September 18, 2002
Buffalo's Common Council flunks high school civics
Buffalo's Common Council flunks high school civics
Assuming Buffalo News reporter Brian Meyers got his quotations and paraphrases accurately in "Council compromise considered unlikely" (September 10), not one of the seven whites who voted to abolish the four at-large Council seats and to realign the city's voting lines knows anything—anything—about the role of the Federal judiciary in government.
At issue was whether or not a federal judge could consider the legitimacy of a suit claiming that Common Council actions had radically altered who got to vote for whom in the city of Buffalo. They weren't arguing the correctness of the federal judge's decision on the legitimacy of their action—things hadn't yet reached a point where any decision had to be made.They insisted that the judge didn't even have the right to hear a complaint that had been filed in federal court.
North District Councilman Joe Golombek told Meyers, "I see this as the tyranny of the judiciary. I was elected to make decisions in the city. Judge Curtin was not." Joe Golembek teaches history at Buff State. He's got to know better than this. I called him last week to confirm this quotation, but I couldn't get through to him and he never called back. [Mr. Golombek did return the call September 19, the day after this article was posted. He said he was responding primarily to Judge Curtin's earlier remark that the numbers for David Franczyk's realignment map seemed to have been pulled out of a hat.]
"Stop talking court cases and compromises and let the voters decide," said Delaware Council Member Marc A. Coppola. That's the same kind of "don't confuse me with the facts" Coppola had in May 2000 when he voted against a death penalty moratorium because, he said, he didn't understand the resolution well enough to vote on it intelligently so therefore he was voting "no." (That wasn't as bizarre as Golombek who said he opposed the same death penalty moratorium because he thought the Catholic Catechism authorized it. Click here for more on that.)
David Franczyk's legal opinion was that "Curtin is venturing 'totally outside' his legal domain."
That foolishness was echoed by South district Council member Mary Martino: "I think (Curtin) is totally outside the realm of his court, and that's all I heard from people over the weekend." For Martino, the word on the street in South Buffalo trumps the U.S. Constitution.
None of these councilpersons seems to know that the judiciary is part of the democratic process, that it is the institution the framers of the Constitution assigned the responsibility of guaranteeing fairness in the democratic process. (Or at least attempting to guarantee fairness in the democratic process. Who in the Continental Congress could have foreseen hanging chads?)
All these Buffalo Common Council comments on judicial legitimacy were uttered before Judge Curtin did anything. A case had been filed, it was assigned to him, and he asked the participants to try to settle it out of court to avoid the possible unpleasantness and great expense of litigation. The only response these councilmembers had was to pontificate about why a federal judge had no place in a civil rights and voters rights case.
What is to be done? One of two things, as I see it.
One is, they could sue Brian Meyers for libel. That probably wouldn't go anywhere because truth is a defense against libel, so they'd never win. I presume they wouldn't even try in federal court because they say it has no legitimacy in these affairs, and every state supreme court judge I know would shoo them out of the courtroom giggling.
The other thing they might do is they could take a break from all the puffery and pooling of ignorance and read the U.S. Constitution. They might learn something useful.