Governor Chris Christie announced the nominations of Monmouth County Superior Court Judge David F. Bauman and Board of Public Utilities President Robert M. Hanna to be Associate Justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Christie said that the nominations represented a political compromise on his part. The Democratically controlled State Senate, which must confirm the nominees, blocked the governor’s two previous nominees in part over the partisan balance of the Court. Bauman is a Republican. Hanna is an Independent voter.
Both men have been previously confirmed by the Senate for the current position. Christie quoted the accolades that Democrats bestowed upon each nominee during their previous confirmation hearings.
Christie said the Bauman’s nomination is a nod to the Senate’s demand for racial diversity on the Court. Bauman is an Asian-American who was born in Japan.
While the legislature is moving forward to put a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot that will overturn the State Supreme Court’s decision that Judges don’t have to pay their fair share of their pensions and health benefits under the reform legislation enacted last year, the ever crafty senator from Old Bridge, Sam Thompson, wants to stick the Judges ruling in Depascale vs The State of New Jersey high up under their robes.
In a letter to the Treasury Department sent this morning, Thompson noted that given that the Court ruled that Judges’ “salary” includes their pensions and health care, the men and women in black have been under contributing to those funds since 1982.
Never mind the 1% to 99% rhetoric that has worked its way into our lexicon since the Occupy movement moved into Zuccotti Park. With yesterday’s 3-2 decision that judges are exempt from New Jersey’s pension and health benefits reform, our State’s judiciary have declared themselves the .005%. They are the truly elite. The 400 of New Jersey’s 8.8 million citizens. They don’t have to share in the sacrifice.
As Governor Christie said in Atlantic City yesterday,
“What we did, the administration and the Legislature, was demand that everybody in public employment pay their fair share for the benefits they’re going to get like people in the private sector do every day. And I cannot believe that we’re going to permit one small sector of folks (to be exempt), who consider themselves special, and who by the way granted themselves this special treatment themselves. That doesn’t make any sense to me.’’
“If you’re a police officer, or a fire fighter, or a teacher in this state, and you’re paying more for your health benefits and your pension, I’ve got a feeling you’re pretty frosted if it turns out that a group of judges decides for the whole group of judges that they don’t have to pay their fair share.’’
Christie told NJ 101.5’s audience on his monthly Ask the Governor show last night that if the legislature puts a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot this fall, he will campaign for it. That will be the easiest campaign in the history of the world. There will likely be 3.9 million New Jerseyans voting on November 6. There are about 400 judges. If all of the judges got all of their family members and friends to vote against the Constitutional Amendment, would that add up to even 10,000 votes? I don’t think so.
As Senator Joe Kyrillos said yesterday, “Judicial independence does not mean judicial supremacy and exceptionalism.” If the legislature acts by August 6, and it looks as though they will, the people of New Jersey will be sending the Judicial branch an overwhelming reminder that they work for us. In America, even in New Jersey, the people are Sovereign. “All political power is inherent in the people.”
Even though there is not much time, the legislature should consider recommending other changes to Article VI, Section VI of the State Constitution to the people, since we’ll be making changes to the clause anyway.
Is seven years too long before a Judge is reviewed and reconfirmed? How about 3 or 4 years? Is tenure after 7 years, if reconfirmed, until mandatory retirement at age 70 still appropriate? How about a review and reconfirmation every 4, 5, or 7 years until retirement. When the retirement age of 70 for judges was affirmed by Constitutional Amendment in 1978, the average life expectancy in the United States was 73.5. Now, the average life expectancy is 78. Why not increase the mandatory retirement age to 75 or 80? How about establishing a voluntary retirement age before being eligible to collect a pension at 70. Those would create some pension savings.
The Judiciary has given the Legislature an opportunity to make substantive adjustments to the .005%’s superiority and exceptionalism.
As Governor Christie told a Town Hall meeting audience in Garfield on May 2, it is extraordinarily difficult to hold judges accountable in New Jersey. Now would be a good time to make some changes.
If you agree, contact your legislators and the governor. Pass this column on and ask others to do the same. Time is short.
