Blogs For Victory

Once again Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor makes the corruption news:

State Attorneys General regularly hire private plaintiffs lawyers on a contingency-fee basis to prosecute cases. The trial bar returns the favor with campaign donations to state office holders. And despite the inherent conflicts of interest and questionable ethics of the practice, corporate defendants have rarely challenged such arrangements. Which is why a motion pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is so remarkable — and deserves more public attention.

Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the state of Pennsylvania over Janssen’s antipsychotic drug Risperdal. The state alleges that Janssen has improperly marketed the drug for off-label uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Janssen denies the accusation, but the merits of the case — which hasn’t gone to trial yet — are not what’s at issue in the motion before the court.

Rather, what’s at issue is the fact that the civil action against Janssen is being prosecuted on behalf of the state by Bailey, Perrin & Bailey, a Houston law firm. And it turns out that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s Office of General Counsel was negotiating this potentially lucrative no-bid contingency fee contract with Bailey Perrin at the same time that the firm’s founding partner, F. Kenneth Bailey, was making repeated campaign contributions totaling more than $90,000 to the Democratic Governor’s 2006 re-election bid.

Janssen’s motion seeks to invalidate the contingency-fee arrangement and lays out a detailed timeline of Mr. Bailey’s political contributions and the subsequent actions of the Governor’s office.

The article goes on with the time line, and its pretty damning. Rendell, of course, first gained national notoriety with his attempts to suppress the soldier vote during the 2004 campaign, as well as rather questionable vote totals in Democrat-heavy areas of Pennsylvania which moved the State to Kerry in 2004. Rendell, former mayor of Philadelphia (a city not noted for clean government), is hip deep in the disgusting, pay-for-play politics of our time, raised to the normal mode of governance when Democrats rule the roost. How does he get elected and re-elected?

For the longest time I just put it down to sheer stupidity on the part of the people – I mean, come on, corruption so obvious and so destructive that only idiocy could explain how people get away with it. Lately, however, I’ve been revising my views. Hardly anyone pays close attention to politics – there might be 5 or 10 million people in America who take a daily interest in it, another 20 million who look into it on a fairly regular basis, but all of this together is only about 10% of the population and about 25% of the electorate. Most people don’t pay that much attention – and therein lies the ability of scoundrels to prosper…not because people are stupid, but because – it seems to me – that we are hard-wired for faith and thus have a natural presumption to believe what we are told.

We’re supposed to have faith in only one thing, as it were, but being what we are and surrounded by the temptations of the world, we often place our faith in created things and people rather than in God…and thus we trust the news, trust the politician (even if we say we don’t), trust the apparent consensus of opinion. It takes something really brazen and out front for us to start doubting in any consistent manner. Unless someone like Rendell is caught robbing a church, the basic assumption of the people is that he’s relatively honest and trying to do a good job – and most of the time most of the information provided doesn’t go into arcane details of corrupt practices, as detailed in the linked article.

Its a hard thing to actually get this right – to strike a balance, that is, between our requirement to be generous in our views but also skeptical about the motivations of others. But it is something we must do – the trick must be learned, lest we become forever the playthings of people who believes rules are made to be broken, all the time and everywhere. Blessed are those who believe without seeing, but Our Lord never said “blessed are those who believe but never think about their beliefs”. The key is to think about things – to ponder just why someone wants to do a particular thing and, especially, wants us to act in a certain manner. If we think things over carefully, we are likely to come to a reasonably correct solution. And thus the normal mode of the scammers is to call everything a crisis demanding immediate action, no thinking to slow things up.

A hurricane, flood or earthquake requires immediate action – but if it isn’t about to knock your house down, action can be delayed and, indeed, must be delayed while we think through the likely effects of whatever is proposed. Rendell might not be breaking any laws in what he’s doing – but the laws he may be on the right side of are a hodge-podge of ad-hoc actions, likely enacted on the run, and tailor made for crooks to take unfair advantage. Out here in Nevada we have a rather clever provision for amending our Constitution – it must be passed on two successive elections by the vote of the people. This allows for calm reflection and for passions, if aroused, to be cooled. We need more of this sort of thing in all government actions – wait a bit, and lets think things over.

Calm reflection by a well informed electorate is the key to success in any democratic republic, like ours – we must get away from crisis-mode governance and back to a much more deliberate manner of proposing, enacting and enforcing laws. We do more of that, we’ll end up with less of Rendell, and that would be a good thing for our country.