I Am Not a Lawyer

And I don't even play one on TV.  What I saw in the transcript was a couple of politicians schmoozing each other.  Like I said before, it was certainly tacky, but I don't know whether or not it was illegal.  There are people much more qualified than I who are working on this thing, and I'm sure they'll get it all sorted out sooner or later.  With the election being only a year away, however, I can't help but wonder if the intent is to resolve the issue or just to make Trump look bad to the voting public.  Be that as it may, Trump has already lost my vote because of his shameless betrayal of our Kurdish allies.

Speaking of lawyers, Judge Joe Swallow called me on the telephone this morning.  He doesn't do the internet, preferring, he says, to remain in the 20th Century.  The email address that I found belongs to his wife, who passed my message on to him.  He is 86 years old and, although his memory is not what it used to be, he remembers enough about the case that I am convinced it's not a figment of my imagination.  Convincing Uncle Ken might not be so easy, so I asked Cortana if she knew anything about it.  Cortana seemed confused.  The young girl in the case was named Bonnie Hoover, and there are apparently lots of people with that same name, some of whom have been involved with the Michigan court system at one time or another.

It seems that Bonnie was denied welfare benefits because the state had implemented a new disbursement formula that favored the urban counties over the rural ones.  Mr. Swallow, who was a member of the state legislature at the time (1965-1973), and some of his colleagues, believed that there was a "racial component" to this formula, so they filed a lawsuit in Ingham County, which is where you have to file if you want to sue the State of Michigan.  At some point, there was an effort made to make it a class action case, but I'm not clear about how that turned out.  Mr. Swallow talks pretty fast for an old guy and, if I had stopped to take notes, I would have missed the next thing he said.  Be that as it may, the case was eventually settled out of court because that's what the client wanted to do.  Joe Swallow later lost his seat in the legislature because of redistricting, but went on to become a circuit court judge in Alpena County, where he resides in retirement even unto this day.