Yesterday, the Board faced a choice: hire legal firm Garcia Calderon Ruiz, which specializes in government law,
or run with academic lawyer Prof. Robert Weisberg, as outside counsel for official misconduct proceedings against Sup. Ed Jew.
Beleagured Sup. Ed Jew in happier times outside his flower shop on Waverly Place.
Photo by Charles Russo
Three attorneys with GCR, Mary Hernandez, George Yin and Nicolas Vaca, gave a relatively slick presentation compared to the Dumbledore-style ramblings of Prof. Weisberg.
“We have dealt with removal issues before,” said Hernandez.
“We are used to working in gray areas,” said Yin.
“A reasonable estimate,” said Vaca,of the firm’s $24,800 bid to get the project started.
But that bid appeared to be $24,800 too much, compared to Weisberg’s offer to work pro-bono, even if he teaches criminal law and doesn’t have experience in government agency law.
“This is not really a criminal matter,” said Weisberg. “The Board is a legislative body, and so it would be unconstitutional for it to convict someone of a crime.”
Maybe the Board enjoyed Weisberg’s easy-to-grasp explanations,which included making an analogy between Jew’s case and congressional impeachments proceedings: just as Congress indicts and the Senate then votes to remove from office, the Ethics Commission would do the “impeaching” and the Board of Supervisors would then vote whether to remove Jew from office.
Alles klar, Herr Professor.
Because in the end Sup. Geraldo Sandoval, seconded by Sup. Tom Ammiano, directed the Clerk of the Board to enter into an agreement with the professor, which does include the possibility of the $15-an-hour labor of his student research assistants at Stanford University.
.