So here we go again with there being no law that will be allowed to constrain the government.
It’s a small, local matter.
But one that has its parallells all the way up to the federal governernment.
I encountered it via my local newspaper: State Supreme Court refuses to hear case involving Sonoma County pension hikes.
Now, I’m all for government workers having decent pensions, and I’m heartily sick of all the maniacs crying doom over their visions of fiscal devastation brought on by inflated pension budgets.
So, whatever.
It’s this bit at the end of the article that bugs me:
The county’s rebuttal to Luke’s legal challenge was that a procedural error shouldn’t be grounds to void the upgraded pensions received or promised to thousands of current and future county retirees.
This, despite the previous paragraph being:
County attorneys and the county grand jury separately found in 2012 that officials did not meet public notice requirements when the Board of Supervisors in the early 2000s approved enhanced retirement benefits.
Uhh, yeah.
What that is saying is that, while the County’s own lawyers and grand jury had decided that, yep the Board broke the law with this approval but nope, we’re gonna let it stand.
That is just wrong.
That decision just reinforces that there is no actual law.
If you don’t actually enforce all the laws as they are written, then you’ve created a situation where the law is irrelevant.
Why should anyone care what the law is if it’s not actually enforced?
And these people wonder why no one cares about speed limits, or drug prohibitions or bribery regulations?
It’s because we all know they don’t matter.
All that actually matters is knowing whether it’s likely to get enforced at a particular moment and in a particular situation.
And the folks who run governments know that it’s never likely to apply to them.
Not personally, and probably not even institutionally.
So if we want to have an actually functioning State, where folks actually care about what the laws are, then we have to start enforcing them.
And that begins with enforcing them on the government itself.
