The justices were twitching like crack addicts to get this decision out by last night, and the opinion reflects their "deliberative" state of mind. The opinion consists of seven pages, double-spaced. The caption is two pages in length, the order is two pages in length, the recitation of facts consists of one page, and the entirety of the court's legal reasoning takes up all of two pages. They could at least have thrown in a couple of recipes to give their opinion more weight.
The next case in the court's two-case arsenal is Catania v. Haberle. The justices cite this case for the proposition that the law should be liberally construed "to allow the greatest scope for public participation in the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to allow the voters a choice on Election Day."
But the voters did have a choice on Election Day. They could vote for the Democratic nominee, the Republican nominee, or any of the other, minor party candidates on the ballot; or they could write in whomever they wished. Moreover, in Catania, the Republicans did not have a nominee. In the present case, the Democrats sought to replace their nominee. And they could only do so with the help of the court.
The New Jersey supreme court has now joined Florida's high court in its willingness to rewrite election law for partisan political purposes. I fear that the precedent set by Al Gore during the 2000 election, in which he sought judicial help in securing the presidency, will now plague the electoral process for decades to come. And when considered along with the spectacle now taking place in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee — in which highly qualified conservative judicial candidates are being summarily denied appointment — the Democratic party's politicization of the judiciary can be counted as yet another step in undermining the rule of law.
- Mark R. Levin
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