The law of unintended consequences is a quirky animal. As the GOP pushed back hard on AttorneyGate, one of the reasons that was repeatedly cited for firing some of the eight U.S. Attorneys was the failure to aggressively pursue cases of “voter fraud”.

“Voter fraud” is a GOP buzzword for disenfranchisement of classes of people who Republican Party bosses (nationally and locally) profile as potential voters for Democratic Party candidates. Egregious acts of disenfranchisement took place in Florida during the 2000 election, and Ohio wasn’t much better in 2004 - although the tactics changed somewhat. The bottom line is that the entire concept of stealing elections using the weight of a thousand lawyers (and a few well placed GOP enablers at the state level, such as Katherine Harris and Kenneth Blackwell) is not something that Karl Rove dreamed up overnight.

Before we consider the lawyers, though, let’s explore the necessity of patience in creating the momentum that’s necessary to impact the national political discourse.

The Theocrats in the United States didn’t emerge as a powerful, right wing voting block in the space of a few years. Before Monica Goodling was out of diapers, back in the late 70’s or early 80’s, I recall a prominent fundamentalist cleric (memory fails on exactly who, but I think it was Falwell) preaching that the faithful were going to take back the country for Jesus, school board by school board, local alderman by local alderman. In other words, build their machine at the grassroots, no matter how long it took to accomplish. And sure enough, they succeeded to a degree that no one could have envisioned, even during the days when the scandals that befell Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Baker made the fundies look pretty damn silly.

Well, the GOP lawyers did the same kind of grassroots building thing - only it was a whole lot less visible, and potentially even more dangerous over a period of time. In a perversely interesting twist, it’s the reason that today, we’re dealing with the likes of Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, Rachel Paulose, and a cast of hundreds of legally inexperienced and (gasp) incompetent lawyers at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. Digby explains:

I was surprised to see that the Republican National Lawyers Association (where Rove delivered his speech last spring in which, among other things, he mentioned as “problems” those states from which the targeted US Attorneys hail) was pretty much formed for the express and exclusive purpose of training and deploying lawyers on matters of purported voter fraud (aka minority vote suppression.) Neither did I know before that they played a pivotal role in the Florida Recount…

The paper that Digby cites was an eye opener for me. At least 20 years ago, there was a GOP legal blueprint in place to organize Republican lawyers, and to train the next class of Republican lawyers in the art of voter suppression and shady legal tactics in attempting to take down the Democratic Party. And at the core of it, this is why Karl Rove thought they had built a permanent majority - that the GOP would always and forevermore have the legal upper hand in dealing with uppity Democrats.

In 1985, several months before the RNC was hauled back before the same judge as a result of illegal purging efforts in a 1986 Louisiana senatorial campaign and agreed to submit all future ballot security programs it oversaw to the court for its inspection, a new organization was created—the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA)…

…By 1987 the RNLA had active chapters in several states and the District of Columbia, and planned to hold its first annual convention early the following year.

…The RNLA turned out to be much more than a Rotary Club for GOP lawyers, however; it became the predominant Republican organization coordinating ballot security. By its own account, in early 2004 it had grown to “a 1,900-member organization of lawyers and law students in all 50 states…

…and they had a tremendous presence in Florida during the 2000 recount, dwarfing the Democratic Party efforts in the state. Were any of the fired U.S. Attorneys part of that effort, or perhaps even card carrying members of the RNLA? As the attorneys come back before congress to testify, it’s a question that deserves to be answered, and would lend even less credibility to the Bush regime’s arguments.

But back to my main point. If AttorneyGate does absolutely nothing else for the progressive agenda, it’s helped to bring the issue of tampering with voter rolls (legally or illegally) back into the spotlight in a big way. David Iglesias, the deposed U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, was actually pursuing “voter fraud” issues quite agressively, at least at the outset of his tenure. And then, in 2004, a New Mexico judge ruled the way that judges usually do in these types of cases:

“The 11th-hour request by the [GOP] plaintiffs creates the risk of substantially disrupting the public voting process, which far outweighs any potential harm to the plaintiffs.”

I have no doubt that RNLA-trained and equipped lawyers are now serving in U.S. Attorney positions around the country. And most of them are regarded as “loyal Bushies” first, and instruments of the proper administration of the U.S. Department of Justice second. That’s the way the Bush regime works.

The ruse is finally being exposed for the premediated politicization of justice that it is - and that’s the real upside to AttorneyGate. In the process, studies and papers such as cited by Digby will finally rise to the surface, as they should have long ago. A hot button issue such as premediated voter disenfranchisement will receive much closer scrutiny in elections yet to come. While GOP lawyers will still try to game the system, the pool of willing participants may shrink a bit - and certainly, all of them will be a bit more professionally skittish in recklessly meddling with the most fundamental of rights - voting.

Just as importantly, the entire country will have a much better understanding, and confirmation of something most of us have always known in our gut: the game is rigged against us. The odds are always stacked in the favor of the guy dealing the cards.