Sanders Supporters Get Their Day In Court Against Wasserman Schultz

[Jim Lane]

145. Have you read the DC law and any interpretive regs and any court decisions applying it?

Frankly, your post gives the impression that your legal reasoning is: (1) the statute is colloquially known as a "consumer" protection law, and (2) you personally don't consider a donor to be a consumer. That's insufficient. You would have to start with the definition of terms in the statute.

A classic example is RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, enacted as part of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. Its obvious purpose was to give prosecutors new weapons against organized crime. Nevertheless, it has been applied far outside that realm. Lawyers were not idiots, at least not all of them. They read the statute and crafted innovative arguments. Some failed, of course. Courts have, however, held that a tie to organized crime in the traditional sense is not necessary and that RICO could be applicable to such entities as a Louisiana state government officer, the Key West Police Department, the Pro-Life Action Network (for blocking abortion clinic doors), the Los Angeles Police Department, two state court judges in Pennsylvania, a financier who ran a Ponzi scheme, and a lawyer who helped his bankruptcy clients hide assets. (These are some of the examples listed here.)

An Italian-American lawyer I know once told me that the legal issue was whether RICO could be applied to people whose names didn't end in a vowel. It can be.

Anyway, the point is that none of these lawyers were deterred by the title of the law. They persevered, as we would say now, and succeeded.