See you in court, buddy.
For a former prosecutor, Gov. Chris Christie sure seems to have a hard time understanding
how these things work.
Stonewalled by the Christie administration, media outlets have been forced to sue to obtain even routinely disclosed information, such as payroll data. Rather than release documents connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, pay-to-play allegations, possible ethics violations, and the out-of-state jaunts Christie has made while weighing a run for president, Christie's office and several state agencies have waged costly court battles. As the 2016 presidential primary race draws closer, and Christie considers jumping in, his administration is fighting 23 different open-records requests in court.
Or maybe as a former prosecutor he has a
very good idea how these things work, and knows exactly what his administration needs to withhold in order to dodge greater public scrutiny and/or still more legal investigations. Many of the documents relate to pay-to-play charges between Christie's administration and his donors; others are for entirely mundane things like the governor's planned schedule. And, of course, the bridge thing.
"We can and do beat them in court. But as long as they're appealing—I don't want to call it a pyrrhic victory, but we're not going to get the records," says Walter Luers, an attorney who helped a transparency project run by the state Libertarian Party sue for public access for Christie's travel expenses. "Appeals take two to three years. We're already into the presidential elections. By the time we get these records, Christie could have a new address."
Mm-hmm. Color me a cynic, but it seems like the majority of cases where elected officials churn through entire appeals processes in order to avoid the public release of records turn out to be cases where the eventually released documents do indeed make the elected officials look bad. Christie hopes to run out the clock on "Bridgegate" and the other scandals that have littered his tenure.
You know, this may be the first election I can remember in which we have multiple candidates who could easily be seen as "the next Nixon." It's probably because getting investigated (Walker, Christie) or indicted (hello, Rick Perry) for something is seen as an ideological plus in a conservative movement that's pretty sure (see: D'Souza) all prosecutions of their members are of course conspiracies against the movement as a whole. Who would be the slightest bit surprised to hear that a President Chris Christie sought to nix disaster relief to a state that hadn't voted for him, or that a President Walker was running an elaborate campaign scam out of the Roosevelt Room. We'd be stunned if it didn't happen.
This long ago ceased to be about ideology, or at least the ideology and the crookedness are enmeshed enough at this point to be indistinguishable. The Republican base has a real hankering to see "tough guys" in the positions of power, and if those "tough guys" bend or break laws in order to further their goals that's just seen as proof of their toughness. The same movement that has sent itself into convulsions over the tyranny of a passed law like Obamacare or the dictatorship implied by executive orders has no particular problem with candidates who have elevated themselves using the fruits of true corruption. Unless you are Al Capone, that seems like a damn curious "ideology" to have.