Remember when that awesome Republican governor Scott Walker limited the unions from extorting massive amounts of money from the state using their collective bargaining powers? Well, some judge halted the legislation. That judge has now been overruled by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial plan to end most collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.
The court found that a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily approved the collective bargaining measure in March and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had halted the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.
The changes on collective bargaining will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette arranges for official publication of the stalled bill, and the high court said there was now nothing to preclude him from doing that. La Follette did not return a call Tuesday to say when the law would be published.
[…]The court ruled that Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi’s ruling, which had held up implementation of the collective bargaining law, was in the void ab initio, Latin for invalid from the outset.”The court’s decision …is not affected by the wisdom or lack thereof evidenced in the act,” the majority wrote. “Choices about what laws represent wise public policy for the state of Wisconsin are not within the constitutional purview of the courts. The court’s task in the action for original jurisdiction that we have granted is limited to determining whether the Legislature employed a constitutionally violative process in the enactment of the act. We conclude that the Legislature did not violate the Wisconsin Constitution by the process it used.”
The court concluded that Sumi exceeded her jurisdiction, “invaded” the Legislature’s constitutional powers and erred in halting the publication and implementation of the collective bargaining law.
Generally, when a higher court calls bulls**t on a lower one, it’s called a remand, a declaration that the lower court got it wrong, and to try again.
Commenters are telling me the court ruled here ab initio, which (context clues, it’s been forever since I did anything law-oriented) means it’s expunged from memory altogether as being improperly entertained from the start, which means there is no remand to the lower court to try again. The higher court has said “Not only did you get this wrong, you got it so wrong we don’t trust you with another bite at the apple, so we’re directing your decision from here. It’s over. Done. Finished. Kaput.”
And more. This judge, Sumi, attempted not to rule a law unconstitutional but a bill — a not-quite-yet-a-law — unconstitutional, as she ordered the law to be unpublished, that is, to remain a bill without going to the final step to make it a law.
Ace actually brought out the flaming skull and the bear for this story… so it must be big.
Here’s some other good news from Wisconsin – they just passed a bill to legalize concealed carry. That’s good for law-abiding citizens and bad for criminals, who will now have a tougher time committing crimes.
Michele Bachmann still hasn’t announced that she is willing to run for President!
I have therefore decided to protest her tarrying by posting two interviews that she did this past week, so that you can all tell me if you think that she would make a good President, or not. Maybe she will stop by and read our comments and realize how badly she is needed, and how well she would do as President.
First, Bret Baier spends some time with Michele going over her pluses and minuses: (MP3 version here – 3 Mb)
If you have Fox News, Bret Baier’s show is the best thing on that entire network.
Second, here is an interview with popular social conservative Mike Huckabee: (MP3 version here – 3 Mb)
Michele Bachmann was a self-styled “education researcher” making a run for a Minnesota school board seat in 1999 when the question came up at a candidate forum: If elected, would she serve all four years?
Maybe not, she said.
Bachmann, now a three-term congresswoman and tea party favorite who may run for president in 2012, opened up about a confrontation she’d had with a state senator over Minnesota’s new school standards.
“I told him that if he’s not willing to be more responsive to the citizens, that I may have to run for his seat or find someone else who would do so,” she said, according to a newspaper account of the meeting.
Bachmann lost the school board race, but then knocked off the senator, a fellow Republican, just months later using the standards as her primary issue.
It was an early indicator of a recurring theme: Bachmann often wins by losing.
[…]The race would test her resilience because she would start far back. But as a little-known House member only a few years ago, Bachmann became hero of the conservative tea party movement in part by fighting losing battles with the GOP establishment. Her path to Congress was paved by failed efforts to pass a ban on gay marriage in the Minnesota Legislature.
“She is very good at turning lemons into lemonade all the time,” said Sal Russo, a California political consultant who came to know Bachmann through the tea party.
[…]From her first involvement in politics, the 55-year-old Bachmann has shown a determination to keep pressing forward and find opportunities, even when the way seemed blocked.
In the late 1990s, Bachmann was a stay-at-home mother of five in Stillwater, a scenic St. Croix River town east of St. Paul. Then she was drawn into a revolt over education standards.
[…]”People had been predicting her demise since Day One: ‘Oh, she’s a radical, she’s too far right, she’s too outspoken, she’s too inflammatory,'” Pulkrabek said. “The fact of the matter is, with the exception of the first race, she wins.”
Parlaying her school board defeat into a victorious legislative campaign, she moved to the state Senate and seized on a new issue.
Around Thanksgiving 2003, justices in Massachusetts ruled the commonwealth couldn’t prevent same-sex marriage. Bachmann hit the phones, reaching out to fellow conservatives about making sure gay marriage would stay illegal in Minnesota.
[…]Jeff Davis heard her public appeal through his car radio. Not politically involved at the time, Davis came to the Capitol and pledged to help Bachmann.
[…]”She’s an energizer. She influences people around her,” Davis said. The drive instantly elevated Bachmann’s political profile, he said. “It was a launch point.”
[…]Bachmann’s victory in that race brought her to the national stage and prompted a new focus on fiscal issues. She harnessed the outrage of the tea party, a fledgling political force inflamed by debates over government bailouts and a far-reaching health law pursued by President Barack Obama.
