Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [103]
Rove presided over a complete makeover of Texas government. By 2000, everyone from the ag commissioner to the governor was a Karl Rove candidate. But the Texas Supreme Court was his designer bench. Rove hates trial lawyers. He recites from memory stories of malingering plaintiffs shaking down honest corporate citizens for millions of dollars. And he understands that while you are rewriting the rules governing lawsuits, you need to take over the high court so you can stop them at the top before you shut them out at the bottom. So he did. If the Texas Supreme Court isn’t the most anti-consumer, anti-plaintiff, anti-environment, anti–open-government court in the country, it’s damn close.
Priscilla Owen was so far out of line with her fellow justices on the bench that she often seemed like the court jester. It’s hard to imagine a better bellwether Bush appointee to the federal bench. He may have struggled with Antonin’s name, but he knows how to pronounce Priscilla. Bush didn’t know Charles Pickering, Miguel Estrada, or Michael McConnell, but he knows Priscilla Owen. He knows her record. He knows the grandees at the law firms who picked up the tab to get her elected. He knows the court she served on. And he knows what kind of opinions it handed down—even if the details are a little sketchy to him.
Owen is the compleat Texas jurist: a business-community whore who sings in the church choir. Trust us. If we’re wrong on this one, to borrow a line from a Dallas lawyer whose client’s life was destroyed by a decision written by Justice Owen, we’ll “kiss your ass on the courthouse steps.”
Since there are few businesses as big as Ford and few law firms as badass as Baker Botts, we might as well start examining the record of Justice Owen with the lawsuit filed on behalf of Willie Searcy. It shows what Bush looks for in a judge, and it sheds a little light on an issue at the top of the Bush agenda—tort reform. Tort reform in the Queen’s English is imposing limitations on the rights of individuals to file suit when they are injured or suffer a financial loss at the hands of another party. Corporate immunity, corporate impunity. So we’ll start with big bidness.
In April 1993 fourteen-year-old Willie Searcy was a passenger in a 1988 Ford pickup truck traveling south, in the rain, on Interstate 35. He leaned forward to pick up a piece of trash on the floor of the truck, pulling the slack out of his shoulder belt. His timing couldn’t have been worse. A Mercury Cougar crossed the median just ahead, and Willie, his twelve-year-old brother, Jermaine, and their stepfather, Kenneth Miles, plowed into it. Restrained by his seat belt and hanging on to the wheel, Willie’s stepfather was badly banged up, as was Jermaine, but both recovered. Willie didn’t fare so well. The tension eliminator—the little mechanism that allows for slack in the shoulder belt—didn’t take up the slack when he sat back up with the trash in his hand. The boy’s chest hit the dashboard, tearing all the posterior ligaments that keep the skull in its proper place in relation to the spinal column. A former Army paramedic who learned his trade in Vietnam was in the first car to arrive on the scene. He’s credited with saving Willie’s life.
He could not save him from complete quadriplegic paralysis. Willie Searcy would spend the rest of his life in bed. He could not breathe without a ventilator. He required nursing care—or at least attendance twenty-four hours a day—in order to stay alive. It was a terrible prognosis for a fourteen-year-old who played running back on his YMCA league football team. The emotional costs to Willie’s mother and stepfather were impossible to calculate.
The financial burden was easier to figure. Medical and nursing care would cost millions.
The lawsuit filed on Willie’s behalf was about as straightforward as his prognosis. His attorneys alleged that his injury was a result of the failure of the tension eliminator that provides for the give and take in the shoulder belt. Since Texas law at the time allowed a plaintiff to file suit in any county where