I Don’t Like It == It’s Unconstitutional
Add Jerry Moonbeam to the list of California fruits and nuts who think the Constitution is unconstitutional. Between this and Lisa Madigan, can just anybody be Attorney General?
UPDATE: Good Lord, the brief is even goofier than I thought. Rather than taking the dubious but not necessarily frivolous position that Prop 8 is a “revision” rather than “amendment,” Mr. Moonbeam is arguing that on matters he really, really cares about, the Constitution can’t be amended (or, presumably, revised) at all.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Apparently so. In California at least, the state supreme court effectively ruled that an attorney general doesn’t need to be qualified in order to be elected and hold office (at least, that was my snarky take on it at the time).
McGehee´s last blog post..Adventures in Christmas Shopping
December 20th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Due to link rot, I can’t find the original article and haven’t read the case, nor do I have ready access to the actual rule. Do you? Does it lend itself to an alternative reading that the AG must have been a continuous member for 5 years, and must be an active member at the time of election, but need not have been active for 5 years continuously? Not thinking of moving back to CA to run for AG myself, but if I do, how far in advance do I need to plan?
December 20th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I just wonder who got the Moonbeam? And who might have paid him off or offered some sort of quid pro quo? A bit of a conspiracy theory, but, ya never know.
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December 20th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
I don’t have access to the full article either (Scroogle brings up only my site and a “MyLibrary” teaser) but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any rebuttal of the use of “uninterrupted” in quoptes, or the phrasing “the five years prior,” both of which imply both continuous, and current at the time of the election.
Seems to me if the judge’s ruling turned on refuting the wording used in the complaint, the article ought to have said so. Instead it left an unmistakable impression that the judge regards the qualification itself as immaterial.
But you;re right, that could at least as easily be journalistic malpractice as judicial.
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December 21st, 2008 at 7:35 am
McGehee, I found the statute in question, which is Government Code Section 12503. That statute reads, in full:
I don’t see anything in there requiring the AG to be an active member of the bar even at the time of election, let alone for the five year period preceding it. Of course you can’t tell that from reading the crappy article, which puts quotation marks around something that either wasn’t a quote at all, or was a quote from some crank lawyer’s brief, and not from the statute the article purports to be discussing. Unfortunately, when it comes to reporting on court cases, journalistic malpractice is more the rule than the exception.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I’m torn between agreeing with you about all that, and asking if you’re sure that’s the only applicable rule.
I’ve never been a lawyer, in California or anywhere else, but I do seem to recall that even the state’s constitution is a disorganized grab-bag of scattered crap. Statutory law, I’d be astonished if it were any better.
McGehee´s last blog post..Still Too Much After All These Years
December 21st, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I don’t know for sure that that’s the only applicable requirement. All I do know is that the California Constitution contains no requirement that the AG be an attorney at all, and that a Google search for california attorney general five years bar member yielded only one hit to a story about the frivolous challenges to Jerry Moonbeam’s candidacy, which cited 12503 only. Adding “Brown” to the search terms yielded more screeching but no more substance beyond one other article that also cited only Section 12503.
Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. This suit was a turkey, right up there with the goofy suits that argued that Barack Hussein Obama isn’t a natural born citizen because his middle name is Hussein, or whatever.