Right. That's what I was talking about. The Supreme Court killed the so-called "catalyst theory" a few years ago. Napierski is saying that the board could have possibly saved the town a million bucks by changing the ID policy immediately and motioning to dismiss the case before it was decided. I've no idea whether the district court or the appeals court would have bought it, but the board should have tried (that's the accusation at least).
Curious, is it not, that the Discovery Institute's spin-masters place no blame on the original school board. They (the original board) were in a position, all along, to reverse their policy, and had they done so shortly after the suit got filed, they very well might have avoided liability for the other side's legal fees.
But they didn't even consider such a course of conduct. Why? Because -- like the Blues Brothers -- they were on a mission from God. So they stayed the course, all the way through that tragic joke of a trial, while their lies were exposed, and their experts were shown to be fools, and they stayed with it right up through the election where they all lost, and never once did they make any moves to drop the whole insane business of pushing creationism into the science classes -- a policy which they themselves had initiated.
So the new school board gets elected after the trial ends, and shortly before the final decision is rendered [Dover boots board], and the Discovery Institute tries to blame the new board for the district's getting stuck with legal fees. Surely, even the severely retarded can see the madness of this argument.
If the board had followed its attorney's advice in the first place there would have been no suit.