Recent developments and revelations have led me to reverse my initial inclination to support and vote for Jerry Brown in the race for California's governorship. I at the time was motivated by the fact that, unlike his anti gun RINO opponent in the upcoming election, the Democrat candidate years ago took a principled position on citizens' Second Amendment rights. In addition, I believed and hoped that Brown might have matured and learned some important lessons since his previous disastrous tenure as California's moonbeam governor, and that he had done as good a job as Oakland's mayor as anyone who has served in that problem city's impossible top political job in recent decades.
Since then however, Mr. Brown has been derelict in the performance of his duties as California's attorney general by indulging his ego and personal policy preferences and allowing them to outweigh his obligations to the state's voters. He is refusing, as is California's film action hero governor, to participate in an appeal from a federal trial court judge's decision striking down a voter approved amendment to the state constitution upholding the traditional concept of marriage as being the union of one man with one woman.
The gambit in this course of action is to have the appellate court refuse to consider the appeal on its merits because no one with official standing is participating in its prosecution. If, as is possible, the appellate court is willing to countenance this charade, the voters who adopted the constitutional amendment would go unrepresented and the dubious decision of a single federal trial court judge would stand as the law, and homosexual marriages would be lawful in California.
The issue here is not whether gay marriages should or should not be permitted. The issue is by whom the decision should be made -- whether the decision should be made by denying any voice in the decision to the voters. By abandoning the defense of the amendment Brown would deny the voters any role in deciding the question either at the ballot box or in a judicial review to determine whether their judgment or that of a single black robed occupant of a federal trial court bench should prevail.
Such tyranny by an attorney general is not without precedent. Some years ago when opponents of a California voter approved ballot initiative brought a legal proceeding to challenge the measure's legality, an earlier attorney general and governor, both of whom agreed with the challengers, sold out the voters by settling the case on terms favorable to the measure's opponents. In addition, Nebraska's attorney general currently is refusing to defend a law enacted by that state's legislature against a challenge brought by opponents of the enactment by the people's elected representatives. This probably will result in those who were unsuccessful in defeating the statute in the legislature prevailing in court with the connivance of the attorney general, who supposedly is responsible for defending and upholding his state's laws. Because he deems himself better qualified than the legislature to determine what laws the state ought to have, opponents of the measure probably will win by default before a judge, who in all likelihood will prevent the disputed statute from becoming effective.
If such derelictions are allowed to stand -- and they will become more common and widespread if voters elect to higher offices the attorneys general who engage in them -- we will be governed by single unlikely despots: whoever occupies the office of the attorney general in any given state.
Incidentally, insofar as Jerry Brown is concerned, it turns out that he also is allied with Code Pink -- the outfit, if you recall, that notoriously engaged in physically blocking access to the Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, California.
It's time to retire Jerry Brown from public life.
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