"See You in Court" Quote of the Day

I hope Big Con readers will join me Sunday at 5:00 EST when I host a Firedoglake book salon on attorney Thomas Geoghegan's See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation. [1] Even more so, I hope you'll buy and read the book. It's simply amazing—as penetrating and original an analysis of what ails America as any I've ever seen. It's also hilarious, in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying sort of way.

The book began life as a pamphlet called The Law and Shambles, and that's precisely what it's about—who conservatives who claim to be for law and order actually ended up corroding the rule of law in the United States. Feast your eyes, as Tom does in Chapter 4, "From Administrative Law to No Law," meat inspection. "How could regulation be collapsing here?" Here's how:

But let me tell you about our suit with the owner of a chicken-processing plant. We are suing for his workers, under the so-called WARN Act, which requires a notice before a plant closing. In this case, the owner did not give the required sixty days' notice before he closed the plant. "But the Department of Agriculture shut me down," the owner argues. "How could I foresee that?" He argues that year, he may have done bad things, and let rats run wild, and let rats shit on the chicken meat. And yes, it is even true that the inspectors of the Department of Agriculture gave him write-ups.

But here is the issue: Was it reasonable for the owner to foresee that the Department of Agriculture would enforce its own regulations?

He had an argument: "I'm in the business, and they never enfore the law." Never. That was his claim. The Department of Agriculture is more or less a joke. Under Bush I, then Clinton, and then Bush II, it' gotten worse. "Everyone knows!" Nows comes the ruling of the district judge, who is a liberal, a Clinton appointee: Yes, he says, it was unforeseeable. It was as if he took judicial notice that as a matter of common knowledge, the government does not enforce the laws.

Case dismissed!

I'm still in shock that the employer got away with such an argument. But he had a point. We cut back on inspectors. We don't impose fines. So he had no way of knowing that the Department of Agriculture would shut him down.

In other words, the application of the Rule of Law is the equivalent of an act of God. Completely arbitrary. Like a hurricane.

Yes, we appealed. I helped edit the brief. It was not my case, but my colleague's. All I did was strike out the word "rodent" and put in the word "rat." And the word "rat" came up a lot because the plant was filthy: fill of rats and rat droppings all over the meat. The scary part was that the plant had gone on like this for years. The more we deregulate, and the more the inspectors are told not to threaten but to work in a "cooperative spirit," the more the rodents, and the rats, are free to go on dropping on our chicken wings and nuggets.

So what happened on appeal? Well, of course we argued that a judge cannot assume that it is "unforeseeable" for the laws ever to be enforced. In the United States, has the Rule of Law really come to this? Even though we got the District Court judgment reversed, we did not really win the point.

Instead, we have to go to trial. We have to have a trial to determine whether the owner of the chicken-processing plan has to believe the government when it says to him they're going to enforce the law.