We’ll get to see who, if anyone, shows up this morning in Senate Local Government to testify for or against Senate Bill 180, the retread…
Tag: petitions
Senate Bill 180, Senator Jim Stalzer’s effort to salvage some shreds of circulator stifling from the unconstitutional wreck of his co-sponsor Representative Jon Hansen‘s 2019…
Senate Bill 180, Senator Jim Stalzer’s retread of Representative Jon Hansen’s circulator registry and badges, was supposed to get a hearing in Senate Local Government…
The very sensible, pro-people-power Senate Bill 112 goes to Senate State Affairs Monday at 10 a.m. in Capitol Room 414. The bill would strike SDCL…
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…
Campaign finance reports are finally in from all ballot questions committees that circulated petitions in 2019. Let’s compare the successful petition drives with my own…
Economist and Senator Reynold Nesiba (D-15/Sioux Falls) is winding up for a one-two counterpunch to the Republican war on initiative and referendum. This morning I…
Our victory in SD Voice v. Noem II (and that’s not the editorial we—the judge’s ruling in my favor was a win for all South…
The Secretary of State has offered a handful of bills of keen interest to election nerds. Discussed by the Board of Elections last summer, none…
“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: