CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BROWN
REVERTS TO HIS YOUTH WITH COURT APPOINTEE”
There is no doubt about the
intelligence and diligence of Leondra Kruger, 38, Gov. Jerry Brown’s new
appointee to the California Supreme Court.
But this graduate of the elite,
private Polytechnic School adjacent to the Caltech campus in Pasadena has not spent
substantial time in California since 2000, and very little in the six years
before that. Essentially, Kruger left California to attend Harvard University
and Yale Law School, returning only for short stays, including summer
interships in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles in 1999 and with a
large Los Angeles law firm the next year.
That raises a question Brown ignored
in his first-go-‘round as governor in the 1970s, when he loudly proclaimed he
was scouring the nation for “the best and brightest” to populate his
administration.
There is little doubt Kruger fits that
category today, at least in theory. She clerked for a U.S. Supreme Court
justice, John Paul Stevens, a plum job for any recent law school graduate. She
has been a top lawyer in the federal Justice Department and argued substantial
cases before the nation’s top court while a deputy solicitor general.
But she has no experience as an adult
in California. In that way, she’s reminiscent of Adriana Gianturco, perhaps the
least successful of Brown’s first-term appointees. Gianturco, a graduate of
Smith College, UC Berkeley and Harvard Graduate School, was brought in from
Massachusetts to freshen up Caltrans.
One of her first fiascos was making
the two center lanes of the I-10 Santa Monica Freeway, then the world’s busiest
highway, into carpool-only lanes. So infuriated were Los Angeles commuters,
whose existing gridlock suddenly became much worse, that Gianturco became known
on radio talk shows as the “Giant Turkey,” “the madwoman of Caltrans” and “Our
Lady of the Diamond Lane.” She was, she once said, “besieged, vilified,
crucified.”
Because
she also had not bothered to develop rapport with either local officials or
state legislators, her project and her tenure as Caltrans director were doomed
to flop. There still are no carpool lanes on that freeway, and all carpool
lanes established elsewhere since then have been added on, not taken from
existing traffic lanes.
All this because Gianturco didn’t
understand California and Californians.
Similar pitfalls could await Kruger,
who is all but certain to be confirmed by the state Commission on Judicial
Appointments, consisting of state Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, Attorney
General Kamala Harris and Joan Dempsey Klein, senior presiding judge of the
state Court of Appeal.
“She reminds me more of Rose Bird than
Gianturco,” says Robert Stern, longtime president of the former Los
Angeles-based Center for Government Studies. Bird, appointed California chief
justice at 40, just two years older than Kruger is now, also had no judicial
experience, but had been a California lawyer, working as a public defender and
teaching at Stanford Law School.
Like Gianturco, she did not understand
some California sentiments, and thus was voted out by a 2-1 margin in her first
confirmation election in 1986. Bird never approved an appealed death sentence
in her entire court tenure. She also authored several regulatory-related
decisions that infuriated the state’s business lobby.
“They put up the money to oust her,
with the governor at the time, (Republican) George Deukmejian, campaigning hard
on that, too,” recalled Stern. “They used the death penalty to get at her, but
were actually more interested in her business decisions.”
So it will behoove Kruger to
familiarize herself quickly with California politics and attitudes. She will
fail to do so at her own peril.
Her supporters don’t seem concerned
about that. “She is super-smart, crazy well-prepared and the type of person who
only cared about getting it right, not about getting in good with the boss,”
said her ex-boss, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who moved her
into that office’s No. 2 slot.
Katyal, now a Georgetown University
law professor, said watching Kruger work was “like watching a master.”
Given her lack of any California
background as an adult, Kruger will need to be masterful to become widely
accepted. If she’s as good as her old colleagues say, she’ll do the necessary
homework, become a full-fledged Californian and be just fine.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
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