The California Supreme Court will not prevent Democrats from moving forward Thursday with a plan to redraw congressional districts.
Republicans in the Golden State had asked the state’s high court to step in and temporarily block the redistricting efforts, arguing that Democrats — who are racing to put the plan on the ballot later this year — had skirted a rule requiring state lawmakers to wait at least 30 days before passing newly introduced legislation.
But in a ruling late Wednesday, the court declined to act, writing that the Republican state lawmakers who filed the suit had “failed to meet their burden of establishing a basis for relief at this time.”
The national Congress pulls this trick regularly, also in order to get around rules limiting the speed at which legislation can be introduced. I believe the PPACA was passed out of the body of another bill, after Republicans tried to use calendaring rules to obstruct the legislation, back in 2010. One of the bigger tax bills - either Trump’s or Bush’s, I can’t recall - was passed in a similar manner.
Maybe we’ll see a federal court block this on a technicality, but if they do it would be a huge shift in how legislation is moved in the face of minority obstruction.
The federal legislature is one of the worst. They do a ton of awful shenanigans. I would support a constitutional amendment to ban all of those practices.
Bills can have only one subject. The subject needs to be the title. The title cannot be changed.
Those three rules block at least 90% of federal legislative nonsense.
And perhaps the title should be what the bill actually is
For example something like “Freedom for American Internet Choice”
Which likely removes regulation or restriction on a company being a monopoly because the “Freedom” is who can bribe the most and lobby against possible commercial or municipal competition.
There’s plenty of bills like that where the title is incredibly misleading, on purpose, to get people who don’t care to do any research to wonder “why would anybody be against freedom?”
Yes, that is what that line means. Washington has very similar language in their constitution and it blocks a lot of shenanigans.
This particular strain of nonsense, certainly.
But, at some level, the legislature governs as it wills. You can’t constrain people with rules when they write and interpret and enforce the rules internally. All the judiciary can do is object to the actions and hope the bureaucracy responds in kind. Judges have no enforcement capacity (partially by design).
The only real way to block legislative nonsense is to grant Judges a hand in selecting/promoting/recalling executive and legislative bureaucrats. And given the current state of the federal judiciary, I can imagine a lot of reasons why liberals would hate that idea.