On perhaps no issue did Democrat
Edwards differentiate himself from his GOP rivals than on tort reform. Long an
ally of trial lawyers, as one example of his fealty towards them Edwards
opposed efforts to remove
the ability of state regional bodies to bring suit on matters over which
the state or parishes had ultimate policy-making authority, voting against
such a measure.
That law
specifically applied to the South Louisiana Flood
Protection Authority-East’s attempt to extract money from nearly 100
companies that had explored and extracted oil in its jurisdiction over the
decades. It alleged them primarily liable for environmental damage in the
billions of dollars despite that science does not corroborate the impact to
that extent and with few exceptions had followed the law with the state’s
blessing in their activities throughout.
In short, and as admitted
by the suit’s ringleaders (most now no longer on the agency’s governing
board), they made this nothing more than a grab for money in order to finance
the agency’s extensive capital construction plans. They saw producers of wealth
and contributors to society as nothing more than fatted calves required for
slaughter to further their agenda.
And a remark made by Edwards about
the suit in the larger context of tort reform indicates he thinks the same. At
the time, he asserted that the Legislature should not act retroactively in such
matters, which it does all the time in any event and this law did not affect
the ability of private parties to sue but applied only to a small passel of
state government and more local governments.
But his objections were more than
that, as he recently revealed. “I think the day’s going to come when we’re
going to ask Congress to pony up federal tax dollars to fix our coast, and
they’re going to be much harder to convince because we will not have done what
we could have done locally,” he said.
So, in other words, to have “done
what we could have” includes the pursuit of jackpot justice. Meaning that
Edwards agrees with the premise that companies that followed the law and
received permission from the state should draw punishment regardless from
government immediately for actions only tenuously related to the reputed amount
of harm caused.
If Edwards feels that environmental
damage came from company actions that failed to follow the law (including their
issued permits), such as engaging in inadequate remediation or sloppy
construction, then to recoup recompense the state should use administrative means,
with forays into the judiciary only when exhausting those means, that provides
proof of such errors and levied against only those directly responsible for
each specific violation. Otherwise, he acts hypocritically by supporting a
blanket, retroactive sanction (and one where the monetary value of which bears
no relation to the real world damages), a concept he said in a different
context that he opposed.
Of course, to do so would take
years, perhaps decades, for the state to pursue successfully and would bring in
far smaller amounts of money than envisioned. By contrast, Edwards prefers
powerful government using the judiciary to take what it wants of the property
of the people, justified only by his ideological pretensions of what he sees as
desirable public policy.
That demonstrates the latent totalitarianism
in liberalism to which Edwards adheres. It tells us all we need to know about his
lack of commitment to individual freedom and his faith in the state as arbiter
over people. The question that remains is how well we can keep his command and
control tendencies on these matters in check over the next four years.
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