“What a tangled web we
weave when once we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott
If a suit filed by the Democratic State Central Committee in
Hartford Superior Court in answer to previous suit filed by the State Elections
Enforcement Commission (SEEC) is upheld, Connecticut’s clean election law will
have been judicially repealed. Under such circumstance, the Friends of Clean
Elections in the General Assembly – assuming anyone holding elective office is
a friend of clean elections in Connecticut – will have no choice but to repeal
the law or, as seems more likely, gut and fillet it.
The clean election law, passed after the corruption trial of
former Governor John Rowland, established a non-permeable wall between
politicians running for election and the businesses and political entities they
sometimes oversee, but an ad supporting Governor Dannel Malloy’s recent
re-election bid appeared to permeate the wall. The Malloy re-election ad
contained a line – “small print,” as a cautious lawyer might say -- that advised
voters when polls would be open.
The ad having passed under the sniffer of Jerry Labriola,
the former Republican Party Chairman smelled something fishy. No one disputes
that the campaign notice clearly breached Connecticut’s clean election law. Mr.
Labriola filed a complaint with the SEEC, which ruled in his favor. Although
the law had been breached, the Democratic State Central Committee argued, the
breach was permissible because state law does not supersede federal law, which
allows money to pass unimpeded from a federal account to Mr. Malloy if, as in
the case under review, the ad contains a small print notice that transforms the
political mailer into an acceptable form allowed under the superseding federal
law.
If that gobbledygook seems confusing to the Friends of
Honest Elections in Connecticut – none of whom will have any difficulty
recognizing the offending ad as a Malloy campaign election document that
contains a “small print” fig leaf -- the confusion is the lawyerly result of an
attempt to deceive. See Mr. Scott’s often quoted refrain on deception above:
Deception always involves tangled webs supported by rooms full of lawyers,
about whom Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher once said, “First thing we do [after
seizing power], let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Forrest Gump would have had no difficulty calling the Malloy
election ad an impermissible affront to Connecticut’s clean election law. The
only open question is: Will Connecticut courts allow the imposture and by so
doing toss the state’s clean election law on the ashbin of history?
In defending the SEEC ruling, attorney General George Jepsen
finds himself on the side of the clean election law angels. Or, to be more
precise, the lawyer assigned by Mr. Jepsen to defend the SEEC judgement, is on
the side of good governance. Mr. Jepsen has recused himself from the case
because he had been early in his career the Chairman of the State Democratic
Party, a clear conflict of interest. The attorney general’s office is notorious
for keeping cases bouncing on the litigation road, always paved with good
intentions, until years in the future indigent defendants drop from exhaustion
and perish in the courts. One expects the case to drag on and on and on, to be
settled, in the absence of a judge who insists on moving the case quickly to a
just resolution, sometime in the next century.
It is sweetly ironic that “conflict of interest” will itself
be on trial in Connecticut’s Superior Court; the purpose of the clean election
law, it will be recalled, was to slay the conflict of interest dragon.
And here we are. By far the best review of the tortuous details surrounding the rival suits may be found in Courant investigative reporter Jon Lender's account here.
We are here because Mr. Malloy wanted to put a bag around
Connecticut’s clean election law and hang it from the nearest tree. As Governor
of Connecticut, Mr. Malloy easily could have observed his own state’s clean
election law and produced two mailers: one a political re-election pamphlet,
and the other a manual instructing inattentive voters how to find their polling
places. But the devil of greed and unrestrained power wormed its way into Mr.
Malloy’s receptive heart, and so here we are – in court batting legal ping pong
balls back and forth across a judicial table before Connecticut’s politically
compromised judges. And despite Mr. Jepsen’s disclaimer, the legal case seems
stacked in favor of the Democratic Party’s Governor because employees of the
former Chairman of the Democratic Party, Mr. Jepsen, should not be directing a
case filed against the Democratic State Central Committee.
The last thing Mr. Malloy, an autocratic head of a single
party state, needs is a functioning clean election law that cannot be skirted
by former prosecutors such as Mr. Malloy, attorneys general who once were
Chairmen of the Democratic Party and, should the case ever reach Connecticut’s
Supreme Court, newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald, once the
co-chair with Mike Lawlor of the Democratic controlled Judiciary Committee. There
is enough political heft among all these people to choke a horse, and ethics
laws are fragile butterflies.
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