Ed FirmageNews of The Day
Page C l of today’s Salt Lake Tribune, appropriately, the Money Section, informs us that suit is being revived by a Tenth Circuit reversal of a Utah federal district court decision preventing suit against the Unversity-owned laboratory, and Blue Cross/Shield of Utah, on grounds of sovereign immunity. Allegedly, the federal government got bilked for millions of dollars by our Utah institutions of healing and higher learning. Horray for the 10th Circuit. I know nothing about the facts of the case, except that a whistle-blower got the usual treatment in Utah for telling the truth.
The doctrine of sovereign immunity stinks. Basically, the doctrine of sovereign immunity says that you can’t sue the government. Any government. Anytime. Horse pucky. It’s a hold-over from the horrendous notion that the king can do no wrong. An opposite presumption would occasionally be unfair. But as a generalization, kings being kings, and actually believing all the crap said to curry favor of them by syncophants and other courtiers, kings are especially vulnerable, as are we all, to flattery. Picture if you will, Narcissus looking into a pool of deep, very deep water. His “girl friend” comes up behind him. Seeing Narcissus gazing longly into the reflective pool, she timorously says, “Narcissus, is there someone else?”
And when flattery is all you hear, which is the nature of court life, or the White House, or Congress, or any church headquarters, or the University of Utah, God save the subjects, or in our White House with King George the Mad and Ignorant, god save the citizens. So: horray for the 10th Circuit.
Someday, on both grounds of fairness, and the economic doctrine of deep-pocket loss-spreading, the government will be the ideal defendant. In that manner, the “damned accidents,” in life, together with universal governmental conspiracies and wrong-doing, and the anti-Darwinian notions deep in corporate life, of the survival of the least fit in governance, sovereign immunity will be thrown on the scrap and crap-heap of history. Ed Firmage Salt Lake City, Utah
