Perhaps recognizing that challenging Amendment A, South Dakota’s marijuana legalization, via an election contest will go nowhere in court, anti-pot plaintiffs Kevin Thom and Rick…
Tag: court
Sheriff Kevin Thom and South Dakota Highway Patrol Colonel Rick Miller may be barking up the wrong legal tree in their taxpayer-funded court challenge to…
Before I tear into the core legal arguments, I want to note the weird plaintiffery going on with the election contest Pennington County Sheriff Kevin…
Energy Transfer Partners showed no signs of obeying a federal judge’s order to shut down and drain their illegally permitted Dakota Access pipeline within 30…
White Supremacist Auctions Farm Gear Monday, Provided Legal Precedent for Tribal Checkpoints in 2019
Gordon, Nebraska, felon, gambler, and white supremacist Rudy “Butch” Stanko is retiring—not from white supremacy, as far as we know, but from agriculture. Alas, such…
Dicamba is now illegal, thanks to yet another court ruling determining that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency has failed to do its job: A federal…
In my coverage of the SD Voice v. Noem II trial, I noted that it is difficult for me to report accurately when I’m a…
Two really funny things happened yesterday with regards to the South Dakota Republican Party’s effort to restrict your initiative and referendum rights. First, the Attorney…
The Bureau of Finance and Management provided the Joint Appropriations Committee with an overview of the state budget yesterday. At 39:30 in the SDPB recording…
“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: