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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35690 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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There is a lawsuit, oral arguments are today, but like I said at the end:

One problem is that courts have a limit with their jurisdiction over other branches of government. We saw that with the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity. Can the legislature keep saying, "No, you do not have say over legislative proceedings, we are going to keep doing what we are doing?" The Minnesota Constitution states clearly, "Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings."

There is a strong possibility (>50%) that the courts just say they can't rule on this as it is a political question. So they do not decide it at all, and the Legislature has to decide whether or not the Legislature can decide anything.

Probably a naive question, but does the MN supreme court have any precedent cases where they punted on a "political" issue? This seems pretty clear-cut to me in favor of the GOP, and the rules-lawyering by the DFL seems to me as exactly the sort of behavior you should throw the book at, under the "win stupid prizes" principle.

Yeah. "If you refuse to show up everyone else just votes without you" seems like a way better principle than "if you refuse to show up you deadlock the system", conditional on the not showing up being voluntary rather than some scheme where a surprise meeting was called.

Most recently, during the oral arguments for taking Trump off the Minnesota ballot, the Minnesota Supreme Court spent the majority of oral argument time considering if they had jurisdiction as it was a political question. But it was all kind of made moot by the SCOTUS ruling.

I'm not familiar enough with Minnesota law to know specific cases where this happened. The brief I linked to had this argument, but I don't know how to access the cases it discusses:

As noted, our Constitution’s Article III provides for the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and prescribes that “[n]o person or per- sons belonging to or constituting one of these departments shall exercise any of the powers properly belonging to either of the others.” As this Court has explained, “[t]he three distinct departments thus created are of equal dignity, and, within their respective spheres of action, equally independent.” State v. Dist. Ct. in and for Ramsey Cnty., 194 N.W. 630, 632 (Minn. 1923). This is no small matter. “The division of powers is the fundamental principle upon which American constitu- tional government is based, and the success of our form of government depends, in large measure, upon the respect paid to that principle by each of the three divi- sions in its relations with the others.” Smith v. Holm, 19 N.W.2d 914, 915 (Minn. 1945).

This separation of powers, of course, protects each of the judicial and legis- lative branches from the other’s intrusion on its internal affairs. For instance, when the Legislature recently tried to instruct the courts by statute to open their Minne- sota Government Access records system to all attorneys, this Court directed that the matter was within judicial, not legislative, competence. Order re Minn. Stat. 484.94 (2023) and the Rules of Public Access to Records of the Minnesota Judicial Branch, No. ADM10-8050 (Minn. June 28, 2023). Similarly, this Court holds that “the Leg- islature’s ability to discipline judges is limited to the impeachment process.” E.g., State v. Irby, 848 N.W.2d 515, 521 (Minn. 2014). And more broadly, separation-of- powers principles surely limit legislative interference with the judiciary’s internal organization. For instance, if the Legislature disagreed with this Court about the constitutionality of the Court’s appointment of a referee in a case before it, and enacted a statute purporting to remove the referee, we have no doubt that the Court would find serious separation-of-powers problems.

By the same token, it is long settled Minnesota law that “[t]he judicial branch may not, therefore, directly or indirectly interfere with th[e] legislative power in any other way than by passing upon the constitutionality … of [the] laws.” Holm, 19 N.W.2d at 916. In other words, “[t]he courts have no judicial control over … matters which the people have by the Constitution delegated to the Legislature,” In re McConaughy, 119 N.W. 408, 415 (Minn. 1909), and must be “wary of unneces- sary judicial interference in the political process.” Ninetieth Minnesota State Senate v. Dayton, 903 N.W.2d 609, 625 (Minn. 2017)

You'd think that courts are setup just to resolve this sort of vague procedural issue. But I guess when it comes to parliament procedure it may be a violation of the separation of powers.

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