“Jersey’s Lesson for GOP
By Arnold Ahlert
New York Post, October 9, 2006
On September 30, 2002, Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli, mired in an ethic scandal, retired – and was replaced on the New Jersey ballot by former Senator Frank Lautenberg.
On October 2, the State’s Supreme Court decided that Lautenberg could be added to the ballot 34 days before the election – violating a state election law requiring a 51 day limit.
On September 29, 2006, Republican Mark Foley, mired in an ethics scandal, retired and was not replaced on the Florida ballot by the actual candidate Joe Negron – because it violated Florida election laws.
Anyone wishing to vote for Negron will have to do so by voting for Foley."
Certainly Ahlert makes an interesting point, but read further:
“Deja Vu on Ballot Change
By Herb Jackson
Bergen Record, October 14, 2002
Next time you hear Republicans working themselves into a lather over what they consider an outrageous and unprecedented abuse of power by the state Supreme Court in allowing Frank Lautenberg on the U.S. Senate ballot, remind them how Frank Catania became an assemblyman.
It was 1990, and longtime state Sen. Frank Graves’ death resulted in a promotion for Assemblyman John Girgenti to the Senate seat he still holds today. That created a vacancy in Girgenti’s former Assembly seat in the heavily Democratic 35th District, which was comprised of Haledon, Hawthorne, Paterson, and Prospect Park in Passaic County and Elmwood Park in Bergen County.
Paterson Councilman Cy Yannarelli was tapped by Democratic leaders and he easily won the June primary in the special election.
Republicans did not even put up a candidate in the primary. A 22-year-old from Paterson staged a write-in campaign, but failed to get the minimum 100 votes,the same number of signatures necessary to be placed on a ballot.
The state Supreme Court had decided in 1987 that when no one runs in a primary or gets enough write-in votes to qualify for the November ballot, a party committee could, within seven days of the primary, appoint a candidate to run.
But June 1990 came and went, and the Bergen and Passaic GOP committees left the ballot blank. In July, the Democrat-dominated Legislature and Gov. Jim Florio passed a new law to overturn the court’s 1987 ruling. The new law, which said it "shall take effect immediately," said that when a party runs no candidates and no one gets enough write-in votes in a primary, that party has no candidate on the November ballot.
Remember 1990 was the year of the infamous Florio tax increases, and during that summer Republicans started to realize that Democrats in the Legislature were extremely vulnerable. So on Sept. 6, the Bergen and Passaic GOP committees chose Hawthorne lawyer Frank Catania to run against Yannarelli.
The secretary of state, citing the new law and long-expired seven-day deadline, refused to put Catania on the ballot. Republicans sued, and after Catania lost at the county and appellate level, the state Supreme Court led by then-Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz, ordered his name on the ballot.
Making the situation especially painful for Democrats was that Wilentz’s order came four days after Yannarelli had been indicted on vote fraud charges relating to the 1989 election. Catania won the race.
Obviously, the Lautenberg case is somewhat different. Sen. Robert Torricelli quit this year, while in 1990 Republicans initially did not think it was even worth running. But in both cases, party leaders went running into court after they missed deadlines to change the ballot.
And in both cases, they were relying on the courts carrying on a 50-year tradition of letting voters, not judges, sort out who deserves to be on the ballot and who does not. One has to believe that the GOP’s over-the-top protestations in 2002 are based not on any true surprise but more on a campaign strategy to portray the Democrats as crooked.
"I saw Chief Justice Wilentz afterward and he basically told me that the court moved very rapidly because they wanted to do what was right," Catania, who was reelected twice and is now a consultant on casino security, said Friday. ‘And it looks like that’s what they did [in Lautenberg’s case] too.’”
So there it is. The Jersey court, in a case involving Jersey law, ruled based upon a 12 year old precedent where they had allowed the Republicans to do the exact same thing. The Florida Court, in a case based on Florida law, ruled differently on a similar set of facts.
This, Mr. Ahlert, is known as Federalism. I’ve never much cared for it myself, but conservatives are supposed to be for it. As I recall, your side’s legal chowder and marching club is known as "The Federalist Society".
It seems to me that to the extent a double standard is afoot here, it belongs to Mr. Ahlert.