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.…
Posts tagged as “SD Voice v. Noem II”
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…
Gregory County cartoonist Jo Johnson offers this lovely visual representation of the cost of wanton disregard of First Amendment rights in the ballot question process:…
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 editorial board of my local board uses the state’s twin losses in court (IM 24 last May; 2019 HB 1094 this month) over the…
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…
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:
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…
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…