Beverly Grossman Palmer began her career as a senior research associate at the Environmental Law Institute. She clerked at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment. It seems that she began her career as a lawyer with good intentions, to use the law to advance causes that she believes in.

Perhaps it was also with good intentions that Beverly Grossman Palmer began her legal work as Treasurer for the Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman, a super PAC developed to promote the re-election of Howard Berman, a Democratic U.S. Representative from a district in southern California. Good intentions, however, have led Beverly Grossman Palmer into profoundly bad ethics.

It’s unethical enough for Beverly Grossman Palmer to involve herself with independent expenditures, which corrupt the political process by enabling the wealthy and powerful to purchase favorable relations with elected federal officials. The Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman takes unethical campaign finance beyond the run-of-the-mill, however, and Beverly Grossman Palmer has signed her name in approval of the super PAC’s dishonest techniques.

Today, the Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman reported spending $1,350 on a mailing by a group entitled Continuing The Republican Revolution. According to the independent expenditure disclosure, the mailing was intended to support the re-election Congressman Howard Berman – a Democrat.

The organization Continuing The Republican Revolution is not run by the Republican Party. It’s a political advertising venue, operated by the political consulting firm Hart & Associates, LLC, that’s open to any candidate who chooses to pay to have their campaign promoted on the Continuing The Republican Revolution slate.

The Republican Party has not endorsed any candidate in Berman’s district. It doesn’t have a candidate in the race at all. Howard Berman is running against another sitting Democratic member of Congress – a man with a confusingly similar name, Brad Sherman.

The mailing from the pay-to-play Continuing The Republican Revolution slate purposefully creates the false impression that Howard Berman has the Republican Party endorsement, however. It’s a sleazy and dishonest tactic that dishonors the Democratic activists who put Howard Berman in office in the first place.

I don’t know Beverly Grossman Palmer personally, and so I can’t speak to her motivations for involving herself in the distribution of a fake Republican Party slate. I can only wonder whether this kind of activity is what she imagined herself doing when she sent in her application to law school years ago.