Former legislator Mark Wright must be starving for attention now that he is out of power. On Thursday he made big news when Jo Mannies reported that the “conservative” lobbyist is opposing conservative Republican efforts to reform Missouri’s judicial selection process. According to reports, Wright is even writing long rambling letters to the editor using big words like “panacea” and blaming his former colleagues in the legislature for activist court decisions.

We have a few questions for Mr Wright:

Was it really the fault of our elected leaders that Judge Wolff and the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Planned Parenthood could keep thousands of dollars the Holden administration had passed to the abortion provider in blatant violation of state law? Even Judge Wolff and the majority of the Court admitted that Planned Parenthood was being allowed to keep the money even though the law was clear.

Or, should we blame our elected leaders for Judge Teitelman’s decision to ignore extremely clear law and open state coffers to trial attorneys? That is exactly what the liberal Supreme Court majority did recently by ruling that disability benefits can be paid even though the injured person is dead and the injury no longer exists.

The problem with those cases was not bad law-making, it was result-oriented judicial activism.

But maybe we should look past Mr. Wright’s sloppy research and writing to understand why he is joining the other side. We suspect that his change of heart is related to the fact that the struggling lobbyist has been seen in Jefferson City trying to scrounge up new clients. We don’t see the Missouri Bar, MATA, or other liberal interest groups signing up to be his new lobbying clients. (We don’t see any new clients, for that matter.)

But maybe the opponents of judicial reform knew that Wright had fallen on bad times and that it would therefore be easy to talk him into putting a “conservative” face on their liberal agenda. Is Wright so desperate that he would sell himself as an unreported consultant to MATA, the Missouri Bar, or some other left-leaning interest group? Of course, it might be too much to expect crackerjack journalists to ask revealing questions before acting like they’ve spotted the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with the latest GOP “divide.”

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