Friday, April 28, 2006
Well, not quite
While I agree with The Daily Cal that the Judicial Council made a bad call, I don't think the editorial is entirely fair. The reason I think the Council made a bad call is because they argued that because the language of the RSF referendum is merely ambiguous rather than false, it is not inaccurate (or rather, not completely inaccurate). I should note that the defense did not argue this. The defense argued that the Attorney General has the authority to determine what is and is not inaccurate. But this isn't the first time the Judicial Council ruled based on its own ideas, rather than those of the defense.
Two of the suits certainly had valid points: One argued the three-line ballot question for the RSF referendum violated the two-sentence maximum. The other presented a more worrisome point: the question's misleading language.
These were actually both in the same suit.
In spite of both objections, the Judicial Council let the referendum pass unscathed. Their justification? For the first issue, they said since the senate "intended" the question to read as two sentences, it was acceptable. Apparently, since the senate didn't mean to break the rules, it's okay.
This isn't quite accurate. Apparently, the Senate voted to pass the language that eventually appeared on the ballot, but due to a typo in the minutes, the semicolon was replaced with a period. The Judicial Council ruled that even though the minutes were approved, the original passed language was the correct one, reasoning that since Senate actions are valid before their minutes are approved, they are also valid after the approval of the minutes, even if the minutes disagree with the Senate's actions. I'm not sure I buy the argument, but that's what it was. The end result, though, was for the semi-coloned version (supposedly two sentences) to appear on the ballot. The Judicial Council did not rule that, because the Senate wanted a two-sentence version, the three-sentence version was okay.
Perhaps we should cut the council a little slack. After all, they didn't get out of session until 5 a.m. Tuesday, hours before polls opened. But why did they start deliberations at 11 p.m.? Council members may be busy people. But they need to dedicate time during the day to council matters because part of their faulty logic must have been due to sleep deprivation.
The charge sheets were filed Sunday morning. The cases were accepted Sunday evening. The hearing was set for Monday evening, starting at 6. Since there were three of them, they ran until 11, at which point the Judicial Council began deliberating all three of them, as well as DAAP's appeal for something else, finishing around 5, I guess. Because of the upcoming election on Tuesday, starting at 9, it's not clear that there was a better schedule. Jason Dixon was literally typing up the brief for the last case right up to the time it began.
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