A politicized organization
connected to the beneficiary of a court decision that strikes down a government
regulation receives reimbursement from the state of Louisiana for its legal
costs. Then a hue and cry arises from some quarters, not complaining about how
the state never should have defended its jurisprudence but about how the winner
should return voluntarily the money due to Lambda Legal and the Forum for
Equality to taxpayers to help out a strapped state … uh, maybe not, considering
with whom we’re dealing here.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme
Court decided to protect a class of individuals, whose class is defined solely by
their behavior and this behavior is not granted in the document special
Constitutional status unlike that emanating from political or religious belief,
from states refusing to grant them marriage licenses because they are of the
same sex. Louisiana had a constitutional prohibition against such marriages,
which had spillover effects including adoptions. As a result of that ruling, a
similar case as that decided by the nation’s highest court that was working its
way through the judiciary in the state and another dealing with adoptions were
concluded in favor of the plaintiffs, who challenged the state ban and therefore
will have the state pay their costs and who were represented by the above
organizations and a New Orleans law firm to which they owe funds as a result.
But when those declarations were
made by the various courts involved, no pleas emerged for the special interest
groups involved not to bill the parties who then could get the reimbursement
from the state. If there was any grumbling at all, it surrounded the fact that the state had
spent $330,000
in defending the rule of law.
Yet not long after in regards to a
case last year, where a political action committee announced it had received a
similar kind of reimbursement under almost identical circumstances, howling
commenced. The Fund for Louisiana’s Future successfully had sued the state
to throw out its law preventing donations to organizations like it of over
$100,000 in an election cycle, with a payment of $70,000 from the state to it
revealed in regulatory filings last week. The group is unaffiliated with Sen. David Vitter but is run by past
supporters of his and works on behalf of his election this fall as governor.
Naturally, politics intervened in
reactions. A Vitter gubernatorial opponent, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, and the endorsers of state
Rep. John Bel Edwards for
that office, Louisiana Democrat leaders and their party, separately said Vitter “forced”
the state to hand over the reimbursement, with Dardenne adding that Vitter
somehow should get the PAC to return voluntarily the money to “give taxpayers a
break.” Never mind, of course, that the law does not let Vitter have any
connection to this PAC and he had nothing to do with the money’s transfer in
the first place.
Ironically, the argument for
charity from case winners is much better concerning the one discovering the
right to same sex marriage within the Constitution than from the one limiting
the First Amendment. It took emotive argumentation employing a breathtaking
judicial activism to find any justification to advocate that the Fourteenth
Amendment trumped the Tenth for the former, reasoning that more analytical
jurists rejected, while the latter on its face was a clear violation of freedom
of speech, as spelled out in previous cases, that the state should have
conceded immediately.
Obviously, unprincipled hypocrisy
explains Democrats’ reactions on these two cases; the challenge that turned out
to their liking they want to see the plaintiffs get every penny, while with the
one that didn’t this payment suddenly becomes tainted and they hope to make it
a political football to sully Vitter and to boost Edwards’ fortunes. In
Dardenne’s case, it’s simply campaign opportunism that looks to move himself up
in the polls.
But if they really want to put
their money where their mouths are, they do have their own PACs collecting money
separate from the Dardenne and Edwards’ campaigns (the Democrats’ styled more
as “anti-Vitter” than “pro-Edwards’) that could donate the funds back to the
state. After all, these also were beneficiaries of the court ruling, so if they
feel so strongly about a bonus in the future of taking in more money as a
result, they should give back.
Yet regardless of the reaction to or
lack of action concerning the revelation, the response of Dardenne and the Democrats
to it tells us something unflattering about both.
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