In the courts’ analysis, and to justify their preferred result, they reasoned that the language of the [unallotment] statute was ambiguous. They implied a condition into the statute that didn’t exist, holding that unallotment may only be used after the Legislature and governor have already adopted a balanced budget.<\/p>\n
Apparently Chief Justice Magnuson’s majority believed its decision would resolve the current disagreement between the governor and Legislature, but it had no such result. The 70-year-old statute was the agreed-upon method between Minnesota’s executive and legislative branches for resolving an impasse like the one we have just seen: the House and Senate DFL leadership could garner enough votes to pass a revenue-raising bill, but they could not muster enough votes to override the governor’s veto. The unallotment statute was one tool available for breaking an impasse — one that many disagreed with in these circumstances, to be sure, but a tool we cannot live without.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Members of Minnesota’s judicial branch should never have inserted their views into the issues between the political branches. These judges over-reached their own constitutional authority, which is restricted by the Separation of Powers Clause, Article III, Section 1, which provides that no branch can usurp or diminish the role of another branch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Our system is such that there\u00a0 could <\/em>be consequences…:<\/p>\nIf his actions were heavy-handed or overly political, voters in the next election could hold accountable those who supported his actions. If voters agreed, as I did, that the governor’s use of unallotment was absolutely necessary in response to our state’s historic economic and financial crisis, then they could act accordingly in 2010. Instead, the court got political.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Which would involve people – and the media – paying attention to what the SCOM does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) sent Minnesota’s government into a tizzy a few weeks ago when they tossed Governor Pawlenty’ s unallotment – his legal line-item veto – of\u00a0 billions in spending in the previous budget. Via NewsQ, Senator Julianne Ortman says the SCOM swerved into activism in throwing out the unallotment – and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,2],"tags":[154],"class_list":["post-10968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-governor","category-minnesota-politics","tag-pawlenty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10968"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10977,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968\/revisions\/10977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}