Thursday, January 19, 2023
Political Mayhem Thursday: How not to do advocacy
New York governor Kathy Hochul (pictured here getting ready to root for her hometown Bills) gave what may be the very worst MLK Day speech ever-- and that's saying something, given that I wrote a law review article around a terrible MLK Day speech by Jeff Sessions.
Hochul is in the middle-- well, probably just through with-- a bitter dispute over her choice to become the new newest judge on New York's top court. (Confusingly, in NY the trial courts are called 'Supreme Courts' and the top appellate court is the 'Court of Appeals'). Her choice, Hector LaSalle, is a moderate-to-conservative former prosecutor who ran into fierce opposition-- and yesterday was shot down in a committee vote.
Among other things, LaSalle voted to allow lawyers to strike jurors based on skin color, which, um, seems problematic. But Hochul plowed ahead with her MLK day speech (given while the nomination was still in play), which not-so-subtly tried to use MLK to support her nomination:
"Dr. King called upon us to be just and to be fair, and to not judge people. And that has not been afforded to an individual named judge Hector LaSalle... When he was gunned down, assassinated, my family sat there and held hands and wept. How could this be?" How could this man of God who taught us about nonviolence and social justice and change, and not judging people by the color of their skin, or one or two cases out of 5,000 cases decided."
No, it's not from The Onion. She really said that.
There is a lot not to like in that speech, much of it relating to the neutering of King's actual beliefs by politicians eager to make him into a "let's all just get along" figure urging us all to avoid conflict. Ugh.
And that turn at the end! Yikes!
