Washington Examiner Attempt to Link Judicial Bribery Scandal to Health Care Debate is Dumb
Today Ya’ll Politics linked to a Washington Examiner Op-ed story that attempted to link Mississippi’s judicial bribery scandal to the current health care debate. I have seen some dumb things written about the legal system. This may be the dumbest.
Try to make sense out of this quote:
There’s no reason why this situation should persist, except that the nation’s top trial lawyers continue to grease the skids in Washington, D.C., and state capitals, piling up money for Democratic politicians who in turn hinder the cause of lawsuit reform. A recent Examiner analysis of contributions from employees of the top 15 plaintiffs’ firms found that less than 2 percent of nearly $1.3 million they donated went to Republicans.
That’s why President Barack Obama and Democrats seek to prevent state-level legal reforms in their health care bill. It’s not just that the bill lacks tort reform provisions, it punishes states that adopt them by withholding federal money.
But those legal reforms are necessary. Otherwise, the natural conclusion is the world portrayed in “Kings of Tort,” the recent book by Alan Lange and former federal prosecutor Tom Dawson. The book describes how former tort baron and current federal prisoner Dickie Scruggs sued his way into a fortune and then began purchasing an entire state’s judiciary. Years before he was caught bribing two Mississippi judges, Scruggs had described as “magic jurisdictions” those places where verdict money was used to stack benches and juries.
This is another straw man argument for tort reform. But this one is worse than the norm.
Scruggs purchased “an entire state’s judiciary”? Really? Because I’ve read Kings of Tort, and that is not what the book says. According to the book, Scruggs tried to bribe two judges, one of who reported it to the feds and the other of whom is now in jail.
And frankly, the statement is a slap in the face of Mississippi’s "entire judiciary". Is the author really claiming that Scruggs purchased all the judges in Mississippi? Is he really that stupid?
I do not believe that we have a corrupt judiciary in Mississippi. But even if we did, the solution to corruption in an elected judiciary would be:
-
prosecute corrupt judges; and/ or
-
have an appointed judiciary.
Not caps.
Politics in the U.S. is rife with corruption. My guess is that there is less corruption among elected judges than other elected politicians. But regardless, lawsuit caps do not even address judicial corruption, much less solve it.
Why would someone make this argument? According to some, the author of the article (David Freddoso) is a shill of the political right (aka Big Business). Here is an excerpt from a review of Freddoso’s book that attacked President Obama:
David Freddoso's new book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate is a badly written hatchet job, full of errors and distortions and smears. The author, who works for the right-wing National Review and published his book with Regnery (which printed Unfit for Command, one of the Swiftboating attacks on John Kerry in 2004), simply fails to prove his key assertions, preferring to rely upon a bunch of false attacks, McCarthyist-style denunciations of Obama's associations, and extreme conservative attacks on abortion rights, all of it padded with lengthy digressions on topics unrelated to Obama and his record.
Freddoso's embarrassing excuse for a critique has received virtually no critical attention, thanks to the right-wing press promoting it and the compliant mainstream outlets. A fawning story in the Politico called Freddoso's book "serious" and "a fact-based critique." According to the Politico, it occupies "a small island in the often-shrill sea of criticism of Obama." In reality, Freddoso's book is one more example of that polluted sea of criticism, filled with numerous factual errors, unproven innuendo, guilt by association attacks, and lunatic conspiracy theories that would be laughable if not for the seriousness of these false accusations.
Freddoso’s latest straw man hatchet job that implicates the Mississippi judiciary is both out of line and dumb.
[slow clap]
For me what makes this argument so disingenuous is the majority of the states have already enacted tort reform measures. So why is it necessary on a federal level? This whole issue is a red-herring that is only used as a distraction.
For at least two senators, John Kyl and John Mcain, both of Arizona, they support federal tort reform because their state constitution EXPRESSLY FORBIDS tort damages caps. So the people of Arizona express their will and their values through their constitution and their two elected officials go to Washington to undermine their State's constitution. Nice guys.
I thought conservatives and republicans believed in federalism, limited government, and states' rights. Guess it just depends on whose ox is being gored.