Seattle P-I editorial endorsing re-election of Susan Owens and other Supreme Court incumbents:
the courts in general have come under increasing special-interest attack for "legislating from the bench" -- a rhetorical extension of the "activist judges" slur.Today's Seattle Times:A fair, impartial and independent judicial system is at risk when candidates, and their well-heeled backers, try to exploit this stereotype to gain places on the bench
Johnson and other critics say Owens ... is a liberal "activist" judge who is too willing to decide policy matters that should be left to the Legislature.Slur, maybe. Stereotype, maybe. Incorrect? Apparently not. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 18, 2006 02:19 PM | Email ThisBut Owens suggests there are times the court has to play such a role.
"The Legislature is really behind the times socially," she said during a recent interview
Connelly took a swipe at the latest NRCC ad showing the unsavory relationship between Dotzhauer and Cantwell. He says it was a cheap shots. I wonder what Connelly did or said about the McGavick admission of DUI and whether he hammered McGavick when the press got out of control. Or, we could name a few others.
Owens says we need to legislate because the legislature can't? No wonder she needs to go.
Posted by: swatter on October 18, 2006 02:26 PMIn the words of the also socially inept Bugs Bunny: "What a maroon!"
Posted by: sro on October 18, 2006 03:02 PMSo does she mean that the Judiciary is supposed to be at the cutting edge of social activism? Who's constitution says that? That statement alone shows why Owens should be shown the door...but I am not holding my breath. Enough Libs in our state believe the same thing.
If your social agenda cannot be implemented by Constitutional Amendment, or through the Legislature, guess what...it does NOT deserve to be forced onto society.
Posted by: Shaun on October 18, 2006 03:16 PMThe Supreme Court goes to goes to extreme lengths when citizens challenge government actions. Our clients had a very unsavory experience in the Temple of Justice last year. They challenged two local taxes, arguing the authorizing statutes had been misapplied. The basic claim was that a different kind of tax should have been implemented, given what those statutes say. Holdings in a number of analogous cases supported this claim. For example, substantially similar tax grant statutes were construed in the Arborwood Idaho and Whatcom County v. Taxpayers opinions, and we argued that was the kind of tax that could have been implemented under the two grants at issue.
The majority opinion came out last year, authored by Justice Owens. It completely ignores the core argument raised in the briefing regarding why these taxes exceeded the authority the statutes provide.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=wa&vol=2005_sc/760365MAJ&invol=4
This opinion also misstates in several respects what was in our clients' briefs. The majority asserts our clients' claims lacked merit based on those mischaracterizations. The majority opinion fails to mention the Arborwood Idaho opinion from 2004, despite the fact that it was cited in the briefing over twenty times in support of various affirmative and defensive arguments.
Our clients' case was dismissed without the court ever addressed the substance of the lawsuit. The main reason why the case was brought in the first place was that both of the statutes could have been reasonably interpreted as referring to a completely different kind of tax than an MVET. The term "excise tax" in both (former) RCW 81.104.160(1) and RCW 35.95A.080(1) can be read as having the "plain meaning" of an excise tax based on a taxing event such as driving a mile, which is a completely different kind of tax than an MVET. This is a rather typical kind of statutory interpretation issue. The Supreme Court does not even mention this argument in the opinion.
If those statutes could be fairly interpreted in the manner we argued, then the issue would be whether such an excise tax would be more favorable to taxpayers than an MVET. If so, some of that money would need to be refunded to everyone who'd paid it. But the Court failed to analyze the claim.
Here's one for the trolls: Is there anything in the RCW's that would have prevented either Sound Transit or Seattle Monorail Project from putting mileage-based excise taxes before the voters, given what those two tax grants say? That is in effect what we asked the Supreme Court to determine, and it went through gyrations to not provide an answer. If there is no reason why not, then the statutes are ambiguous and should have been implemented in favor of taxpayers.
Big Balls
Well I'm upper upper class high society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
And I always fill my ballroom
The event is never small
The social pages say I've got
The biggest balls of all
I've got big balls
I've got big balls
They're such big balls
And they're dirty big balls
And he's got big balls
And she's got big balls
(But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
And my balls are always bouncing
My ballroom always full
And everybody cums and cums again
If your name is on the guest list
No one can take you higher
Everybody says I've got
Great balls of fire
I've got big balls
Oh I've got big balls
And they're such big balls
Dirty big balls
And he's got big balls
And she's got big balls
(But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
Some balls are held for charity
And some for fancy dress
But when they're held for pleasure
They're the balls that I like best
My balls are always bouncing
To the left and to the right
It's my belief that my big balls
Should be held every night
We've got big balls
We've got big balls
We've got big balls
Dirty big balls
He's got big balls
She's got big balls
(But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
(We've got big balls)
(We've got big balls)
And I'm just itching to tell you about them
Oh we had such wonderful fun
Seafood cocktail, crabs, crayfish
(But we've got the biggest balls of them all)
(Ball sucker)
(Ball sucker)
(Ball sucker)
(Ball sucker)
"A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it."
If this isn't the height of arrogance, then it's pretty damn close.
Posted by: YourLifeIsMyFault on October 18, 2006 11:36 PM
Much of our clients' briefing that was filed in the Supreme Court was posted on the web here:
http://www.freewebs.com/11art11/
Appellate briefing must follow stringent style rules for how arguments are presented. Throughout that briefing there is one core claim: a completely different kind of tax was required to have been put before the voters, in light of the "plain meaning" of terms the legislature used in the two statutes (especially when those terms are viewed in the context related statutes provide).
Some of the key opinions and legal arguments relating to this tax challenge are together in a section of the briefing called "CPSRTA and SPMA Implemented the Wrong Kind of Tax." It is about half-way down the page at the URL above.
This is why the case was brought - the statutes at issue can be read as authorizing a completely different kind of tax than an MVET. Local governments MUST implement the kind of tax that is most favorable to taxpayers, not the one that raises the most money for them (which is what happened here). The Court completely ignored this argument when it wrote the opinion dismissing this citizen lawsuit.
The majority opinion mischaracterizes our clients' briefing in a handful of ways. These are material mistakes; they go to the heart of the reasons the majority identifies as warranting dismissal of the challenge to these taxes. Examples of these misstatements include the following:
1) "If, as Appellants maintain, the legislature authorized taxes that are based purely on the value of a vehicle . . .." Completely false. This is in fact the opposite of what was asserted over and over in the briefing: property value should NOT be the basis of the tax, the basis of the tax should be the amount that the vehicle actually was used.
2) "[Appellants] suggest[] that the legislature simultaneously authorized DOL to collect the Authorities' MVET and preempted those taxes under the vehicle licensing statute . . .." Completely false. Our clients at every point stated that DOL was NOT authorized to collect MVETs. The whole point of the case is that DOL only was authorized to collect taxes under these statutes if the voters approved taxes calculated with reference to how much use an owner made of his or her vehicle.
3) "Contrary to Appellants' assertion, there is no basis to conclude that 'register' or 'license' somehow operate as indispensable words without which a local authority is precluded from using vehicle registration as the event triggering taxation on the privilege of driving." Our clients never said anything like that. Look at the briefing. There is absolutely nothing in there even remotely like an assertion that those two words "somehow operate as indispensable words" necessary for local governments to impose valid car tab taxes.
These are just three of the instances. Not only was the citizens' key legal argument ignored, what the Court has to say about what is in the briefing is nowhere near reality-based.