I don’t often speak ill of the dead, but the accolades coming in for New Jersey Democrat Senator Frank Lautenberg who died Monday at age 89 ticked me off. The New York Times described the late Senator as having a “consistently liberal voting record. Americans for Democratic Action said he had voted liberal 94 percent of the time.”

No surprise there. But there’s more to the story.

Lautenberg had retired from the Senate in 2000. Reports are that he regretted the decision. It wasn’t long before he would be back in the Senate under some shady Democrat dealings.

Never forget that Democrats will work to win by hook or by crook. Democrats will not eat their own. If a Democrat is going down, his fellow Democrats will rally to save his skin or at least make sure that power remains in Democrat hands.

Consider how Democrats supported Ted Kennedy after the Chappaquiddick “incident” (July 18, 1969) where he left the scene of a an accident and did not report it to the police until the following morning, nine hours later. Mary Jo Kopechne, a female passenger in the senator’s car, died from drowning.

While death is the great equalizer, it’s not always so in politics. Politicians will do what it takes to keep their hold on political power even if it means breaking the law. We’re seeing it with the ever-expanding IRS scandal which is an assault on the Constitution and our rights as citizens.

But back to Frank Lautenberg. Do you remember the 2002 New Jersey Senatorial election? Democrat Senator Robert Torricelli was doing poorly in the polls because of some scandal. He abandoned his reelection campaign on September 30the of that year because he and his fellow Democrats feared that a recent fund-raising scandal would cost him the race and Democrat control of the Senate.

Torricelli was doing so poorly, that the Republican was sure to win. The last time that happened was in 1972 when Clifford P. Case ran and won as a Republican. Case, however, “compiled one of the most liberal records of a Republican in the U.S. Senate.”

There was no way the Democrats were going to lose a Senate seat to a Republican, so they went about to break existing election laws to insure a Democrat win.

The time for replacing Robert Torricelli on the ballot had expired. Under New Jersey law, candidates could be replaced on the ballot no less than 51 days prior to the election. The November 5 election was less than 35 days away.

This didn’t faze the Democrats. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled 7–0 that the Democratic Party could replace Torricelli on the November 5, 2002 ballot with former Sen. Frank Lautenberg. Lautenberg went on to win.