South Dakota Democratic Party Chair Paula Hawks supports SD Voice’s petition to refer House Bill 1094, Rep. Jon Hansen’s volunteer-deterrent circulator registry and badge requirements. The state party posted this video from the chair Monday calling for 500 volunteers to join the petition drive:
…the initiative and referendum process is under attack. Initiatives and referendums have been a treasured part of our politics in our state from its founding, and Democrats and progressives have used them to win some important victories for the people of South Dakota, including increasing our state’s minimum wage in 2014. Republicans have been working to chip away at direct democracy for years, and in this year’s Legislative Session passed a bill, HB 1094, to make it incredibly difficult for ordinary citizens to exercise their right to put laws to a vote.
We’re working with our friends at South Dakota Voice to refer and repeal this law [Paula Hawks, video, 2019.06.10].
Time is short—I need to walk into Secretary of State Steve Barnett’s office on June 27 with at least 16,961 signatures (plus a whole stack of legally treacherous circulator residency affidavits and oaths swearing not to leave the state) on the HB 1094 referendum petition. But if enough South Dakotans who care about democracy will sign up (either on the webpage Chair Hawks offers or the SD Voice volunteer recruitment page), grab a couple petitions (hey! take a People Power Initiative petition or two, too!), and get their friends and neighbors and Uncle Bob to sign, we can stop the unconstitutional HB 1094 circulator registry and badge law and restore South Dakotans’ right to vote on the laws under which they live.
Congrats to SDDP Chair for taking on the GOP obstruction paradigm in SD! Cory too! This is necessary, despite all the work that needs to be done on local/state matters. Kristi’s GOP dictator follows Thune’s mentor Mitch McConnell who uttered Dems would “rue the day” Bork failed.
This is about Republican’s scorched earth politics we see locally, regionally and nationally, strategically attempting a mass conspiracy to commander the executive, judicial and legislative balances of power. This started in the Goldwater era, 1964. Sorry for the brief history lesson on how the judiciary is about to be packed to the right for the next 40 years. Koch Brothers tar sands today finance this power grab.
Chief Justice Earl Warren’s ideological heir, 1965’s associate justice Abe Fortas was the first casualty of a conservative counterrevolution that, in trying to seize control of the court over the next half-century, revolutionized the confirmation process.
South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, a Republican, emerged as the bombastic frontman of a coalition of senators willing to breach the deep-seated customs governing judicial appointments to sabotage Fortas. Exasperated by repeated failures to neutralize the Warren court’s liberal rulings, they devised a revolutionary strategy that has since become the norm: Obstruct a political rival’s nominees while stacking the court with like-minded jurists.
OBSTRUCTION. Sound familiar? As in 8 years of Republican obstruction of the Obama Administration.
Shattering long-held norms, Republicans teamed up with Southern Democrats to orchestrate the first filibuster against a court nominee. Claiming Johnson was a “lame duck,” Fortas’ opponents called for the next president to fill the vacancy.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, it was this imbroglio — and not Bork’s nomination in 1987 — that triggered the modern confirmation wars, transforming the selection of justices into the hyper-politicized, high-stakes contest we live with to this day.
Tom Daschle/Frontline PBS
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J0JGx8u4Jzg
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-bobelian-supreme-court-nomination-hearings-fortas-bork-kavanaugh-20190512-story.html
Ms. Hawks did a nice job on that.
C’mon South Dakotans! Protect your rights from the SDGOP! They’re the biggest threats to the state’s residents.