Say, here’s a wrinkle I didn’t notice on my first pass through House Joint Resolution 5003, Representative Jon Hansen’s latest chipping-away at our initiative rights.…
Tag: Jon Hansen
In 2018, Senator Jim Bolin tried to hamstring our power to write our own laws by placing on the ballot Amendment X, which would have…
On Monday, I wrote about the draft issue memorandum the Legislative Research Council produced on surrogacy laws. I noted that anti-surrogacy, anti-LGBT, anti-family Representative Jon…
Senate Bill 180, the revised registry and badging scheme for paid ballot question petition circulators, passed House Local Government on Tuesday with one significant amendment.…
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…
Bring back bad legislators, bring back bad ideas…. Jon Hansen left the Legislature in 2013 to go to law school. Since he’s come back to…
Representative Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) has made opposition to out-of-state influence on South Dakota politics a hallmark of his second full term in the Legislature.…
“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:
Posts on SD Voice v. Noem II Trial: Harassment by Petition Blockers in 2015 Shows HB 1094 Circulator Registry and Badges Dangerous, Misguided Secretary of…
Just in time for the People Power Petition drive to hit the fairs, that Sioux Falls paper comes out with a strong editorial criticizing the…