Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Sunday, August 20, 2006 1:24:44 AM
In early June, I made my first 60 mile trip to the Denver Tech Center to work for Bob Beauprez. I am 60 years old but had never worked for a campaign before in my life. They put me to work shredding paper.
Sometime that morning, I took a short break from the shredder and strolled around the headquarters. There was a white board on one wall, and on it one of the staffers had written: "Moral Outrage is the most powerful motivating force in politics." That one sentence summed up in a few words the reason I was willing to drive 120 miles that day and many days thereafter.
I made no comment at the time, nor the next day when a staffer, as it happened the same man who had put up the message, asked me why I was driving so far to volunteer. I simply told him that I wanted to see a Republican governor elected and I thought Bob was the best candidate.
It didn't take the volunteer coordinator and others long to discover that I had talents beyond shredding paper-that I liked making phone calls and was good at it. For a long time, I didn't tell them why I was good at it, perhaps because I hadn't really thought it through. Most still probably don't totally understand, and won't until they begin reading this blog.
My driving force is moral outrage at the courts. When I am talking to a voter, and he starts telling me why he disagrees with Bob on this issue or that one, I frequently am of the same political persuasion (I disagree with Bob on at least four major issues, all of them pretty common), and I tell them that. Then I tell them how often I drive to Denver, and how far I come and ask them why they think I would do that if I disagreed with Bob on their issue.
I don't go into detail. I just tell them that the courts are messed up, and that is what makes me come to Denver. The fact is that the courts in Colorado and the US Supreme Court make fools of themselves so often that most people do agree that the courts are "messed up," including even the most liberal Republicans. It isn't Roe that has done it. It is Term Limits, Eminent Domain, Geneva Convention Rights for Terrorists, and the NSA surveillance ruling. Here in Colorado, it is an extremely partisan Democratic Supreme court which has gerrymandered the state to the point that it has a Democratic legislature at a time when Republican candidates get 300,000 more votes in aggregate, a supreme court which decided that "the courts were a part of the legislative process, and therefore could apportion the state without legislative input when the Constitution required the legislature to perform that function, and recently, a supreme court that took five months to decide that a 40 word initiative had two subjects, much to the surprise of linguistic experts.
That is what the average voter understands. What they do not understand, and what I have learned, is that the courts, the supreme court in particular, sees its responsibility as one of protecting unethical attorneys from the public, not the other way around.
I've learned a lot in six years as a litigant. I'll be sharing as much as I can over the next months (constrained by the fact that the litigation continues). Even attorneys will have much to learn. I think it will make people sick, sick enough that they won't consider electing another Democratic lawyer.
Moral outrage is, after all, the most powerful motivating force in politics.