Botched-Bill Challenger Zeigler No
Stranger to Controversy
By Bree Hocking
Roll Call Staff
Washington
(Roll Call) -- When it became known that the $39 billion budget reconciliation
bill signed by President George W. Bush raised serious constitutional questions
— embarrassingly, the language in its House and Senate versions did not match
up — it was only a matter of time before someone filed suit to block it.
As it turned out, the citizen who decided to stick a finger
in the eye of Congress and the White House by filing a federal lawsuit is no
stranger to controversy.
Jim "Zig" Zeigler, a conservative Alabama lawyer and two-time Bush
convention delegate, has a long history of antagonizing his state’s political
establishment. In interviews with a range of Alabama political insiders, the
57-year-old Zeigler was described as a “crusader” only slightly more often than
he was labeled “a maverick.”
Over the years, Zeigler has filed ethics complaints and
taxpayer lawsuits against an array of state officials and politicians, from
city councilman to governor. He’s also represented everyone from Christian protesters
who want to keep the Ten Commandments in the judicial building to a citizens group
opposed to signing over Alabama’s Gulf State Park to out-of-state developers.
James Anderson, an attorney who does work for the state
Democratic Party, is a former member of the Alabama Ethics Commission and a
candidate for attorney general, said the dominant reaction in the state to Zeigler’s
lawsuit is, “There goes Zeigler jousting after another windmill.”
Yet many of those familiar with his work say his arguments
usually contain a legitimate point.
“I’m sure a lot of people really despise him,” says former Congressman
Glen Browder (D-Ala.). “But he raises issues that quite often need to be looked
at. When he goes after someone on an issue, there’s usually something there for
that person to be concerned about.”
Asked in an interview to recall some of his greatest
successes, Zeigler reaches back to the 1980s, when he says he sued to win
stoppage of “illegal extra paychecks” to Alabama officials and to keep
politicians from joining the state employees’ retirement system.
This self-styled “conservative voice of the people” has also
taken on the federal government before.
In 2000, Zeigler filed suit on behalf of nine conservative organizations
and one individual, seeking to throw out a federal law requiring 527 groups to
report their activities to the Internal Revenue Service on the grounds that “it
violated the First Amendment rights of conservative activists like me.” The
same district court where Zeigler has also filed his recent suit mostly agreed,
striking down much of the 527 law. The decision was later overturned on appeal.
As for the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the case concerns
a minute but extraordinarily significant clerical mistake that resulted in the
two chambers passing slightly different versions of the same bill.
The error occurred after the Senate vote, when a Senate clerk
changed a Medicare reimbursement period for the rental of a certain kind of
medical equipment from 13 months to 36 months before sending the bill to the
House. After the House vote, the clerk then changed the reimbursement period
back to 13 months before it was sent to the president for his signature. Bush
signed the measure into law on Feb. 8.
This seemingly minor change spells a whopping $2 billion
difference to the U.S. Treasury over five years, according to estimates from
the Congressional Budget Office.
“This is constitutional law 101,” Zeigler says. “The same
bill must pass the House and the Senate and be signed by the president. Case
over.”
Zeigler’s suit — which names Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales and Deborah Rhodes, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of
Alabama, as defendants, since Congress cannot be sued — may have been pegged to
the unconstitutionality of un-reconciled bills. But that clearly isn’t
Zeigler’s underlying concern.
An elder law attorney in Alabama, Zeigler advises seniors on
how to protect their assets and qualify for elder care from Medicaid or the VA.
He says his primary opposition to the
law comes from a separate technical provision in the bill. This provision
changes the penalty date — that is, the point from which less-than-fair-market
asset transfers, such as gifts and donations to churches, from the past five
years are totaled to determine how much an individual applying for Medicaid
coverage must pay in nursing home expenses before Medicaid will kick in.
Zeigler says the change penalizes “normal gift-giving by
seniors to their church and family: Christmas presents, birthday presents,
graduation gifts. Did I say wedding presents?”
Nullifying that provision is “my actual goal,” he
acknowledges, while adding, “My legal argument can’t be that.”
Zeigler declares his mission is to be “the voice of the
taxpayer, the voice of the citizen.” During one of his close but unsuccessful
bids for statewide office, he campaigned as a “watchdog,” bringing a
mixed-German Shepherd mutt on the hustings with him.
Zeigler’s outsider reputation goes back to his college days
at the University of Alabama, when he won a rare victory against the powerful
“Machine,” a secretive coalition of fraternities and sororities that controls
student politics, in the race for Student Government Association president (a
plum post, long considered a launching pad in Alabama politics). He was
subsequently impeached by the “Machine”-controlled student Senate but acquitted
by the student court.
By 25, he’d been elected to serve on the state’s Public
Service Commission and was considered “the boy wonder of Alabama politics,”
Browder says. “However, I think his maverick nature pretty much took care of
whatever future lay ahead for him.”
In 1982, Zeigler became the first white candidate ever to be
defeated by a black candidate in an Alabama statewide race, when he lost a
primary bid for the Alabama Supreme Court. He’s since run for a series of offices,
ranging from appeals court to state auditor — all close loses. He earned the nickname, “Mr. 49%.”
Zeigler is active in Christian circles and has been a
supporter of Judge Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who was ousted
after refusing to comply with a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten
Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building. Zeigler represented
the 22 Christians who prayed around the monument and were arrested for
“criminal trespassing.” He’s currently working with the League of Christian
Voters (which he heads) to recruit a ticket of conservative Christian lawyers
to run for seats on the state Supreme Court.
Zeigler, a former Democrat who like many Alabamians switched
to the GOP in the mid-1980s, considers himself a loyal Republican even though
he’s suing to overturn a law enacted by the Bush administration. Zeigler, who
served on the RNC’s legal team in Florida during the 2004 and 2008 presidential
elections, describes his relationship with the state GOP as one of “reluctant
acceptance.”
Indeed, Zeigler and the Alabama Republican Party have
sometimes come down on opposite sides over ballot-access issues. He credits the
unexpected resurrection of his political career to his 2004 race for
re-election as Bush delegate to the Republican National Convention. Zeigler staged
a surprise upset. He was opposed by Perry
Hooper Sr., one of the founders of the modern Alabama Republican Party and a
former state Supreme Court chief justice, but Zeigler shocked the Republican
establishment by winning with 54 percent of the vote.
His brand of conservative populism also raises hackles, and
inspires some nervousness, among some Republicans.
“Because of the history we have in Alabama with populist
politicians, I’m always a little wary of someone who uses these sorts of
tactics,” says Republican former state Sen. Bradley Byrne, an attorney from
Mobile and candidate for governor.
Zeigler’s battle against the reconciliation bill, perhaps
not surprisingly, is a solo fight, for now and possibly for the long haul. But
if the GOP Congressional leadership — which doesn’t want to revisit the issue —
is banking on Zeigler having a short attention span, they should think again,
say those who know Zeigler.
“He doesn’t just file something and forget it,” Browder
says.
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