Meet The Candidates - Dan Bricmont, Esq

Part of an ad hoc series designed to introduce you Pennsylvania's many and varied legislative and judicial candidates.

Sometime ago I received an e-mail asking if I'd like to interview Daniel Bricmont for this blog. The e-mail informed me that Bricmont is currently a candidate for the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. Once I saw the name, I leapt at the chance. You'll see why in a minute.

But first a little background on the Comonwealth Court from the court's website:

The Commonwealth Court is one of Pennsylvania's two statewide intermediate appellate courts. This court, which was established in 1968, is unlike any other state court in the nation. Its jurisdiction generally is limited to legal matters involving state and local government and regulatory agencies. Litigation typically focuses on such subjects as banking, insurance and utility regulation and laws affecting taxation, land use, elections, labor practices and workers compensation. Commonwealth Court also acts as a court of original jurisdiction, or a trial court, when lawsuits are filed by or against the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth Court is made up of nine judges who serve 10-year terms. The president judge is chosen by his or her colleagues for a five-year term. The court generally decides cases in three-judge panels and sits in Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

None of which I knew before I got that e-mail.

Anyway, back to Bricmont. For the sake of full disclosure let me say right now that I met him in the mid-90s when I was employed at his law firm, Caroselli Beachler. He was an associate in what I remember to be a cozy corner office and I was a grunt in the fileroom. Now you can understand why I leapt at the opportunity to interview him for my blog.

I left the firm, by the way, in 1997 and I may have bumped into him three times in the intervening 12 years.

While Bricmont's been endorsed by the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee, it should be noted that he's only been registered as a Democrat since 2008. I asked him about it early on in our conversation and got, shall we say, an eager and animated response.

He said he'd changed his voter registration in order to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary. Not a big fan of the Bush administration, his donation record of has been decidedly non-GOP as of late. Indeed, according to Open Secrets, in the last three federal election cycles he's donated $3,960 to 6 candidates - all but one being Democrats. In March of 2004, he donated $500 to that darling of the radical right, Senator Arlen Specter.

And despite donating to pro-life Democrats Senator Bob Casey and Congressman Jason Altmire, Bricmont is pro-choice and describes Roe v Wade as "settled law."

Judicial campaigns are a much different animal than legislative campaigns. It is "not appropriate" he told me to engage in any sort of "tit for tat" criticism of his opponents. The focus, he said, must be on job qualifications. So we talked about his job qualifications.

His experience, he said as a for instance, as a worker's comp attorney will suit him well on a court that hears cases dealing with employment issues. It is on a such a court were someone who's defended workers' rights for 20 years needs to be, especially these days when the economy is shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. His time as Mayor of Avalon, he added, gave him experience working with a number of statewide government agencies, agencies whose appeals would right straight to the Commonwealth Court of PA.

Daniel Bricmont is a smart guy and after his, uh, pointed response to my first question, I immediately thought, "Holy crap. This is going to be harder than I thought. I can't dance my way through this. I'm going to have to really work to keep up with this guy."

And I was just a blogger and we were just chatting over sandwiches. I can only imagine the attorneys who'd have to face him in Court. All the tees would be crossed, all the eyes dotted. (And let me admit right now that a few of mine weren't.) Bricmont seemed a stickler for the law and for all the necessary proceedures attached to the law.

There's a reason, I guess, why the ACBA gave him a "Highly Recommended" rating.