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled 3-2 with Chief Justice Stuart Rabner not participating, this morning in Paul M. DePascale v State of New Jersey that the pension and health benefits reforms passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Christie last year violates the State Constitution’s provision prohibiting a reduction in judges salaries during their terms. Thus, New Jersey Judges will not be contributing more to their pensions and health benefits, unless the Constitution is amended.
The issue now goes back to the Legislature. Legislation putting a Constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall was held up in June pending the Supreme Court’s decision.
If abolitionist Frederick Douglas appeared today in New Jersey and asked for political support from the African American community, he might be surprised at the fact that his political affiliation would far eclipse his accomplishments. Douglas was a Republican.
In April of 1865, shortly after the Civil War ended, and President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Douglas gave a speech at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston. At issue was the voting rights of Black men and to this subject Douglas remarked:
“I have had but one idea for the last three years to present to the American people, and the phraseology in which I clothe it is the old abolition phraseology. I am for the immediate, unconditional, and universal enfranchisement of the black man, in every State in the Union. Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society, and holds his liberty as a privilege, not as a right. He is at the mercy of the mob, and has no means of protecting himself.”
Drawing loud applauses from the previous line, Douglas went right into the heart of his speech. He deviated from the conventional thought of most abolitionists, which at the time was that the right to vote should come last. The immediate need for African Americans, most thought, was to end slavery, organize and let voting naturally come at the end of the abolitionist movement. Douglas remarked: “It may be objected, however, that this pressing of the Negro’s right to suffrage is premature. Let us have slavery abolished, it may be said, let us have labor organized, and then, in the natural course of events, the right of suffrage will be extended to the Negro. I do not agree with this.”
Five years after his speech, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the States and Federal government from denying African Americans the right to vote. Thereafter, Thomas Mundy Peterson, a Republican, on March 31, 1870 cast the first vote ever by a Black man, under the just-enacted Amendment, during the Perth Amboy, New Jersey, School Board Elections.
The right to vote, not only for African Americans, but for women, was very important to Douglas. So it is with this background that I write about a very important vote to ensue. There is likely to be a committee vote this month to advance the nomination of Bruce A. Harris, Esq. to the Supreme Court of the same State where Thomas Mundy Peterson cast his historic vote.
This morning InTheLobby calls on Governor Chris Christie to call the Democrats’ bluff regarding their resistance to his plan to remake New Jersey’s Supreme Court into judicial body that interprets the law and away from the destructive unaccountable body that has been legislating a liberal agenda from the bench over the last four decades by nominating a conservative Democrat to the bench.
Last week, after a charade of a hearing for Christie’s nominee to the Court, Phillip Kwon, Senate President Sweeney admitted that what the Democrats really want is a Court packed with Democrats.
By nominating a conservative Democrat, one who doesn’t believe in legislating from the bench, Christie would be calling the Democrats bluff, says InTheLobby.
Where would anyone find a conservative Democrat in New Jersey?
What about Marlboro Mayor Jonathan Hornik?
Hornik tells every Republican he meets that he’s really a Republican. On his facebook page, Hornik apologizes for his Democratic registration. “Democrat, but the people matter the most,” is how Hornik describes his politics.
Is Hornik qualified? That would be up to Christie’s vetters and the Judiciary Committee to decide, assuming the Judiciary Committee cares about qualifications going forward. They clearly didn’t in Kwon’s case.
From a legal career and public service perspective, Hornik’s resume is not all that different from that of Bruce Harris, the Mayor of Chatham whose Supreme Court nomination is currently pending in the Senate. Both of specialize in real estate, finance and commercial transaction.
Hornick doesn’t have Harris’s academic pedigree. Harris went to Amherst, Boston University and Yale. Hornik went to University of Delaware and Brooklyn Law. University of Delaware is good. It’s better than Rowan. Governor Christie went to University of Delaware, so that might be good for Hornik. Brooklyn Law is no Yale, but Geraldo Rivera, Percy Sutton, David Dinkins, Larry Silverman, Sheldon Silver all graduated from Brooklyn.
What do you think MMM readers? Is Jon Hornik a conservative Democrat? Would he be an activist Justice or and interpretive Justice?
Democrats in the New Jersey State Senate are upping the ante in their unprecedented exercise of legislative power over judicial appointments.
In the wake of their rejection of Phillip Kwon’s nomination to the State Supreme Court, the Democrats are now demanding that Governor Chris Christie nominate a Democrat to the Court.
