By deciding to vote on one initiative petition – the gay marriage ban – but not the other – health care – less than a week after the SJC issued a unanimous opinion saying the Legislature must vote up or down on the merits of every initiative before it, the Senate President spat in the face of each and every SJC justice.
Having decided the Legislature was above the law, the Senate President chose to vote on an initiative opposed by 2/3 of the people – the ban – and to duck a vote on one supported by over 75% of them – the health care amendment, spitting in the faces of the majority of voters in this state.
Having agreed with House leadership to allow debate on the ban before taking a vote, the Senate President called the vote before anyone could be recognized.
After meeting with the Governor elect, who opposed a vote on the marriage ban, the Senate President told him where to get off by using the power of the gavel to move it forward in the process.
It’s not a pretty picture. It’s the same disrespect for process that drove marriage equality advocates to the SJC where a bare majority, 4-3, fortunately held that the state could not discriminate when it comes to marriage. In 2003, if just one justice had thought otherwise, same sex marriage supporters’ only recourse would have been to the initiative process because a majority of the Legislature opposed civil unions and same sex marriage wasn’t even on the table.
But that same SJC that decided Goodrich has made clear that while it can interpret the constitution only the people can amend it. The SJC has, therefore, also held in two separate unanimous opinions that the same sex marriage ban is something that can be sent to the ballot and that the Legislature must vote on the merits of all initiative amendments.
Whether by the legislative route or by initiative the people can create rights the Court says don’t exist or take away Court created rights – for better or worse we all as voters have the last say.
Obviously, I am a process liberal. I have watched the Legislature’s sausage making for decades as an assistant secretary in the Dukakis Administration, as a Senate Committee Counsel and as a citizen. There are always losers and most of the time they have been the people whose issues I strongly support. Occasionally, its folks whose issues I find abhorrent.
But I firmly believe that unless we protect everyone’s rights whether we agree with them or not we serve as enablers for the kind of lawlessness and lack of accountability to the people displayed in yesterday’s ConCon.
We can’t expect our elected officials to protect our substantive and procedural rights when we’re advocating that they strip others of theirs. We may win one battle, maybe even a couple but we’re setting the stage to lose the war.
When asked by her home town newspaper to comment on the recent SJC decision, one representative responded with the question, “How can we expect our constituents to obey the law if we don’t?” We have to ask ourselves a very similar question. How can we expect our legislators to respect our rights if we advocate that they deny others theirs?
I thank the 92 legislators who took their oath of office seriously and voted to discharge the Health Care Amendment from a phantom committee charged with killing it so it could get the vote on the merits mandated by our constitution. I also thank the 134 legislators who voted against the gay marriage ban and look forward to working with MassEquality to make that vote 151 next time. But I cannot and will not support ducking a vote.
Barbara Waters Roop
Health Care for Massachusetts Campaign
that women have no right to an abortion, or even to contraception, under the U.S. Constitution. After all, the Fourteenth Amendment was improperly passed in a manner that violated proper process, according to constitutional scholars and historians. So, if some women must die in illegal abortions, we all applaud their noble sacrifice in the name of a government of laws. After all, the law is the law.
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And I’m glad you will be spending your time on the phone to seniors and the poor, demanding that they return all Medicare and Medicaid payments received by their doctors over the past year. After all, it is universally recognized that the 2005 federal budget was never really passed, as the House and Senate bills differed in substantive text and were never reconciled. As a result, the Constitutional process for passage was not obeyed, and there was no authority to spend that money. So, if the poor need to sell a car, or sell drugs, to return those vast sums, at least process will have been served.
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Thank you for your completely consistent commitment to the virtuous purity of process.
you forgot the word “fringe” before “constitutional scholars and historians.”
I personally knew a very liberal, very famous Con Law professor who felt the 14th was adopted through a very sketchy process. But he felt that the general landscape of other Reconstruction amendments, combined with more than a century of court acceptance of the Amendment, redeemed its picadillos.
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He also felt, by the way, that the Supreme Court was wrong in its reasoning in the Nixon case–he found it inconceivable that any federal trial judge in the nation could subpoena sensitive documents belonging to the head of the executive branch–but supported the result. He was not a process liberal, so I suppose that makes him opposed to the rule of law. A remarkable position for one of the nation’s most respected law professors, but there you go.
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I notice you didn’t address the budget issue. Probably because no one claims that particular criticism is “fringe.”
i’d like to learn by reading his opinions.
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barbara roop and i, and so many others who have given much of our lives to the HCA over the past 4 years (and much longer for the cause of social and health justice) are activists trying to secure a permanent right to affordable comprehensive health care for all of our neighbors here in MA and to help build toward establishing a system of national health insurance for the country.
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we are human and can only do so much at once. we are not trying to participate in passing current or past federal budgets or to provide oversight and enforcement of federal programs. please do not bash people who share most of your values and who want to work side by side in pursuit of social justice and equality.
“please do not bash people who share most of your values”
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Well, Barbara should have thought about those words before she wrote this diary.
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You can argue that the HCA should have been brought to a vote without publicly declaiming that it was necessary to throw gay people under the bus. She chose not to do that, so she can stop looking for support from the people she is backstabbing.
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“we are not trying to participate in passing current or past federal budgets or to provide oversight and enforcement of federal programs”
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No, but if you are “process” liberals, then you must agree to sacrifice some of your most personal rights and even health benefits for seniors and the poor, because proper processes were not observed.
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Or do the ends justify the means? Do only other people have to make sacrifices for the purity of process?