Thursday, September 11, 2008

Dem. Attorney General McGrath plays politics with the law -- and he wants to be our Chief Justice?

Read the outstanding Electric City summary of just how wrong-headed (and downright contrary to basic legal principles) McGrath's decision not to investigate the govenor is.

Remember, the Montana Supreme Court has twice in the last decade made crucial and direct partisan interventions on behalf of the Democratic Party.

First, in the redistricting fiasco following the 2000 census, the Montana Supreme Court appointed a highly partisan Democrat to be the fifth member of the commission -- which then in a series of endless 3-2 votes threw out all of the reasonable plans drawn up by responsible parties in state government and replaced it with a gerrymandered district plan drawn up by one Joe Lamsen, designed with the sole aim of creating a Democratic majority.

Second, in the 2004 election, when Rick Jore's three-way race ended up in a tie between him and his Democratic opponent, and then Gov. Martz appointed Jore to the seat, following Montana law -- well, the Montana Supremes threw out the election results and handed the seat to the Democrat, and with it, control of the state House of Representatives.

Anyone who thinks that we won't be in for more of the same -- and apparently worse -- with McGrath on the Supreme Court needs to pay attention to this little episode, where he refuses even to investigate wrong-doing admitted to (even bragged about) by the governor.

As Electric City points out, generally a declaration of innocence comes after evidence is gathered, not before.

In his speech to the trial lawyers, the governor made disparaging references to the Republican counties in Montana, implying that in a recount, their officials would have cheated and stolen the election for Conrad Burns. He said something to the effect that it would be like Florida, or some other third-world place like that.

Sadly, he may be right that Montana is becoming a banana republic -- run by Democrats, with the top law enforcement officer's highest oath apparently being "I promise not to investigate Democratic wrongdoing."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You answered your own question: there is no evidence of any wrong doing. Gov. Schweitzer has said he was joking. The Butte-Silverbow elections office has explained the delay in the same way since the election. Brad Johnson's office did what was supposedly a complete investigation of voter fraud in the state and found no evidence.

What more do you want?

Montana Headlines said...

Right. The governor said he was joking, so that should be an end of it.

"Really, officer, I was just joking about threatening to shoot my ex-wife -- can I go now?"