The Legal Times Blog reports that a US district judge has dismissed Ralph Nader’s latest attempt to prove he was the target of a conspiracy by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to keep him off the presidential ballot.
In October 2007, as much of the country began turning its attention to a new and promising presidential showdown, Nader filed suit against the defunct ’04 Democratic ticket, accusing it of launching “a massive, nationwide unlawful litigation assault” on his campaign. The suit, originally filed in D.C. Superior Court, was eventually removed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where it was finally dismissed this May on jurisdiction grounds.
Nader, represented by Center for Competitive Democracy founder Oliver Hall, filed a second version of the suit with the District Court. But in an opinion released today, Judge Ricardo Urbina determined that Nader’s second try was too similar to his first and dismissed the updated complaint.
According to Nader counsel Carl Mayer:
…this was the most massive anti-democratic campaign to eliminate a third-party candidate from the ballot in… recent American history. Not content with having all these laws and statutes on the book that make it difficult for third-party and independent candidates to run, the Democratic Party and their allies in over fifty-three law firms, with over ninety lawyers, were engaged in filing litigation in eighteen states. They were to remove Ralph Nader from the ballot. It was an organized, abusive litigation process.
The core of the lawsuit is that these lawyers, led by Toby Moffett and Elizabeth Holtzman, and something called the “Ballot Project,” which was a 527 organization, systematically went around the country and filed lawsuit after lawsuit, twenty-four in all, plus five FEC complaints, to try to completely remove the Nader campaign from the ballot and to, in effect, bankrupt the campaign, which they succeeded in doing. Not content with that, one of the defendants, Reed Smith, which is a large corporate law firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, they are now going after Ralph Nader’s personal bank account to make him pay some of the cost of this litigation.
Ralph Nader is an American attorney, author, lecturer, political activist, and perennial candidate for Presidency, as an independent candidate for President in 2004 and 2008, and a Green Party candidate in 1996 and 2000.