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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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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)

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