Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Long time South Dakota journalist looks at upcoming legislative session

State budget is the biggie, but other issues await in Pierre as well

As the Sioux Falls paper reported on Sunday, the decline of video lottery spending will likely force some tough budget questions on the legislature.

There are also some of the national hot button issues likely to show up.

4 comments:

The Archer of the Forest said...

I don't understand the anti-Sharia law ban. That's a tempest in a teapot in my opinion. American courts are bound by precedent when not otherwise directed by applicable State law. Sharia has never been precedent in American or English jurisprudence, so I don't understand why they think the courts would suddenly start using it as such.

TLF+ said...

It's symbolism. Our politics (church and secular, sadly) is mostly sticking a symbolic finger in the other person's symbolic eye.

Ultimately, all this stuff makes the Conservative case for limited gov't, IMO. The less areas in which the state can dabble - that is, the more it is constrained by the Constitution - the less of this stuff that can go on.

Roe v. Wade really screwed (pardon my language) us all on this. Once we started getting sweeping laws from the "penumbra" of the Constitution, a cavalcade of symbolic silliness followed.

The Archer of the Forest said...

Roe v Wade is a truly horrendous legal opinion. I say that making no reference to the abortion debate one way or the other. It's simply a truly bizarre legal opinion: it established a constitution right by premising one legal fiction on another.

This is literally the logic: Women have a constitutional right to an abortion (show me anywhere in the constitution where it says anything of the kind) based on a right to privacy (show me anywhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights where it says anything of that kind either). Legal fiction premised on further legal fiction that completely threw out copious amounts of standing legal precedent.

It's truly bizarre logic where you justify fiction via fiction but ignore lots of other fiction and actual precedent.

The Brethren had some strong doobies in the early 70's or something.

cp said...

"Journalist?"