Nadler Operatives Nuke Sullivan Petitions

July 26, 2008
By Jim McCabe

Jerry Nadler’s specific objections to Adam Sullivan’s petitions remind me of the Monty Python skit where a particularly persistent buzzing fly elicits increasingly drastic measures by the badgered individual seeking to eliminate it. Not content with a swatter, the pestered person resorts to machine gun fire, then dynamite. And through it all the fly keeps on buzzing.

Those of us working for Adam Sullivan never expected that Congressman Nadler would accept Sullivan’s invitation to debate the issue of impeachment. But one would have thought that the Nadler camp would have relaxed and had a celebratory glass of champagne once they found out that Sullivan had missed by months the deadline from changing his registration from unaffiliated to Democrat, therefore making him ineligible to run. But no. Suzanne Jacobson and Debra Cooper, acting on behalf of Robert Gottheim of Nadler’s district office, apparently went line by line through all 157 pages of Sullivan’s petitions, alleging that 919 signatures were invalid of the 1946 claimed.

In hindsight many of us savored the fact that the Nadler minions invested this energy sweating over each signature, surely their just dessert given the countless hours invested by many of us on the other side writing letters, collecting signatures, urging Mr. Nadler and other Democratic members of Congress to fulfill their Constitutional oath and begin impeachment hearings.

Suffice it to say that before the Sullivan camp learned of the enrollment issue, we had begun the process of verifying the petition signatures against the Board of Elections voter rolls and we were confident that we had secured the 1250 signatures required to get on the ballot. Had the enrollment issue not forced our early withdrawal from the race, we would now be doing battle with the Nadler camp over the petition signatures. I personally collected close to 400 of those signatures and would have welcomed the opportunity to go to bat against Nadler and company.

But it wasn’t enough that Sullivan wasn’t a Democrat, and that they were claiming that we didn’t have enough signatures. Childishly, the Nadler camp claimed that the designating petition volume was not paginated or bound pursuant to law. Section 6215.1 of the election law states that “the sheets of a petition shall be numbered sequentially at the foot of each sheet.” Now math was never my strong suit in grade school but as the person who numbered the sheets I will state affirmatively for the record that I recall that 2 comes after 1, 3 comes after 2 and so on and so forth. Oh, wait, I see what they’re complaining about—we ordered them in descending order, with page 157 on top and page 1 at the bottom. And for good reason, as we were still collecting petition signatures up until the evening of July 10th. I guess they didn’t like that.

As for being “bound,” that same section of the election law states that “any two or more petition sheets shall be securely fastened together by any means which will hold the pages together in numerical order.” Silly us—we made the mistake of being considerate of the overworked civil servants at the BOE. We assumed that the two holes punched into the top of our petition sheets by the printer were there for a reason. We used a hardboard backing and fastened the sheets together with metal rings that could be unfastened if someone needed to make copies of the sheets.

Ironically, the day before we filed, I called the BOE to ask if they had any guidance on the filing since I had not done it before. I was told that they did not give legal advice and to read the election law. I did, and we proceeded on that basis.

We knew that we had succeeded in getting Mr. Nadler’s attention when Robert Gottheim, Micah Lasher and company arrived at the BOE late in the evening of July 10th presumably to review the petitions we had filed that evening. Had someone tipped them off? Apparently, the congressman himself paid a visit to the offices at one point according to the log book. And what of those stories that started to emerge in the press about Sullivan’s enrollment even before the specific objections were filed on the 21st? Were Nadler and his cronies using the media to discredit us?

In sum, Jerry Nadler pulled out all the stops to quash the voices of those who had the temerity to call him on his failure to leverage his position as Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and begin to hold the Bush administration accountable by bucking Pelosi and starting impeachment hearings. Is he the people’s representative or our adversary?

Despite all his efforts, and like the beleaguered combatant in the Monty Python skit, Jerry Nadler still has an impeachment fly buzzing around his head. When will he realize that it can’t be silenced? That it will be there buzzing in his ear next January when he again swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States? That it may in fact come back to annoy him again with a future electoral challenge?

Or was that a new Jerry that we observed at yesterday’s hearing? At one point, he seemed almost ready to give impeachment a chance. That’s all we are saying, Jerry. Give impeachment a chance.