From Lileks.com:

...The Toricelli situation in New Jersey interests me, because it affects the composition of the Senate, and the Senate affects the composition of my bank account. I have to admit I am not a lawyer, so what do I know? Granted, I'm married to an assistant Attorney General for the State of Minnesota and a former Justice Dept. lawyer, and we talk about the law a lot, but it's not as if I get legal training by osmosis just by living with her. I'll confine my area of expertise to editorial truth-twisting, which brings us to today's joyless slab of tendentious cluelessness.



The New York Times editorialized on the machinations to get Torch off the ballot and a new guy put in his stead. You want a jaw-dropper? This is what made my lower mandible kiss the oak:

The Republicans are likely to argue that under New Jersey election law, it is too late to put another name on the ballot. But legal wrangling over ballot access cannot be allowed to obscure the central issue, which is one of democracy. The guiding principle should be the voters' basic right to a genuine election. With a month to go before Election Day, there is still time for a spirited campaign.

I detect the emanation of the afterglow of a shadow of a penumbra here. Look at the first sentence: they’re “likely to argue” that it’s too late to put another name on the ballot. The law says you can’t withdraw after 51 days. Period. So they’re “likely to argue” that there’s a law that governs this situation, and it ought to apply. The Times seems to imply that the law is merely an opinion, an idea who’s competing in a truth pageant and possibly padding its bra.

But this “legal wrangling” “cannot be allowed to obscure the central issue.” In other words, when there is a dispute over a law - and not the interpretation of the law, mind you, but whether the law applies in the exact situation it was designed to apply to - it’s the court’s job to make the outcome conform to whatever higher issue they choose to glean from the facts. The higher issue, in the view of the Times, is “democracy.” I’m all for democracy, but in this context it sounds like The Children, or Our Seniors, or any other group trotted out to shout down the opposition’s case. Read the sentence again: “But legal wrangling over ballot access cannot be allowed to obscure the central issue, which is one of democracy.” It’s like a plane that starts on the ground, fast flies into the clouds, and holds this out as proof that gravity does not exist. The same line could be used in a case that sought to overturn citizenship requirements for voting.

If the law is upheld, then “democracy” is thwarted. Really? There will be an election with a ballot whose names are the ones chosen by voters in the primary. Sounds “democratic” to me. After all, Toricelli didn’t quit because he discovered an eight-pound neoplasm in his small intestine, or had his brain turned into a fine red mist when a marble-sized meteorite from the Oort cloud struck him in a 7-11 parking lot. He’s not even under indictment. He resigned because there was such a bad odor coming from him and his campaign that actual wavy cartoon stink lines were coming off him, and the cameras were starting to pick it up. He was going to lose. So he quit.

I’ve never seen anything like this - you have to step back and consider what this means. A guy knows he’s going to lose, so the party yanks his short hairs until he quits and hands the campaign to a more attractive candidate. We’re used to guys resigning because they were caught with their hand in a pocket or their dinghy moored in a non-marital port, so Toricelli’s resignation seemed to fit that pattern. But you had to remind yourself that he hasn’t been indicted. He had some really, really, really bad publicity, and was shown the door when his poll numbers started chewing the basement floor.

Reread the penultimate line in the paragraph quoted above: “The guiding principle should be the voters' basic right to a genuine election.” It’s that slippery word “genuine” that amuses - oh, the definitions we can stretch to make an election genuine or otherwise. I propose that we hew to the narrowest definition possible: an election that consists of voters choosing candidates from at least two parties, without coercion or hindrance, is a genuine election. Expand the definition beyond that, and you can insist that an election between two candidates with indistinguishable positions isn’t genuine, or an election in which the district has been drawn to ensure a safe district for a party isn’t genuine, or an election that results in a Democratic victory in a GOP district isn’t genuine because not enough Republicans bothered to vote. It’s a highly subjective concept.

I prefer clear laws with regrettable results to judicial legerdemain in the service of “higher causes,” the nature of which vary from person to person. You can always endeavor to change the law through elected representatives who serve at the electorate’s pleasure. Letting the courts allow a hand-picked candidate who did not run in the primary to replace a primary winner who screwed up his campaign does not strike me as, ahem, genuine democracy. It's playground logic: I call do-overs. Nor would this situation be acceptable and genuine simply because it allowed for a “spirited campaign” to follow. (The previous campaign was unspirited and unenlightening in the Times’ eyes, because it consisted mostly of the challenger pointing out that he wasn’t a greasy ball of vicious, solipsistic mendacity like You Know Who.) If the government decided to have the most boring candidate shot in the streets so the other candidates could have a spirited campaign about his assassination, I wouldn't see this as an improvement.

If all of these points seem like reducto ab absurdum, well, they are - - but that's what happens when you ignore what laws say in favor of what you say they should mean.

I'm watching the news right now; Angelo Genova, the New Jersey Democratic Party Counsel, just said this:

"The right of the voter to exercize a free and competitive choice is paramount to any technical nicety that might be suggested by a time limitation in a statute."

There you have it: all campaign regulations are meaningless, because they are "technical niceties" grounded in bothersome "statutes" that prevent a "competitive" choice. This is the future of American politics, right here.

I fear at the end of it all I’ll just wish they put on togas and went back to stabbing each other on the steps. If they’re going to call themselves the Senate, they might as well act like their namesake.