More Lawyer Jokes
If you don’t have a favorite lawyer joke, you must not be living in the this century. You know, like, what’s the difference between a dead skunk and a dead lawyer lying in the middle of the road? There are skid marks in front of the skunk. We all know that there are many fine, ethical lawyers out there who work for the good of people, but we also are pretty sure that we’d be better off with a whole lot less litigation and a whole lot more civility. So we ask, what do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start, we respond.
But now it is the lawyers who are telling the jokes. Well, they probably don’t think that it is jokes they are telling, but we must laugh. To what do I refer? Recently, the Bush administration announced that it will not vet its judicial nominees with the American Bar Association prior to passing them on to the Senate for confirmation. Now, the administration has made it clear that it is more than happy to accept suggestions from the ABA–just as it is willing to accept such suggestions from other political organizations.
Listen, though, to Evan Davis, president of the Association of the Bar in New York. He says, “Focus on a candidate’s character, temperament, professional aptitude, and experience” would be replaced by an emphasis upon political considerations. The Houston Chronicle is even more hysterical when it opines that “professional qualifications for the federal judiciary won’t amount to a hill of beans for the next four years.”
Gosh, sounds like that bumpkin Bush crowd is likely to nominate Judge Judy as Chief Justice and probably Jerry Springer to the First Circuit! Where will we be without the ABA watching out for our justice system!
But what a lawyer joke. The republic managed to get by pretty well without the help of the ABA until Dwight D., good Republican he, decided to ask for the ABA’s help in the 1950’s. In other words, John Marshall, Felix Frankfurter, Learned Hand, and even Earl Warren, darling of the judicial activists most enraged by this decision, somehow made it to the high court without this ABA approval process. When Eisenhower requested the ABA’s assistance, it was strictly a professional organization, and undoubtedly proved helpful in the process.
What a difference, however, fifty years makes. The ABA is now a political organization from the word “go”, taking pro-abortion, pro-homosexual rights, pro-NEA stances. The ABA couldn’t even muster the honesty to give a “fully qualified” vote to Robert Bork, perhaps the finest and most-qualified candidate for the Court in over half a century–the lynching of whom, by the way, ranks as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in twentieth-century America.
But I digress. The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration is demonstrating true courage in putting the ABA in its place–a place right alongside other political advocacy groups. This group is in the forefront of the push to place the whims of a renegade, power-intoxicated judiciary over the will of the people of this country. Instead of our constitutionally-prescribed representative government, we increasingly see a judiciary willing to throw out this method of governing and legislate from the bench. The sorriest, longest-lasting legacy of the pitiful Clinton administration will be the decades-long liberal bent of our judiciary.
It is a welcome relief to see that we have an administration in power willing to stand up to the ABA–and to call this kind of bluster what it is–more lawyer jokes.
ABA — Wasn’t that a Swedish band from the 80s? The same era as Wayne Watson, who was not a lawyer.
What? Are we resorting now to leaving comments on obscure posts from last year?
Wouldn’t be the first time…