Posted on 05/28/2016 4:00:39 PM PDT by randita
AG Herring to state Supreme Court: Don't rush pace of GOP's suit
By MICHAEL MARTZ Richmond Times-Dispatch | Posted: Friday, May 27, 2016 6:15 pm
Attorney General Mark R. Herring has asked the Virginia Supreme Court to slow down General Assembly Republicans who want to rush a decision in their lawsuit to reverse Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s blanket restoration of civil rights to felons who have served their time.
The attorney general filed a response on Friday to the GOP motion filed earlier this week to seek expedited hearing of the suit against the governor with aim of preventing Virginians whose rights have been restored from voting in the presidential election in November.
The response calls the request to accelerate the schedule to hear the case as early as June 6 unreasonable, especially since Republicans led by House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, and Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, filed their 50-page brief a month after McAuliffe’s restoration order on April 22.
Herring also challenges the standing of Howell, Norment, and four other Republican voters to file suit to reverse the governor’s order, and argues that the suit cannot succeed in excluding newly registered voters from participating in the election.
Even if the court ruled in favor of the Republican suit, McAuliffe could issue individual orders restoring the rights of felons who have registered to vote, the attorney general said. “Either way, there is no emergency that requires that this case be accelerated.”
Almost 5,000 ex-offenders, who had served their sentences and completed supervised probation, had registered to vote, the commissioner of elections said Tuesday. McAuliffe has estimated that at least 206,000 Virginians had their rights restored under his order.
McAuliffe issued a statement Friday that ridiculed the Republican lawsuit as “a frivolous and partisan attempt to strip the civil rights of more than 200,000 Virginia citizens.”
“The suggestion that Republican leaders or any other individual has been injured by my grant order is absurd, and the plaintiffs have failed to make a valid case for why this suit should move forward at all, much less why the court should disrupt its calendar to expedite a meritless lawsuit,” the governor said.
coming from a man under fbi investigation for voter fraud....
Felons have always lost rights.
It is a heavy burden on the Governor to show there is no injury by changing that.
So he lies.
I know two felons who have lost their voting rights. They are extremely-extreme liberals. This is what actually got them into trouble in the first place. One was under the impression that money should be free so he liberated five thousand dollars from a bank. Amazingly, he got off without a jail sentence, but lost his voting rights. The other figured that drug laws were just for white people. He also has a view of the world that is so far left he is daily disappointed that everything isn’t free. I’d hate to have either of them voting again.
Both of them have severe impulse control problems that make ordinary relationships difficult and, potentially under the wrong circumstances, dangerous.
One problem of today is a dilution of the idea of felony. Look crosswise at a police dog and one might get charged with that nowadays. And small pot growers, etc. As social engineers have turned the body of law into such a complex web of bans that if it WAS ever enforced evenly it would become not a bulwark but a monster, people are less likely to want to have much to do with it.
And “conservatives” who have veered into nanny statism have been ensnared by “liberals” into playing the same game.
That was the intent, I think.
I wonder why the Repubs didn’t ask for an injunction stopping the executive order until the VA supremes could rule on whether the Gov’s executive order can overrule the state constitution ?
I’m not sure Texas qualifies as a “liberal” state, but as long as I’ve been here felons had voting rights restored. At one time, five years after completion of sentence, now immediately following discharge.
Gun rights, no such, but voting rights, immediate.
Really?
Unreasonable?
Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia used his executive power to pull this fast one overnight.
And if it is just a few days before the election and the State Supreme Court decides in favor of the GOP we will see a lot of brand NEW felons because they will have voted illegally.
Typical. Liberal. CF.
.
Then the felons can fill out the paperwork to apply, and he can sign his name 200,000 times. There's already a process in place. Don't permit a blanket overnight amnesty in an election year.
You notice that all the Republican legislators are marked with an “R” in the article along with their district. But Herring is never identified as a RAT!
Can’t argue against that point, using the courts to bypass legislatures has many bad consequences.
As does passing laws that overreach.
But the issue here is not the wisdom of restoration but the constitutional power of the Executive.
This gubernatorial proclamation makes part of the Constitution moot and meaningless.
Hate to have a court say that’s okay.
AND an AG who won by a handful of votes, whose opponent chose not to demand the recount he was entitled to, rather than put the Commonwealth thru that mess.
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