Thursday, June 16, 2011

The First Half of Marshall Home's Day in Court

Posted By on Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 12:58 PM

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At this point, we have to know that any event with Marshall Home is going to be a strange occasion, full of odd accusations and statements. It took fifteen minutes for Home to show up for the court proceeding (although he was apologetic for the delay), but he didn't really disappoint, launching into an opening statement that began with the assertion that Jonathan Rothschild is a good man, but then went wildly downhill from there, accusing all lawyers of being foreign agents under the British flag, the Pima County Democratic Party of violating the Constitution, and then, of course, his belief that the separation of powers laid out in the United States Constitution prohibits lawyers (as officers of the court) from running for executive offices.

There's no way that Rothschild is getting kicked off the ballot (the judge said he'd rule on the motion by Monday), and there was a fair amount of snickering and eye-rolling from the crowd, especially the posse behind the defendant's table from the local Democratic Party, and Home deserves some of that for wasting an hour of people's time today. Talking to him after the hearing, he knew that it was a lost cause, but he felt he needed to stand up for the Constitution and for the voters, who he really does seem to feel have been defrauded by the local Democratic establishment lining up for Rothschild early.

While Home doesn't seem to understand the difference between the executive committee's vote to endorse Rothschild and the primary itself, when party chair Jeff Rogers said on the witness stand that Rothschild had his personal support from the start, it is a little unlikely (from my perspective) that meaningful debate on the Democratic side of what's best for Tucson was really going to happen. If the party chair is personally endorsing a mayoral candidate, it would seem that everyone else would fall in line and no one else would have a meaningful chance to win. That might not actually be the case...no one can really predict what actually voters will do especially in small sample sizes like local elections, but long before there was an official endorsement, there might have been an implied one. However, that's not illegal, or even really improper or immoral. It's just sort of how politics works, for better or worse.

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