Today’s FlashReport has a story from the Los Angeles Times about the rescinding the mutli-language rule for recall petitions. Two of the three remaining pro Wal-Mart councilmembers have been under seige by union forces. They successfully sued to stop the recall election by using a ninth circuit ruling on the topic of recall petitions. Roles are reversed here with liberals wanting to exclude multi-language petitions and the Republican Jay Imperial arguing the other side. Politics is all local. See article here.
May 2nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
It’s not a matter of wanting to exclude multi-lingual petitions. The questions should be: 1) Should multilingual petitions be mandated? 2) Should citizens groups be forced to bear the cost of this mandate? 3) Should the mandate be applied retroactively?
The petitions calling for the recall of Jay Imperial and Gary Taylor were turned in for signature verification three months before the original three-judge panel in Padilla v. Lever ruled. The petitions were circulated in the form that the law at the time required. If Save Our Community *had* tried to qualify a multilingual petition, it’s not even clear whether that would have been legal under California state law.
As far as I know, there is nothing in the legislative record leading up the the VRA renewals in 1975 and 1982 suggesting that anyone envisioned applying multilingual requirements to citizen-initiated petitions, I would think both liberals and conservatives would agree that it stretches the boundaries of reason and fairness for a judge [or a three-judge panel] to decide to change the rules on their own, and then to apply that change retroactively.