In our crosshairs: Cliff Taylor

by: Eric B.

Thu Jan 03, 2008 at 13:03:08 PM EST

We kick off the new year profiling a few of the key political races statewide that deserve -- nay, demand -- your attention.  Vote, vote, vote these people out of office.--Eric B.

I'm told that Michigan's Supreme Court, in particular the gang of four that routinely puts special interests ahead of the public, is something of a joke among out-of-state lawyers and judges ... so bad is their reputation for rending reason and sanity in pursuit of judicial activism.

We could dig into history from the tenure of Cliff Taylor and create an indictment from his entire record for why booting him from the state Supreme Court should be one of our hottest priorities for 2008, but that's not necessary.  We have plenty of lowlights from just 2006-07 that are crying out for recognition (enough that Taylor could have easily been nominated as the state's worst public servant for 2007).  Roll the tape: 

We start the year 2007 with a nasty, embarrassing spat between the gang of four and fellow Republican-backed jurist Elizabeth Weaver.  Headlines were generated across the nation when Weaver accused Taylor and Robert Young, Stephen Markman, and Maura Corrigan of bully tactics and corruption.

The source of the spat?  The gang of four reprimanded Geoffrey Feiger for saying mean things about appeals court judges, a reprimand overturned in federal court because it -- ta-da! -- violated the First Amendment.

In a ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Tarnow found that the grievance committee rules are unconstitutional on their face because they are both overly broad and vague, thus they violate the First Amendment right to free speech and the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process law.

No thrashing of the principles of free speech is complete unless it also comes with suggestions of corruption and personal animus, which includes Taylor.  From Lessenberry:

At least two of these judges had no business ruling on this case at all. Both Clifford Taylor and Stephen Markman needed to recuse — disqualify — themselves from the case because they have a clear conflict of interest. They each have an ongoing feud with Geoffrey Fieger.

Years ago, Fieger called them "mollusks and squirrels." (Come to think of it, I think he meant the entire court.) Fieger and Taylor have been going at it for years, and Taylor's wife Lucille was John Engler's top legal adviser when Fieger was running against him for governor.

If this were just a case of allowing professional judgment to be questioned on the grounds of personal feelings, Clifford Taylor might just go down in history as a keenly petty man.  But, his court is famous for other reasons, namely its rulings.  Over last summer, the court -- which claims to be mostly interested in legislative intent -- ignored the original intent of the state Legislature back in 1970, and rewrote the rules of who can sue under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act.

Under the original law, and based on the clear intent of lawmakers at the time (some of whom have since publicly denounced the ruling as activist), the law was intended to give every citizen in the state of Michigan a role in protecting the environment, reflecting the general notion that the air, water, and land in substantial ways belong to all of us.

Not so, said Taylor's high court.  If a tree dies in the woods, and you can't see it, you have no interest in why it happened.  The court, in an incredibly arrogant majority opinion, also dismissed the notion that what happens on your property affects what happens on my property, suggesting that the original law would allow everyone but Martians to sue in Michigan courts.  The end result?

Two years after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled on two cases involving industrial development, a review of new environmental cases by the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service reveals that the Court's decisions are forcing lawyers to change how they use a seminal, 36-year-old state law designed to protect the environment.

This is the very definition of judicial activism, which is something we're told that these kinds of judges are opposed to.  The first of those two rulings mentioned weighed heavily in their decision making on the Nestle case, which means that they invented their own law and then cited it in subsequent decisions.

The ruling came at a time when Mark Brewer and the Democratic Party started touring the state in a car once issued to Taylor.  Taylor had used the thing to drive on vacations and for trips to places like the grocery store.

But, Taylor's gang of four wasn't finished for the year, by a long shot.  If you're tired of hearing about the state's primary fiasco, you can thank the Taylor court.  After being deemed unconstitutional in two lower courts, the gang of four gathered itself up and reinstated it the day before Thanksgiving, suggesting that primary elections are vital to democracy and that anything done to help them out was all right with them, man.

It would be a lot more fun if, at this point, there were a challenger available to rally around.  But, so far, there is none.  Jack Lessenberry endorsed Jim Blanchard, but unless they can get someone faster, I'm afraid that the election will hang on whether people are so digusted with the state Supreme Court that it will simply start ejecting judges in favor of someone else.  If that happens, the odds that we can defeat Taylor, I fear, will be pretty slim.