ASHINGTON - One of the federal lawsuits aimed at stopping the Florida recount was generated by an Indiana attorney with close ties to religious conservatives, antiabortion activists, and the GOP congressional leadership. James Bopp Jr. also is the nemesis of proponents of stricter campaign finance laws.
Bopp pledged Friday to return to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ''definitely, within hours,'' if the Florida Supreme Court rules this week that the secretary of state must include hand-recounted ballots in her certified tally of the presidential election vote.
''This thing has been changing hour by hour, minute by minute, and if the situation changes, we can renew our appeal,'' Bopp said, adding that he saw nothing in Friday's court rulings to bar him. ''We will be right back, asking for an injunction.''
In Washington, Bopp is the lawyer for the Republican Majority Issues Committee, the political action fund of House majority whip Tom DeLay that raised $25 million in unregulated soft money for candidates this fall.
Bopp also is general counsel of the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a legal fund created by US Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, head of the GOP Senate reelection committee, to oppose state laws and initiatives aimed at changing the way elections are financed and campaign donations are reported.
Through the Madison Center, Bopp brought the federal suit on behalf of three Bush voters from Florida's Brevard County. They asked the court to stop manual recounts in selected Florida counties because they say recounts diluted their ballots, which have not been recounted.
Lawyers for Governor George W. Bush of Texas brought their own request for an injunction to the Atlanta appeals court after a federal district court in Miami turned them down last week. On Friday the 12-member panel rejected Bush's appeal, too, saying that ''states have the primary authority to determine the manner of appointing presidential electors and to resolve most controversies concerning the appointment of electors.''
Bopp said he is prepared to consolidate his case with Bush's and argue it jointly, if an appeal is required. The constitutional questions could be argued all the way to the US Supreme Court, he said.
In his career as a lawyer Bopp has brought more than 60 election law cases in 27 states, many on behalf of the National Right to Life Committee and most to thwart state efforts to restrict campaign spending or impose disclosure rules for independent groups.
Leonard Leo, head of litigation at the Federalist Society, an umbrella group for conservative and libertarian lawyers, said Bopp is ''highly regarded and very smart. He is not a political hack down there stirring up trouble.''
Leo said he was not aware that any other conservative legal advocates or interest groups were engaged in the Florida electoral fight. James Kramer, spokesman for one of them, the Institute for Justice in Washington, said his group was following ''the 10-foot pole rule: This is nothing we have any particular expertise in.''
Bopp said he was not acting in concert with the Bush campaign. ''I have not talked one time'' to lawyers for Bush, who also lost their federal appeal Friday. ''It's not because of hostility,'' Bopp said. ''It's just that we are both going a million miles an hour.''
There is plenty of Florida activity among liberal, civil rights groups. Within days of the election, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and teams from the NAACP, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and People for the American Way were dispatched to South Florida to investigate reports of violations of the Voting Rights Act among Haitians and African-Americans.
People for the American Way, a liberal group that endorsed Gore, on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions it had collected over the Internet to Gore and Bush, urging them to back both a revote in Palm Beach County, because of a ''confusing and illegal ballot,'' and an investigation of ''many voting irregularities around the state.'' Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is representing some Palm Beach voters in a lawsuit against the controversial ''butterfly'' ballots.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a civil rights advocacy group at New York University Law School, is staying out of the Florida legal fracas, and Joshua Rosenkranz, the center's president, says he cannot understand why Bopp and the Madison Center are there.
''One explanation is that the Madison Center, which I am not sure exists beyond Jim Bopp's mind, has come up with a principled stance for jumping in on behalf of Bush voters,'' Rosenkranz said. ''The other possibility is that Bopp is acting at the behest or in support of the Republican Party and its causes.''
Bopp, who was a delegate to the GOP convention in Philadelphia and a member of the platform committee, says this is about constitutional principles, not politics. ''We seek to protect the right of all citizens to participate in democracy,'' Bopp said, arguing that a two-tiered, selective vote count - by hand in some places, by machine in others - is inherently unfair, undemocratic, and politically tainted.
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Bopp is formidable, ubiquitous, and highly effective in convincing courts that laws or administrative rules to limit political spending violate the constitutional rights to free speech. Last year, Bopp got the Internal Revenue Service to agree on the tax-exempt status of the Christian Coalition, and he led the successful court fight in California to keep Proposition 208, a ballot measure limiting campaign donations, from taking effect.
Bopp also represented a coalition of conservative groups, including the Natonal Right to Life PAC and the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund, in a losing US Supreme Court challenge to a Missouri law limiting contributions to candidates for statewide office.
''James Bopp basically takes the view that any effort to regulate, in any way, the funding of political campaigns is unconstitutional,'' said Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general who is now the president of Common Cause, a public interest group that often tangles with him.
During the campaign, Bush would not join either US Senator John S. McCain of Arizona or Vice President Al Gore in pledging to overhaul the campaign finance laws. He also seeks to limit access to abortions and supports bans on late-term abortion procedures. Earlier this year, Bopp represented the National Right to Life Committee in the US Supreme Court case that overturned Nebraska's statute outlawing late-term abortions.
