Downtown Sioux Falls and the South Dakota Cattlemen’s Foundation are sponsoring the Seventh Annual Downtown Burger Battle. (The Cattlemen’s Foundation website only mentions the 2018…
Category: South Dakota
Check out other reporters’ takes on my successful court challenge to 2019 HB 1094: Anna Peters, “Judge Rules South Dakota Petition Gathering Law Unconstitutional,” KELO-TV,…
“It’s a bad day for the rule of law in South Dakota,” whimpers Representative Jon Hansen, as if, as Trumpists like to claim, a Constitutional exercise of checks and balances against overreach by one branch of government is really some extralegal coup.
The U.S. District Court ruling Friday overturning Hansen’s 2019 House Bill 1094 did make for a bad day, not for the rule of law, but for the unchecked rule of lawmakers like Hansen who crave absolute power and hold in contempt the voters and their First Amendment rights.
[I proceed now into heavy quoting of a legal ruling, which itself is rife with quotes within quotes and complicated legal citations. I omit the judge’s internal citations and simply put any text I take from the ruling in quote marks (for short passages) or blockquotes (for longer passages). To see whether the words come from Judge Kornmann or from cases he cited, please see his original document.]
Judge Charles Kornmann makes clear from the first page of his ruling in SD Voice v. Noem II that he acts with the utmost respect for the law and the proper place of the judiciary in evaluating it:
Speaking of the budget and the Legislature’s legal obligation to increase teacher pay 2% in Fiscal Year 2021, Senator Al Novstrup (R-3/Aberdeen) tells the Aberdeen…
South Dakota’s general fund revenues continue to show more fiscal health than Governor Kristi Noem’s stingy and visionless budget proposal would lead us to believe.…
House Bill 1024 asks for $800,000 to be plunked into the state’s extraordinary litigation fund. HB 1024 includes an emergency clause to appropriate that money…
The Democratic Forum of Sioux Falls, which sponsors this blog, just updated its program for today, offering a panel discussion of the conflict with Iran…
Following up on a change signaled in December, the Lottery Commission is offering to downsize itself. House Bill 1021 would cut the Lottery Commission from…
Governor Kristi Noem’s New Year’s Resolutions apparently include bringing flip-flops to work. After letting the Legislature re-assign the State of the Tribes Address from her…
We win! We win! You, me, my ballot question committee, every citizen who wants to put a law to a vote, every citizen who likes…