Courts shouldn’t be our political truth police

So Iowa's Supreme Court failed to save us from political dishonesty.

And, honestly, it was the right call.

The court ruled Friday that state Sen. Rick Bertrand, R-Sioux City, failed to prove his opponent, Rick Mullin, and the Iowa Democratic Party acted with actual malice in running a flimsy TV attack ad against him in 2010. Democrats tied Bertrand to a drug company that sold a deadly sleep drug to kids. Trouble is, Bertrand worked for a different division of the massive company and never personally sold the drug.

A lousy, baseless attack, to be sure. But Iowa's highest court cited piles of precedent setting a very high legal bar for proving that a public figure has been defamed, especially during the course of a political campaign. Bertrand's case didn't clear it.

'Among public figures and officials, an added layer of toughness is expected, and a greater showing of culpability is required under our governing legal standards to make sure the freedom of political speech, even when it sounds like speech far removed from the dignity of the office being sought, is not suppressed or chilled,” Chief Justice Mark Cady wrote in the ruling.

Senate Minority Leader Bill Dix, R-Shell Rock charged that the court gave the green light to lie and made 'slander and libel an acceptable practice.”

'Iowans may want to brace themselves this year for what I predict could be one of the most brutal, disingenuous, slanderous campaign attacks in our state's political history,” Dix said in a statement following the ruling.

Where politics are concerned, senator, we're already in a perpetual state of brace. And in this fall's high-stakes scrum to grab control of the closely divided Senate, I doubt Dix and his party, or Democrats, will be tossing daisies and marshmallows.

I'm also bracing for some new legislative effort in the ruling's wake to make political lies illegal. It's been tried before at the Statehouse, and mercifully scrapped. Perhaps this time it will be modeled after an Ohio law that levels stiff penalties for campaign lies. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last month in a case challenging that law.

'Laws like Ohio's here, which criminalize ‘false' speech, do not replace truthiness, satire, and snark with high-minded ideas and ‘just the facts.' Instead, they chill speech such that spin becomes silence,” wrote satirist P.J. O'Rourke in a terrific friend-of-the-Court brief. 'More importantly, Ohio's ban of lies and damn lies is inconsistent with the First Amendment.”

Truth is, our courts can't be the political truth police. Ditto our legislatures. As bad as things are, these disputes must be tried through the back-and-forth of a campaign, with a verdict from the ballot box. When the dust settles, voters have to settle it.

We can hope a court or ethics board or official fact-checker will save us. But, ultimately, decisions we make, or don't bother to make, determine the politics we get. Iowa courts didn't invent pricey flower pots, heated sidewalks and similar petty distortions we've seen in legislative races. It's we the people, and the people we elect, who have, again and again, made the unacceptable perfectly acceptable.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com