A tale of two endorsements
Well, not endorsements, exactly. The Star Tribune Editorial Board couldn’t pick just one to endorse for attorney general, so it divided itself into into team Jimmy Schultz and team Keith Ellison, and each team made a statement of a case for its candidate.
The one for Keith Ellison is good. You can read it here. I encourage you to do that.
The case for Jim Schultz is flaccid and weak, amounting to damnation with faint praise. It is also very short. (I reproduce most it below.) In fairness, the writer had very little to work with. Even so, the piece manages to tell a filthy lie:
But as they do so [consider a candidate’s past and track record] in Schultz’s case, voters should remember that Minnesota attorneys general going back to Walter Mondale and Skip Humphrey, and including incumbent Democrat Keith Ellison, have often initially brought more extensive political than courtroom credentials to the role. That Schultz has no lengthy political history should count as a point in his favor. [Emphasis added]
Keith Ellison was a practicing lawyer, including extensive courtroom experience, for sixteen years before he entered Congress. He was for several of those years the executive director of the Legal Rights Center. I wrote about that in Jim the Naif. (I wrote a second story about Jim Schultz in Jim Schultz: holy warrior.)
Neal Katyal, a former Acting Solicitor General of the United States and a Georgetown law professor, and a member of the Derek Chauvin prosecution team, called Keith Ellison a “brilliant trial lawyer.”
The writer of the Statement for Jimmy must have known these things. The writer of the Statement for Keith Ellison obviously did.
On behalf of the truth, I demand that the Star Tribune Editorial Board make a correction of the sloppy, libelous statement, recited above, on the editorial page.
Otherwise, who edits the editors?
Jim Schultz is the most unqualified candidate for attorney general that the Republicans have put up in fifty years of losing.
The photo that accompanies the Statement for Jimmy, reproduced here, shows him yucking it up with law enforcement officers whose support he touts. But they support him because they figure he’d be supine in police excessive use of force cases, unlike Keith Ellison, who prosecuted Derek Chauvin. Don’t believe me? Here’s what the law enforcement political screeners were interested in when Paul Ostrow screened for the Hennepin County Attorney job:
he surely did pic.twitter.com/tBMzRdtipp
— HarrietTheWry (@HarrietTheWry) October 28, 2022
Update: I sent an email to the Strib editorial department demanding a retraction of the lie about Ellison’s lack of courtroom experience when he took the AG’s job. No response so far.
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