The first was “grow up.”
And the second was “stop wasting everyone’s time and money.”
Justice Derek Molter’s concise, tightly argued majority opinion denied Rokita’s request for a dismissal of the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission’s complaint that the state’s top lawyer—once again—had violated rules of professional conduct governing attorneys. Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Justice Mark Massa joined Molter’s opinion—and Justice Geoffrey Slaughter and Justice Christopher Goff each wrote separate concurring opinions.
Molter’s majority opinion dismantled Rokita’s arguments that requiring him to follow the same rules all other attorneys do and holding him accountable for breaking those rules violated the attorney general’s First Amendment rights. But it granted his request to have a hearing panel consisting of three people, rather than the standard of having just one hearing officer. And it urged the panel, the attorney general and the disciplinary commission to consider using a mediator to resolve this mess of Rokita’s making.
In my more than 40 years as a journalist, I haven’t often read court documents as plain-spoken and direct as Molter’s. In his opinion, Molter makes clear that Rokita’s ongoing fight to defend his indefensible comments about Dr. Caitlin Bernard on Fox News three years ago is one of the dumbest battles ever waged.
The crescendo of Molter’s implied condemnation comes near the end of his opinion, when he writes:
“(T)here is also the first rule of holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. Minser v. DeKalb Cnty. Plan Comm’n, 170 N.E.3d 1093, 1095 (Ind. Ct. App. 2021). And when our state’s highest court must enlist our profession’s most respected leaders as hearing officers to litigate at considerable expense whether our state’s attorney general was sincere when saying sorry, we’re in a hole—so we should all do what we can at least to stop making things worse.”
The justice here identifies the biggest flaw in our attorney general’s makeup and thinking.
When Todd Rokita finds that he’s dug himself into a hole, his reaction is always to throw away the shovel and bring in the heavy-duty ground-moving and excavating equipment. Left to his own devices, he inevitably will burrow his way through the entire planet, just so he can avoid acknowledging that he made a mistake.
The fact that he’s able to have the taxpayers foot the bill for all his spade work only encourages him to tunnel deeper.
Make no mistake about it. The only reason this costly, stupid dispute has continued as long as it has is because our attorney general doesn’t have the basic common sense God gives to the average rock.
Rokita’s troubles started when he learned that Dr. Caitlin Bernard had performed an abortion for a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been raped.
Without bothering to investigate the facts of the situation, Rokita rushed before the cameras at Fox News and said things about Bernard that were so ill-informed and inflammatory that even Fox disavowed them almost immediately.
If Rokita had done the same—if he had said, for example, that his passionate opposition to abortion led him to misspeak—the matter would have ended then and there.
But Rokita being Rokita, he couldn’t do that. He continued persecuting Bernard until, in a negotiated settlement following the first disciplinary commission complaint, the Supreme Court publicly reprimanded him.
His punishment, if one can call it that, was a sweetheart deal. If Rokita just had accepted that minuscule slap on the wrist in silence, his troubles, once again, would have been over.
He couldn’t do it, though. He issued a statement that said, in effect, that he didn’t mean a word of the affidavit he’d signed, under penalty of perjury, as part of the settlement of the first complaint.
That prompted this complaint.
Molter’s opinion broadly hints that Rokita should strike whatever deal he can with the disciplinary commission and—this time—honor the terms to which he agrees.
In other words, stop wasting time and money and grow up.
A smart guy would take the hint and stop digging.
But this is Todd Rokita we’re talking about.
My guess is that as soon as he read the court’s ruling, he began trying to find a bigger backhoe.
