Nader vs. The System: democracy at stake
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Pennsylvania's statewide political corruption scandal known wryly but too-narrowly as "Bonusgate" is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Ralph Nader is hoping it will give him a chance to clear his reputation, as well as the $81,102 in costs that the Commonwealth Court assessed him in 2004.
In this year of political upheaval, third-party candidates everywhere should hope for the same "gift," because the Nader judgment set a precedent that could have a "chilling effect," Mr. Nader's legal team says, on outsider candidacies nationwide.
Back in 2004, Democrats were desperate to keep Mr. Nader, the celebrated consumer activist, off the presidential ballot, fearing he'd siphon votes from John Kerry. They filed challenges to his candidacy in many states. In Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh-based attorneys for the international law firm Reed Smith led the effort.
"Based on news reports coming out of Philadelphia about how these [petition] signatures were being collected, some of my colleagues and I who are Democrats ... organized volunteers, more than a hundred, an enormous effort," said Reed Smith partner Dan Booker in an interview Friday. "It was all to tell us whether, if we went to court, we could prove that enough of these signatures were ineligible."
What wasn't known then -- not by the Nader camp or the public, anyway -- is that some of those "volunteers" were actually staffers in state Sen. Mike Veon's Beaver office, working on the taxpayers' dime.
The challenge was successful. In the Commonwealth Court's decision, President Judge James Gardner Colins characterized the Nader petitions as "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court."
To Nader attorney Oliver Hall's chagrin, "every reporter has repeated that quote," despite the fact that the court's own review of the petitions doesn't support Judge Colins' gross hyperbole. Only 687 (1.3 percent) of the signatures were found to be forgeries -- names like Mickey Mouse or Fred Flintstone, which the candidate called "sabotage and mischief."
First Published April 19, 2010 12:00 am
