Two of my local legislators are firing the next shot in the South Dakota Republican Party’s war against initiative and referendum. Senator Al Novstrup (R-3/Aberdeen)…
Tag: referendum
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard SD Voice and Cory Heidelberger v. Governor Kristi Noem, Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, and Secretary of State Steve…
Shutting down gun stores may not infringe on our Second Amendment rights, but shutting down petition drives violates our First Amendment rights. No state that…
The Legislature had before it five bills to address the conflict between the rural electric cooperatives and the municipal utilities who can unilaterally seize the…
Some Republicans wouldn’t mind expanding the people’s power to refer local laws to a vote… but alas! not enough of them. Representative Julie Frye-Mueller (R-30/Rapid…
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…
If you read the blog regularly, you’ll understand if I am keenly attentive to any measure that affects the ability of citizens to use petitions…
“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: