Daniel Rosenow: Law degree a good asset for senators

U.S. Senate candidate Ron Johnson has a new ad out, “57,” that explicitly attacks incumbent Sen. Russ Feingold and implicitly attacks the legal profession.

Fifty-seven U.S. senators are lawyers, Johnson says, which “would be fine if we had a lawsuit to settle.”

Apparently Johnson is forgetting that the job he’s seeking is one in which he’ll be expected to make laws. Presumably a law degree is a valuable asset, not a liability, in that endeavor.

Johnson also says a great deal about faithfulness to the Constitution, the meaning of the Second Amendment, and the type of Supreme Court justices he would support. I would think a law degree would be essential in interpreting the Constitution and evaluating the judicial opinions of candidates for the Supreme Court.

My colleagues and I struggle every day to understand the Constitution and judicial opinions, yet Johnson thinks he can do both without any relevant training or experience? I wouldn’t hire an architect to do a physician’s job, would you?

Johnson also should know that most of our Founding Fathers were lawyers. That is perhaps the single greatest reason that our republic has survived.

They crafted the Constitution with a wealth of legal knowledge and experience, and that is precisely why it is the oldest Constitution still in use. Far from being a liability, a law degree has been and will continue to be a powerful tool for the lawmakers who shape our nation.

— Daniel Rosenow, an Appleton native and UW-Madison graduate now attending the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis

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