAMES P. PINKERTON
MAYBE the Democrats should find a judge who will appoint Al Gore as the 43rd president.
The lawyerization of the Democratic Party has never been more obvious than in the last two weeks, but it's also never been more obvious what a mixed blessing it is. Yes, lawyers have power and money, but the law is inherently anti-political. The legal mind-set oscillates between two extreme modes: attack-dog nihilism and woolly-minded utopianism. And so Gore could win the legal battles, yet still lose the political war.
Gore has never been ahead in the official vote count in Florida, and yet he still has a chance of winning, because a load of lawyers have cast their shadow on every polling station, courtroom and microphone in the Sunshine State.
To be sure, the Republicans have plenty of lawyers, but the Democrats have the big stars, such as David Boies, the man who clobbered Michael Milken and Bill Gates, and Alan Dershowitz, who brought the saga to a new low last week when he labeled Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris as ``corrupt.''
This lawyering of personal destruction breeds backlash. For example, attorney Mark Herron circulated a five-page letter to fellow Florida Democrats giving them tips on challenging overseas ballots. As a matter of legal-eagling, his effort was a success; perhaps 1,000 military absentee ballots were disqualified.
But as for politics, Herron's memo, leaked to the media, was a disaster. Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., was typical in his revulsion: ``I don't care when it's dated, whether it's witnessed or anything else,'' he told the Associated Press. ``If it is from someone serving this country and they made the effort to vote, count it and salute them when you do it.''
Yet while some Democratic lawyers are trying to disenfranchise selected voters, other Democratic lawyers -- in black robes -- were trying to enfranchise non-voters, or even non-existent voters.
As the Florida high court put it, ``The will of the people, not a hyper-technical reliance on statutory provisions, should be our guiding principle in election cases.'' Such words would sound good -- if they had been uttered by an elected official.
But under the constitutional separation of powers, judges perform a different function; they are not put on the bench to identify the ``will of the people,'' but rather to do the tedious work of adjudicating ``hyper-technicalities.''
But who wants to split hairs when one can save the world -- or at least the Democratic Party?
Under different circumstances, of course, liberal activists are sticklers for ``hyper-technicalities.'' The Democrats' Dershowitz, for example, kept such malefactors as Claus von Bulow and O.J. Simpson out of jail not because anyone really thought they were innocent, but because nobody could prove they were guilty.
But in the political arena, the Legal Left has invented a whole new language, ``The Living Constitution,'' to justify its overweening activism on everything from civil rights to welfare rights to student rights. Many Americans, of course, applaud such legislating from the bench, but on just as many occasions, such black-robed lawmaking has caused a counterproductive backlash.
And that appears to have happened in Miami-Dade County. The canvassing board, composed of Democrats and Independents, voted Wednesday afternoon not to hold a manual recount. These elected officials appeared to understand that, given the time pressures, no manual recount would be perceived as fair. Moreover, even attempting a recount would open up a can of worms that would never be cleaned up; that is, long after the Tallahassee court had moved on to other things, folks in Miami-Dade would be stuck counting and recounting votes in every election forever.
But Gore's relentless litigators sued Miami-Dade, on the theory yet again that judges know better than politicians ``the will of the people.'' No wonder Democrats, in Florida and around the country, are starting to conclude that the advancement of Gore's career could come at the expense of their own. |