“The governor may be entitled to his own nominees for cabinet posts, but we will not allow him to pack the Supreme Court,” Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said. “The governor must work with us to put together a balanced tandem of candidates for the court. The Senate will not consider anything less.”
NJ.com reports that Sweeney’s spokesman Derek Roseman said that Sweeney was telling Christie to nominate a Democrat.
During his press conference following the Senate Judiciary Committee’s rejection of Kwon, Christie revealed that he had complied with Sweeney’s demand of diversity in his appointment of Kwon, the first Korean-American ever nominated, and Bruce Harris, an Africa-American who is the first openly homosexual nominee.
Reshaping the Supreme Court into a less activist body that does not legislate from the bench was a hallmark promise of Christie’s gubernatorial campaign. During his first two years in office, Christie has been openly critical of the Court and unabashed about his commitment to change it.
Steve Lonegan, Executive Director of the New Jersey Chapter of Americans for Prosperity and Governor Chris Christie’s opponent in the 2009 GOP gubernatorial primary, has come out in opposition to Christie’s nominees for the State Supreme Court.
Chatham Mayor Bruce Harris and First Assistant Attorney General Phillip Kwon were nominated by Christie in January. The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled hearings on their nominations on March 22.
In a press release issue last night, Americans for Prosperity said that they expected to testify against the nominations and that it ” will be mobilizing its army of more than 60,000 citizen activists as part of its efforts to have impartial, originalist justices confirmed to the state’s highest court.”
“After careful review and consideration of these nominees, Americans for Prosperity cannot endorse their confirmation to the state’s highest court and will work to see that they are not confirmed by the state Senate,” Lonegan said.
“The governor was elected on the promise to change the makeup of the court by replacing activist justices with originalists who will interpret the law, not make law from the bench,” continued Lonegan, “and Americans for Prosperity was fully prepared to support him in achieving this goal.
“However, there is nothing in the backgrounds of either of these nominees to assure us that Mayor Harris or Mr. Kwon will practice judicial restraint and put a stop to this court’s endless usurpations of the powers of the other branches of government if seated on the Supreme Court.”
If you want to understand what rule by liberal judges looks like on the state level, you need only look at New Jersey, which is teetering on bankruptcy though it remains one of America’s wealthiest states. ~ Steven Malanga, writing in City Journal
If you want to understand how, despite being one of the wealthiest states in the country, New Jersey is teetering on the brink of fiscal disaster, read Steven Malanga’s The Court That Broke New Jersey.
If you want to know why no governor or state legislature can reduce New Jersey’s oppressive property taxes, read Steven Malanga’s The Court That Broke New Jersey.
Malanga traces the roots of New Jersey’s tyranical Supreme Court all the way back to Arthur Vanderbilt, the first Chief Justice under the 1947 state constitution. In his opinion in Winberry v. Salisbury, Vanderbilt layed the foundation for judicial tyrnany by ruling that the court, not the legislature, has the power to make rules for the state judiciary.
That ruling set New Jersey’s judiciary apart from the court systems in most other states—as well as from the federal judiciary, which ultimately derives its authority from Congress. Some critics have even argued that Winberry violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that every state must have a republican form of government. “Under the doctrine of Winberry v. Salisbury,” wrote New Jersey lawyer Anthony Kearns in a 1955 ABA Journal article, “we can only conclude that laws of practice and procedure are exclusively in the hands of men who are not elected.”
Malanga clearly lays out how New Jersey’s Supreme Court has taken over the state’s education policy and funding with no improvement in urban education to show for the $40 billion that has been wasted as a result of the Abbott decisions. He lays out the history of how the court usurped local zoning power with the Mt. Laurel decisions and COAH. He connects the dots in explaining how those two extra-constitutional power grabs have resulted in massive wealth redistribution, with no societal benefit, and an oppressive system of goverments.
Malanga stressed the importance of Christie’s promise to reshape the court with judges who will interpret the constitution rather than relating to it as a “living document.” However, he is not optimistic because of “…a Democrat-controlled legislature that’s often happy to dodge responsibility for heavy spending by letting the court mandate it.”
Hat tip to InTheLobby for bring this important article to our attention.
By Evans C. Anyanwu