 |
|
October
3, 2002 12:00 p.m.
Another
Sleazy Court
New
Jersey’s supreme court goes to work.
|
|
thought the wheels of justice grind slowly. Then again, I never litigated
before the hyper-efficient justices of the New Jersey supreme court.
On Monday, around
5 P.M., Sen. Robert Torricelli announced that he would not seek reelection.
On the same day, the New Jersey Democratic party, among others, asked
the superior court and the New Jersey supreme court to allow the ballots
for the November election to be changed. The next day, Tuesday, the New
Jersey supreme court took up the case directly and scheduled oral arguments
for the following morning. On Wednesday morning, the court heard oral
arguments for 2-1/2 hours. A mere six hours later, the justices ruled
unanimously that Torricelli's name must be removed from the ballot and
replaced with "a candidate duly selected by the Democratic State
Committee." In other words, even if the Democrats had not agreed
on a candidate by the time of this ruling, they would have been free to
continue searching for the candidate with the highest poll numbers.
The justices were
twitching like crack addicts to get this decision out by last night, and
the opinion reflects their "deliberative" state of mind. The
opinion consists of seven pages, double-spaced. The caption is two pages
in length, the order is two pages in length, the recitation of facts consists
of one page, and the entirety of the court's legal reasoning takes up
all of two pages. They could at least have thrown in a couple of recipes
to give their opinion more weight.
But the economy of
words alone does not do this decision justice. The court found two cases
on which it relied for purported precedent in rewriting New Jersey's election
laws. The first case, Kilmurray v. Gilfert, is cited for
the proposition that "it is in the public interest and the general
intent of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit
to the electorate a ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major
political parties as well as of all other qualifying parties and
groups." [Emphasis added.]
The point is, of
course, that Frank Lautenberg, the Democratic State Committee's replacement
choice, does not qualify under existing New Jersey election law, which
requires candidate selection to be completed no fewer than 51 days before
the election. This citation does not support the court's position.
The next case in
the court's two-case arsenal is Catania v. Haberle. The
justices cite this case for the proposition that the law should be liberally
construed "to allow the greatest scope for public participation in
the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow
parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to
allow the voters a choice on Election Day."
But the voters did
have a choice on Election Day. They could vote for the Democratic nominee,
the Republican nominee, or any of the other, minor party candidates on
the ballot; or they could write in whomever they wished. Moreover, in
Catania, the Republicans did not have a nominee. In the present
case, the Democrats sought to replace their nominee. And they could
only do so with the help of the court.
The New Jersey supreme
court has now joined Florida's high court in its willingness to rewrite
election law for partisan political purposes. I fear that the precedent
set by Al Gore during the 2000 election, in which he sought judicial help
in securing the presidency, will now plague the electoral process for
decades to come. And when considered along with the spectacle now taking
place in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee — in which highly qualified
conservative judicial candidates are being summarily denied appointment
— the Democratic party's politicization of the judiciary can be counted
as yet another step in undermining the rule of law.
|
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
