And Return To Living In A Tent
By: Dr. Bharani Padmanabhan – Feb. 2024
When interviewed by the spineless Governor’s Council after declaring she wanted “to serve” on the bench, Debra Squires-Lee recalled time spent in Arizona, California, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, and Wyoming and said “From the time I was 10 until I was 15 we were an itinerant construction worker family. We basically lived paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes we lived in tents in state parks, but my brothers and I loved living out West. We swam and fished. We played very elaborate games, and I read a ton of books.”
At that point Squires-Lee had spent years as a corporate lawyer and lived in a big pile in tony Hingham (Median home price $1.2 million). In 2014, she was one of the first to host a fundraiser in her own home for the progressive Maura Healey.
Squires-Lee first came to my attention when she lied about Dr. Ryan Welter to favor corporate big shots. First, she arranged for his brief to be concealed from the court docket though he filed it. The clerk-magistrate is on record that he personally handed the brief to her in chambers. Squires-Lee then lied in her decision memorandum that Dr. Welter did not file that brief, before then quoting from it in that same memorandum. You can’t make this stuff up. The missing brief suddenly showed up on the docket the same time as her memorandum (Case 2173CV00120). That tells you all you need to know about Judge Debra Squires-Lee. She has also made me view the Palatino typeface with ambivalence, though I had unreservedly loved it previously.
When Florida Governor DeSantis pointedly sent illegal immigrants to progressive Massachusetts a year ago, the outpouring of love and affection for them from Massachusetts leaders was life-affirming. Then the immigrants just kept coming. As a direct result, Massachusetts natives are on course to losing the protection of a 1983 law that granted them the right to shelter. That right is going away thanks to the very progressive Maura Healey and her strong booster Squires-Lee.
Here’s how that went down.
A progressive outfit called Lawyers For Civil Rights (LCR) attached the names of a couple of homeless people to a lawsuit which carefully ensured that Maura Healey’s name didn’t appear on it (2384CV02449 Alcarraz, Gloria et al vs. Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities). LCR complained that Governor Healey gave the Legislature only 30 days notice before she unilaterally changed the state’s shelter regulation, though the law requires the Governor to give the Legislature 90 days to do something.
And then LCR’s lawyers, Jacob Love and Oren Sellstrom, did not object when the case was handled by Judge Squires-Lee herself. I assume the homeless plaintiffs had no clue.
So, friends, you will never guess what happened next!
Squires-Lee handed Maura Healey a total victory and dismissed the case within three days flat, saying that 30 days notice was just fine.
After Squires-Lee dismissed the case, our progressive ACLU bravely filed an amicus brief, unless Squires-Lee had concealed that too from the docket.
The only question I have is, did Love and Sellstrom intentionally abuse their plaintiffs just to burnish their progressive public image knowing that Squires-Lee would of course back Healey no matter what – making this a cynical progressive show trial, OR are they unprincipled cowards who spinelessly stayed silent about the glaring bias instead of robustly objecting on behalf of their clients and demanding that Squires-Lee recuse herself from this case?
If Love and Sellstrom had publicly announced that had they but heard of Twitter they would of course have demanded recusal, and then filed an appeal on conflict and bias grounds, I could have accepted that they didn’t put on a progressive show trial. Now we know better.
In the meantime, the homeless natives of Massachusetts are living in Animal Farm, looking at the progressive Maura Healey and the progressive Debra Squires-Lee, and wondering what just happened: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
I call on Judge Debra Squires-Lee to heed her buddy Maura Healey’s noble advice, turn her Hingham home over to immigrants, you know, Zhivago-style, and choose, à la Angela Merkel’s parents in 1954, a simple fulfilled progressive life in a tent. Way better than depriving the Black people of Roxbury of what little they still have.
Then the spineless Governor’s Council rubber stamped Maura Healey’s SJC proxy, Elizabeth Dewar, straight from rubber stamping in the AGO to rubber stamping from the bench. This means they rubber stamped a rubber stamper. Justice Peter Sacks will follow her onto the bench soon, I predict. The next Huey Long is being made.
Bharani Padmanabhan MD PhD is a neurologist who specializes in neuroimmunology. scleroplex@gmail.com ◊