Patterico's Pontifications

7/9/2005

Post the Documents!

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Government — Patterico @ 1:51 pm



This is a great example of how newspapers frustrate me. The L.A. Times has an article titled Suit Could Kill Ballot Initiative:

SACRAMENTO — Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer asked a court Friday to remove an initiative backed by the governor from the November special election ballot, saying the petitions voters signed were “substantially different” from what the attorney general had approved.

Initiative proponents counter that the version circulated to voters for their signatures is not substantially different.

The L.A. Times has copies of both documents. Why don’t they just give us a link to each, so we can see for ourselves?

For what it’s worth, here is a link to the version submitted to Lockyer. If anyone can find a link to the version circulated to voters for their signatures, please provide the link in the comments. Big bonus points to anyone who runs and posts a single document that shows the differences.

UPDATE: Courtesy of commenter Steve at Oh, That Liberal Media comes a link to Lockyer’s petition for writ of mandate. At the bottom of the document is a textual comparison of the language from the respective documents. The comparisons are not placed in their full context, but between the link I gave you in the post and this one, it’s possible to do the comparison with a little work.

5 Responses to “Post the Documents!”

  1. Of the 950,000 who signed that petition, I’d be surprised if more than 5 actually read the whole thing.

    Shredstar (91b3b2)

  2. The story makes that point.

    Of course, legislators almost never read the laws they vote on, either. Doesn’t matter; in each case, the necessary fiction is that the entire thing was read.

    Patterico (756436)

  3. So, if I can show that a mistaken draft of a law was presented to a legislator before he voted on it, the law is invalid? You could put a phone book in the middle of some of these laws and no one would notice.

    Kevin Murphy (6a7945)

  4. So, if I can show that a mistaken draft of a law was presented to a legislator before he voted on it, the law is invalid?

    Nah. But the fiction employed by the courts when interpreting a law is that the legislators knew what each obscure provision contained, and affirmatively decided to include it.

    Patterico (756436)

  5. I don’t know about putting a phone book in the middle of these laws but I do know they stuff a lot of pork in the middle of virtually every law they pass.

    Since when do most courts really care what the legislators knew about the contents of any particular law. After all, “the constitution is what the court says it is”, right? Works the same with all laws.

    Harry Arthur (b318a5)


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