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February 22, 2004

Lockyer's Ethics

Not being a lawyer, I don't know the ins and outs of legal ethics -- and maybe I've got this all wrong -- but I've always thought that attorneys prided themselves on the ability to separate their personal beliefs from the needs of their clients. In normal practice an attorney who publicly derided his client's pending case would face disciplinary proceedings, and rightly so.

Which brings us to Attorney General Lockyer, who is not only refusing to act to defend the laws of California, but is taking the Governor to task for attempting to do so. He goes so far as to accuse the Governor (his client) of inciting hate crimes:

In a fax Friday night to the home of a Lockyer aide, the governor wrote: "I hereby direct you to take immediate steps to obtain a definitive judicial resolution of this controversy." The message also said that San Francisco's actions to wed gay couples "present an imminent risk to civil order."

Lockyer called that statement "preposterous" and said it is the kind of "exaggerated, hot rhetoric" that risks stirring people up to commit hate crimes.
The next move, as Prestopundit notes, is now Schwarzenegger's. The Governor should act immediately, and in such a way as to highlight the Attorney General's dereliction of duty.

My suggestion? Hire an outside law firm to make the state's case, intervene in the current case as the chief Consitutional officer of the state, stating that the Attorney General is derelict and refusing to uphold California law for political reasons. Then he should file ethics charges with the State Bar against the Attorney General for putting his personal political ambition before his duties to the State.

Think of it as a PATCO moment.
According to journalist Haynes Johnson, the decisive manner in which Reagan handled the PATCO strike convinced many Americans that he was "the kind of leader the country longed for and thought it had lost: a strong president" -- in sharp contrast to the widely-held view that Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had been too indecisive.

UPDATE: San Francisco authorties seem to have a fundamentally different viewpoint when it comes to other protests of unconstitutional laws, like, oh say, gun bans. Literally, they view such protests as a threat.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at February 22, 2004 10:02 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Does anyone here know if the CA AG is an elected or appointed official? If he is elected, it might be recall time. If he is appointed, it might be purge-time for the Governator.

Posted by: Phelps at February 22, 2004 01:36 PM

He is elected on the same cycle as the Governor and other Constitutional officers. Election at congressional midterm (next Nov 2006).

A recall might happen if this mess continues -- it would probably coincide with the presidential election. But the Governor can intervene in other ways. Impeachment is not politically possible.

More likely is an initiative mini-FMA to settle the state constitutional issue, much as is being tried in other states.

BTW, none of this surprises me -- I'm quite on record as predicting the meltdown of the gay marriage movement if they went too fast. SF's mayor has turned the dial to "11" and is going to defeat his people's hopes.

Posted by: Kevin Murphy at February 22, 2004 03:49 PM

Recall would be well-deserved, not just for this, but also for willfully breaking privilege days before Arnold was inaugurated, and for bringing that phony "antitrust" suit against the grocery chains. I'm not sure it would succeed, however. For reasons I fail to grasp, Lockyer is popular in California; he's the only one who got a majority of the vote in 2002.

Posted by: Xrlq at February 22, 2004 11:37 PM