BY STEPHANIE GRACE
This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise
nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the
baggage.
I was a new reporter covering Jefferson Parish, and Scalise, now the
majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, was just starting
out in the Louisiana Legislature (I’m going from memory, but the
exchange obviously stuck with me). It would be several years before I
would fully decode just what he meant by the sentiment, which is similar
to statements he would later make to at least one Washington news outlet, and what it said about Jefferson Parish and Louisiana politics.
The “baggage,” of course, was Duke’s past, his racist and
anti-Semitic views and his former role as a KKK grand wizard. Scalise
disavowed Duke then, as he did once again this week, when blogger Lamar White Jr. revealed that Scalise had spoken in 2002 at a meeting hosted by a Duke-founded white nationalist group.
But the other part of the sentence, the part about their similarity,
was the rub. Scalise may have been naïve about how to express himself
to a newcomer, but he was already a savvy politician who knew that, even
though Duke had lost the governor’s race a few years earlier, Duke
voters were still around. And those Duke voters also were potential
Scalise voters.
This is, in effect, a dirty little secret of Louisiana politics, and
the context in which Scalise made the fateful decision to show up at
the EURO conference in 2002. The truth, as Scalise suggested that day,
was that the actual governmental philosophy Duke espoused isn’t far off
from what was becoming mainstream conservative thought, what with its
suspicion of taxes, set-asides and safety net programs such as welfare.
The problem in his view was the messenger, not the message.
Does Scalise endorse the racist goals of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a group so bigoted that the Southern Poverty Law Center has
labeled it a hate group? I’ve never seen anything to suggest so,
although there were times, like when he opposed establishing a holiday
honoring Martin Luther King Jr., when he certainly could have shown more
cultural sensitivity. I’ve watched him work closely with his fellow
state legislator and now congressional colleague Cedric Richmond, who
has defended him, and have seen him at campaign events in support of
Richmond and other African-American colleagues, party and ideological
differences notwithstanding.
But I also get how the invitation wouldn’t have set off alarm bells,
given that Scalise had long since made his awkward peace with the
situation.
In fact, by 2002, Scalise may have been so used to the idea of
dealing with Duke voters that he really considered EURO just another
part of his constituency, even if it was a distasteful one. Maybe not so
different in his mind from the League of Women Voters,
which he cited in an interview with The Times-Picayune as another group
he’d addressed despite the fact that they didn’t agree on everything —
an insulting comparison that suggests he still doesn’t fully grasp how
bad this all looks from the outside.
Scalise claims he didn’t know the group’s origins, which is pretty
implausible given how prominent Duke and his associates were in
Jefferson political circles.
Instead, the most charitable explanation is that he chose not to
think about it, that he opted instead to focus on areas of agreement.
Indeed, sketchy reports of his speech suggest he talked not about race
or religion but the legislative slush funds then allotted to urban
lawmakers, which were indeed often abused, but which also would have
validated stereotypes held by this particular group.
He’d hardly be the only politician to
make such a deal with himself. In 1996, commentator and presidential
candidate Pat Buchanan disavowed an endorsement from Duke, even as he
fielded a Louisiana delegate slate with at least one former Duke
campaign official. Former Gov. Mike Foster paid Duke for a valuable
voter contact list, then failed to disclose it, explaining once word got
out that it wasn’t “cool” to be associated with him.
No, it’s not. But like robbers drawn to banks because that’s where
the money is, politicians go where the voters are. And they, I guess,
tell themselves what they need to hear in order to sleep at night.
Stephanie Grace can be contacted at sgrace@theadvocate.com. Read her blog at http://blogs.theadvocate.com/gracenotes. Follow her on Twitter, @stephgracenola
I’d start by saying this. “A man, a member of our community, has been killed by another. Only a trial court can sort out what exactly happened and what defenses, if any, may apply. I believe in our trial system above all others in the world. I ask for an indictment so that all voices can be heard in a public courtroom with advocates for both sides in front of trial jurors from the community. This room is not the room to end this story. It’s where the story begins.”
I’d do it by asking the grand juries to apply the law to these men as the law demands it be applied — equally. I’d ask them to consider the recent fateful events as the work of ordinary humans, not police officers. I’d explain that the cases are too important to be settled in a secret grand jury room. The lives lost are too valuable to avoid a public trial.
I’d ask them not to consider the defenses the men may raise at trial, because these are irrelevant to the question of indictment. Judges routinely tell my clients — indigent, poor, often young men of color — that they will face trial because probable cause is an exceedingly low standard of proof. All it requires is a suspicion that a crime occurred and a suggestion that the defendant may be responsible for the crime.
Of course I’d present the facts, and exculpatory evidence if I had it. But the most important question is what suspicion is raised by the subject’s conduct, not what excuse he furnishes in his defense. I’d advise grand jurors to treat with caution any self-serving statements offered by someone who has killed another person. We indict on facts, not explanations. The “presumption of innocence”? It doesn’t apply. Affirmative defenses such as self-defense or “reasonable use of force”? Those are “better left to the jury,” just as my clients are most often told.
I’d share with them the stories of how often police officers lie and shade the truth to advance their positions: I’ve watched cops lie about minor, irrelevant details — fare evasion, driving without a seat belt, reaching for a waistband — when they know how important those details are for the district attorney’s case. I’d say how I’ve confronted police officers for lying or omitting facts from their reports or even pretending not to see or hear something captured by a chest-mounted camera when that thing is exculpatory to the person they arrest.
The prosecutors in these cases failed to share stories such as these because they don’t routinely have to confront police officers as part of their job. It’s also because they never wanted an indictment in the first place.
I practice in Oakland, Calif., a city plagued by violent crime. I do this work because I believe in a fair process for every person, even those charged with doing unspeakable things. I have represented hundreds of defendants — in robberies, rapes, carjackings, kidnappings and murders — during preliminary hearings, which, like grand juries, determine whether a person should stand trial. In my hearings, the district attorney charges the defendant first and then presents evidence pointing to probable cause. The judge in these hearings, almost always, orders the defendant to stand trial. When defendants do testify, they typically do it at trial, not before the grand jury (as Wilson did). And the district attorney tells the jurors that the defendant would say anything to go free.
So how is it that police shoot an unarmed boy in Ferguson and strangle an asthmatic man on Staten Island, and nobody found probable cause? The only explanation is that, rather than acting like prosecutors, these district attorneys acted like the officers’ attorneys. They did not push the grand juries to indict. In fact, they suggested that it would be okay not to indict. They presented mitigation.
They didn’t cross-examine the killers. Remember, grand juries only see one lawyer – the prosecutor. There is no judge present and no adversary to the district attorney. When there is only one lawyer in the room, and that lawyer has asked for indictments in every other case he has presented, and he stands before you and tells you he wants you to do whatever you think is right, the outcome is almost preordained. Here’s what the right approach would have been:
Unarmed men were killed. Let’s have a trial.
