Friday, December 23, 2011
Supposed to work this way!
News from Northwest Public Radio:
This is how a correctly functioning government looks. This is how 'Checks and Balances' were supposed to work.
Courts use existing law, precisely as the legislature wrote it, to determine the outcome of a case. If this yields an absurd or intolerable result, it's not the court's job to rewrite the law or ameliorate the result. It's the job of the legislature. The court is giving useful and accurate feedback to the legislature, forcing public recognition that the legislature created a corrupt loophole in the water law.
At the federal level, courts break this well-designed feedback loop by writing their own laws, which is evil in two ways. (1) It removes popular consent and destroys the point of a parliamentary system. (2) It relieves the legislature of its sole and proper job.
And that's why we have a tyrannical executive and a fucking useless legislature at the Fed level. ¶ 6:35 AM
Conservationists and small eastern Washington farmers have been dealt a blow by the state's high court over the increasingly touchy issue of water rights.
Livestock operations in Washington -- even those involving large feedlots or dairies with thousands of animals -- have unlimited access to groundwater, and are not bound by permits or the rights of senior users. So said the Washington Supreme Court Thursday in a ruling involving small farmers arrayed against a 30,000-head feedlot in Eltopia, a hamlet near the Tri-Cities.
The closely watched case put the Franklin County farmers and conservationists in a blue funk. Spokane water lawyer Rachael Paschal Osborn was mystified and angered by the ruling: "When you have one type of water user who is already being told that they have to shut off their water use during a drought year how could you possibly have a stock water operation come in and begin to use water in that system? All of the water is allocated, it's all accounted for," Osborn says.
By a six to three majority, the high court ruled that the state legislature exempted livestock operations from the state well permitting process.
This is how a correctly functioning government looks. This is how 'Checks and Balances' were supposed to work.
Courts use existing law, precisely as the legislature wrote it, to determine the outcome of a case. If this yields an absurd or intolerable result, it's not the court's job to rewrite the law or ameliorate the result. It's the job of the legislature. The court is giving useful and accurate feedback to the legislature, forcing public recognition that the legislature created a corrupt loophole in the water law.
At the federal level, courts break this well-designed feedback loop by writing their own laws, which is evil in two ways. (1) It removes popular consent and destroys the point of a parliamentary system. (2) It relieves the legislature of its sole and proper job.
And that's why we have a tyrannical executive and a fucking useless legislature at the Fed level. ¶ 6:35 AM
