Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin Law Curbing Unions
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times
Published: May 26, 2011
Ruling that Republicans in the State Senate had violated the state’s open meetings law, a judge in Wisconsin dealt a blow to them and to Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday by granting a permanent injunction striking down a new law curbing collective bargaining rights for many state and local employees.
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Republican senators asserted that they had enacted the collective bargaining law under emergency conditions, obviating the need to comply with the open meetings law. But Judge Sumi said she found no official evidence of emergency conditions or notice.
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She (Judge Sumi) said the evidence demonstrated a failure to obey even the two-hour notice allowed for good cause if a 24-hour notice was impossible or impractical.
Perhaps temporarily-
“There’s still a much larger separation-of-powers issue: whether one Madison judge can stand in the way of the other two democratically elected branches of government,” he (Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Senate Majority Leader) said in a statement. “The Supreme Court is going to have the ultimate ruling.”
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It depends on how the higher court, to which the case is appealed, is politically inclined. Judicial philosophy is nothing but political philosophy all dressed up in sophistic, black robes; reason gone amok in order to
prevent the masses from breaking down the walls of aristocracy. All three branches really need each other in order to function as power brokers. They’ll only bend so far. It’s a Western History board game with the rules being periodically rewritten but with the same fixed dice. I’ve pretty much had it.