Her outspoken opposition did not stop the health law, but it got her much more television exposure and helped make her a face of the new resistance. In one Fox News interview, Bachmann urged viewers to flood Washington and “go up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, ‘Don’t take away my health care.'”
Amy Kremer remembers seeing Bachmann’s television plea while on a Tea Party Express bus heading between rallies in Washington state. The next week, Kremer joined Bachmann in the nation’s capital for a big tea party protest.
“You can tell the ones who have the passion, the fire in the belly and are truly speaking from the heart. She’s one of those,” Kremer said. “That comes through.”
The article goes on to explain how Michele got to be a three-term Congresswoman in one of the most liberal states in the entire country.
Congresswoman Bachmann is a leading advocate for tax reform, a staunch opponent of wasteful government spending, and a strong proponent of adherence to the Constitution, as intended by the Founding Fathers. She believes government has grown exponentially, with ObamaCare being the most recent example of its uninhibited growth. Congresswoman Bachmann wants government to make the kind of serious spending decisions that many families and small businesses have been forced to make. She is a champion of free markets and she believes in the vitality of the family as the first unit of government. She is also a defender of the unborn and staunchly stands for religious liberties.
Prior to serving in the U.S. Congress, Bachmann served in the Minnesota State Senate. She was elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2000 where she championed the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. Before that, she spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases. That experience solidified her strong support for efforts to simplify the Tax Code and reduce tax burdens on family and small business budgets. Congresswoman Bachmann also led the charge on education issues in Minnesota calling for the abolishment of Goals 2000 and the Profiles of Learning in its school. She recognized the need for quality schools and subsequently started a charter school for at-risk kids in Minnesota.
Congresswoman Bachmann sits on the Financial Services Committee (FSC) and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The FSC is tasked with oversight of numerous financial sectors including housing, real estate and banking. This gave the Congresswoman keen insight into the housing crisis and credit crunch, leading her to be a staunch opponent of the taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street and the Dodd-Frank legislation. Serving on the Intelligence Committee was a welcomed opportunity for Congresswoman Bachmann as she has consistently advocated peace through strength to ensure America’s national security. As a mother of five children and 23 foster children, she has a deep appreciation for that portion of the Oath of Office in which members of Congress vow to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
In July 2010 Congresswoman Bachmann hosted the first Tea Party Caucus meeting because she saw the need for Tea Partiers to have a listening ear in Congress. She is seen as a champion of Tea Party values including the call for lower taxes, renewed focus on the Constitution and the need to shrink the size of government.
You can learn even more in the links below, particularly this one that contains the best speech I have ever heard from her. That speech covers her Christian faith in some detail, and mentions her interest in Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics, which also formed the views of famous worldview scholar Nancey Pearcey. Did you know that Michele once introduced famous Indian apologist Ravi Zacharias when he was giving a MacLaurin lecture? She is a big fan of Christian apologetics – she asked to go see Ravi Zacharias for her birthday present. A woman after my own heart. She doesn’t want clothes and jewelry – she wants to be able to defend her faith! You can listen to the lecture right here (14 Mb), and hear her gushing about apologetics and Ravi Zacharias. The topic is “Christian Apologetics in the 21st century”. The lecture was delivered in March 2002 in Minnesota, when Michele was a state senator.
2011 is shaping-up to be a monumental year for school choice. The year kicked-off with big changes in Wisconsin, where in February, Governor Scott Walker broke the union stranglehold on public education and lifted the cap on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation’s oldest voucher program.
In March, Utah passed a statewide online learning program. The Beehive State passed the The Statewide Online Education Program, which allows children in grades 9-12 to take highschool coursework online from public or private providers anywhere in the state. Also in March, in an historic win for low-income children in the nation’s capital, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was restored and expanded, thanks to the leadership of Speaker John Boehner.
In April, Arizona created education savings accounts (ESAs) for special-needs children, who can now receive 90 percent of state per-pupil expenditures in their ESAs, which they can use on a variety of education options, including private school tuition.
And in May, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels enacted the largest school voucher program in the country, which will help an estimated 600,000 children attend a private school of their choice.
Now, children in Oklahoma could soon benefit from a proposed tuition tax credit program. A bill which is headed to Gov. Mary Fallin’s desk would provide scholarships to children in low- and middle-income families to attend a private school of their choice. Oklahoma is building on the voucher program for special needs children passed early last year, and is on its way to having one of the most robust education markets in the country.
Bananas and condom races became topics of debate in the Illinois Senate this afternoon, when lawmakers rejected a measure that would have given the State Board of Education new control over sex education.
Under the legislation, schools choosing to offer sex education would be required to teach “medically accurate and developmentally appropriate” curriculum — local districts would choose from a range of material offered by the state board, then parents could review the material and decide whether or not their child should participate.
Republican lawmakers grilled the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago, on what would qualified as “age-appropriate” material for the junior high and high school students in question.
State Sen. Kyle McCarter, R-Lebanon, asked Steans if materials suggesting “having races by putting condoms on bananas” were suited for sixth-graders.
State Sen. Chris Lauzen, R-Aurora, said he believed adopting the new standards could push parents with “traditional values” to pull their children from public schools.
[…]”This is not just educating them on math and science — this is educating them on an issue that could literally save their lives,” said state Sen. Linda Holmes, D-Plainfield.
WINTERY KNIGHT 