Bob Dole hasn’t figured out all the angles to this judge-bashing shtick.
As for the politics, well, obviously Dole has some poll that says America hates fuzzy-brained, pro-criminal judges, and everybody knows polls don’t lie. So Dole has decided to go after Clinton’s surrogates in black robes.
Last week, Dole picked out four of the 185 federal judges that Clinton has nominated and put them on the “all-star team of liberal leniency.” Dole has promised to put some solid, Republican law-and-order judges on the bench if he becomes president. This will wipe out crime.
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Maybe Dole’s savvy on the politics, but he’s forgetting a practical side to this. Lefty Democratic judges can come in handy sometimes–even for Republican judges.
Take Sol Wachtler, who ran as a law-and-order Republican when he was elected to the New York state court in 1968 and when he moved up to the appellate court in 1972. He had a television commercial where he posed at a jail and said he would “get the thieves and muggers and murderers into these cells.” The Republicans loved him. They thought he had the makings of a governor, or maybe even a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Who knows, if Wachtler had gotten a mushy Democratic judge maybe he wouldn’t have been hit with a 15-month sentence in 1993 for harassing his ex-lover with threatening notes, sending a lewd letter with a wrapped condom to her 14-year-old daughter and threatening to kidnap the child. Did Bob Dole think of that?
A dedicated, liberal jurist might have scoured the law books long enough to find just the right technicality to let former Republican Will County Circuit Judge Patricia Schneider go scot-free last year. Instead, she got 90 days of home confinement and a fine for fixing traffic tickets and a child support case. She was a Republican up-and-comer, led the ticket in 1992. Alas . . .
Republican Kane County Circuit Judge Michael O’Brien had to resign last year to avoid criminal charges. All he did was fib about winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. Guarantee him a Democratic judge, and maybe he would have taken his chances in court.
If the Indiana Supreme Court had a little more Democrat-like compassion for the accused, maybe it wouldn’t have removed Vigo County Judge William McClain from the bench last month just because it found that McClain sent harassing letters and a used condom (what, did he trade notes with Wachtler at some judicial conference?) to a secretary.
McClain was appointed to the court as a Republican, but then he jumped to the Democrats. No doubt the GOP figures the switch sent him off the deep end.
These cases were noted recently in a story in The National Law Journal that had the unmerciful headline, “Judicial Crackups Fracture the Bench.” It was all about a rash of strange behavior by judges in recent years. “Judicial meltdown,” the story called it.
There was a big color picture on the front page of the Law Journal to go with that story. It was the Pekin Police Department mug shot of none other than Illinois Supreme Court Justice James Heiple. The mug shot was taken after Heiple had a late-night run-in with some cops after he was stopped. He’s been charged with speeding and resisting arrest.
Since you asked, yes, he’s a Republican.
But did Dole think of his fellow Republican’s fate when he went on the law-and-order warpath? Here’s Heiple, the poor guy, going on trial in May, and his own presidential standard-bearer is out hunting for liberal judges.
Dole couldn’t have waited until after the trial? Now if Heiple gets a local judge who aspires to be a Dole appointee to the federal bench, he might wind up doing 10-to-20 years hard time at Joliet just for leading the cops on an impromptu parade through Pekin.
The Law Journal takes a kindly approach to all this, quoting experts who suggest that the weird behavior comes because judges are under extreme stress from politicians and the press and sometimes even ex-cons who hold a grudge. The answer must be compassion and understanding. The article quotes one psychologist who warns that today’s judges live in a state of “flooded consciousness.”
I’m not exactly sure what “flooded consciousness” means, but I think it’s the technical term a Cook County Circuit Court judge was searching for recently when she abruptly walked off the bench during an evidence hearing and said, “my head’s too full.”
Okay, okay. She’s a Democrat. But at least her president can be counted on to sympathize with her flooded consciousness, share her flooded consciousness, include it in his next universal health-care package.
Does Bob Dole care about flooded consciousness? Not in the least. He picks on someone like U.S. District Judge Harold Baer, calling for his impeachment. All Baer did was make one goofy ruling on some evidence in a criminal case. He didn’t send any extortion letters or flee the cops or send anything unseemly to a 14-year-old. At least, not that we know.
In presidential politics, there is no justice.