The American Spectator

p> A BAD CASE OF SCRUGGS br> A chastened Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has already made plans to meet with trial lawyer extraordinaire Richard “Dickie” Scruggs in Scruggs’ hometown of Pascagoula, Mississippi, within the next two weeks to hash out differences over the nomination of federal court judge Charles Pickering . The judge is a close friend of Scruggs’s, as well as a longtime friend of Sen. Trent Lott , Scruggs’s brother-in-law. Scruggs happens to be one of America’s most influential trial lawyers, a group Edwards (a trial lawyer himself) has pinned his fund-raising hopes on if he is to make a serious presidential run in 2004. /p>

Scruggs’s hackles were raised over Edwards’s treatment of Pickering during the judge’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Edwards, using notes and information provided by Democratic staffers on the committee, belittled and berated Pickering for his role in a Mississippi cross-burning case. Before the hearing several Democratic senators on the committee, including Dianne Feinstein and Joseph Biden, were given the same information and declined to take on that line of questioning for fear of bringing on the ire of Scruggs and the trial lawyers.

“This was a hot potato,” says a Democratic staffer on the Judiciary Committee. “Everyone sensed that this subject would be hot and would be embarrassing to the Pickering family, to Lott and to Scruggs. A lot of our people wouldn’t touch it. Edwards jumped at it. I think he realized this could make him a star.”

What Edwards apparently hadn’t banked on was Scruggs’s ire. “Edwards blew off Scruggs’s calls before the hearing and now he’s probably sorry he did,” says another Judiciary Committee staffer. “Scruggs controls so much money within the trial lawyer community that if Scruggs were to say so, Edwards would probably have a hard time getting much money or support from that group.”

So now Edwards is scrambling to make peace with the man who may hold his political future in his wallet. “He’s going to Mississippi like a puppy who missed the newspaper,” crows a Lott staffer. “I don’t know what would be better for us, pictures of Edwards getting rejected, or Edwards and Scruggs kissing and making up.”

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