“Every crossroad in American life has a lawyer stationed there, levying a toll before you are permitted to go on your way. The election [Florida 2000] has brought home to us again how much we are in thrall to the members of this guild of men and women who take so much from the society and give so little in return.”
– New York Observer
There aren’t many people I’d like to see run through Saddam’s infamous plastic shredders, beyond perhaps the terrorists themselves. I might, however, make an exception for Kerry-Edwards’ merry band of lawyerly election thieves – the ones now assembling in the shadows of Nov. 2 and beyond.
The last time I checked, the Constitution gives lawyers the same puny little vote you and I have: one. Don’t tell them that, though. They and their corrupt judiciary buddies have become masters at overturning the will of the people, finding “rights” in the Constitution for their “perversion d’jour,” and generally turning the law on its head. This latter act they perform so they can shake the coins out of its pockets before tossing it into the dustbin. Did I point out that your taxes subsidize the production of lawyers at state-funded universities?
As Mark Pulliam’s piece on the Florida 2000 election aftermath makes clear, Al Gore’s legal team, acting in concert with a corrupt, Democratic Party-controlled Florida judiciary, very nearly stole the 2000 presidential election:
Several grim lessons emerge from this affair. First, it was a very close call. Al Gore and his lawyers almost succeeded in overturning the results of a presidential election, even though he had no case. The irreducible fact is that Bush received more votes than Gore in Florida, even including felons and excluding many military absentee ballots. The only chance Gore ever had was to convince a Democrat-controlled county canvassing board or court to count non-votes (that is, dimpled chads) as Gore votes. And he nearly got away with it.
– “The lawyers’ war on law,” by Mark S. Pulliam, 2001, The Gale Group
The Constitution assigns lawyers no role in elections – not one – beyond their own measly little ballot. It never assigned to them the “hanging chads” from an army of ballot spoilers. Nor does it assign to them the task of deciding if elections are fair or free. That task is left to state legislatures and chief executives, whose recurring elections make them closest to the will of the people, provided it can be heard over the shrieks of lawyers chasing ambulances, channeling dead malpractice plaintiffs or ascertaining the will of cemetery-bound Chicago voters.
As their website makes clear, Kerry-Edwards have embarked on an ambitious plan to “educate” voters at the polling places on how the equipment and process works. (Here, ma’am, you just touch this little box on the screen marked “Kerry-Edwards.”) This is what in Democrats’ minds seems to pass for democracy: busloads of newly registered voters driven from precinct-to-precinct by felons, where at each stop an officer of the court (lawyer) instructs them on voting. Illegals, felons, potheads and anarchists tricked into registering while signing phony cannabis-legalization initiatives. This is the “democracy” of the left – the one George Soros has dumped his millions of ill-gotten currency speculation gains into, and the one America’s Hollywood elites seem to think the nation needs to “re-establish its direction.”
So what is the cost to lawyers for breaking the law? Mr. Pulliam, himself an attorney, tells us:
For example, Al Gore’s much-hyped “superlawyer,” Mr. Boies, solicited and filed an affidavit in the Florida litigation that misrepresented the facts of an important Illinois case – which was relied on by the Florida Supreme Court in its infamous Nov. 21 decision favoring Gore. The affidavit prepared by Boies claimed that an Illinois court conducting a recount had counted dimpled ballots as votes, but the facts were otherwise: Dimpled ballots were not counted.
Even after this deception was exposed by the Chicago Tribune and the signer of the affidavit recanted, Boies did not withdraw the erroneous document or notify the court in Florida. At best, he violated the rules of practice in Florida by not correcting the record; at worst, he suborned perjury.
In either case, he should be disciplined (if not disbarred), but instead he basks in praise and accolades. Based on his performance in Florida, the National Law Journal just honored Boies as one of its “Lawyers of the Year.” We have come a long way from the archetype of “Honest Abe,” the plainspoken country lawyer.
Thomas Jefferson warned us that violence would at times be necessary to ensure that the tree of liberty remains well-watered. By sitting as both advocates and arbitrators, lawyers have stacked the deck against both the legislative and executive branches of government. If the abuses continue, we may have reached the point that Jefferson foretold.
