Posted on 08/29/2014 1:08:00 PM PDT by thetallguy24
Glad you agree. Let’s get married.
A statute sets a time period for county election appeals and no time period for non-county election appeals, demonstrating clear legislative intent. A Jim Crow era state court decision held the non-county election provision to have the same time period as the county election provision. The statute is then repealed, and replaced with the identical language and with same intentional discrepancy. That means, "we did mean to exclude a time period for non-county elections".
Another analogous statute requires an appeal 'forthwith'. Then it is amended. The original 'forthwith' provision expressed the intent of the legislature at the time the non-county elections provision was enacted, and that provision was not amended when the 'forthwith' provision was amended. What happened to the 'forthwith' provision later is irrelevant given that no change was made to the non-county election provision. Why not rely on the 'forthwith' provision for guidance in divining the intent of the legislature?
Even if one gives some credence to an ancient state court decision, it should not be persuasive, much less controlling, given that the provision was subsequently repealed and consciously replaced by the legislature.
I don't interpret statutes for a living, but the judge appears to me to be in error, mumbling about 'precedent' from the bench.
I am a lawyer, but not a Mississippi lawyer, and not an election lawyer anywhere, so take the following with a grain of salt. But the usual presumption (under federal law and in the states where I do practice) is that when the Legislature amends a statute and re-uses the language from the former statute, they intend to keep in force any judicial interpretations of the former language (because otherwise they could have clarified the language to make it clear that they didn't mean what the prior court decisions had said).
McDaniel, incidentally, was the Chairman of the Election law committee of the State Senate, so he had opportunity before this election to clarify Mississippi's election laws. Reading about those laws in the course of following this election, the laws are a mess from top to bottom, full of vague and contradictory language, and with many key provisions based only on dubious court decisions. For example, the rule against cross-over voting in a run-off, on which McDaniel based his entire challenge, is not in the statute itself but only in an old court decision. Live by precedent, die by precedent.
- the original provision, by its deliberate omission of a time limit contained in a 'sister' provision, demonstrated the legislature's intent that there should be no time limit;
- the 1957 decision flew in the face of the plain meaning of the provision; (From the NMissCommentor discussion, there may also be a civil rights or Voting Rights Act reason why that case should not be considered precedent, but I cannot assess that.)
- the repeal and subsequent reenactment of identical language, to include the distinction between county court and non-county court timelines reinforces the plain meaning interpretation of legislative intent, not the earlier state court decision.
If the legislature had conformed the language to the state court decision, then the principle should apply; but the legislature deliberately stuck to their guns on the distinction. The state court said white is black. The legislature said, no, white is white.
I'm only pestering you about this because, like you, I hope that Chris finds a way forward.
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