Garden State Patriot

I haven’t posted much about COHA lately, so in an effort to keep this vital issue on the radar I wanted to share this.

Assemblymen Michael Doherty and Michael Patrick Carroll have introduced a concurrent resolution (ACR-216) that would lead to amending the state Constitution to remove the affordable-housing obligations placed upon local municipalities as a result of the Mount Laurel court decision.

If both houses of the Legislature approve it, the declaration would be submitted for voter approval at the next general election. The resolution will also prohibit state government from imposing laws that would overturn or interfere with a municipality’s zoning ordinances.

The amendment says that no law shall require any municipality to “create, fund or implement any program to provide housing for all income levels by means of land use regulation, or by fee assessment.”

“Nowhere in New Jersey’s Constitution is there a mandate for the state or local towns to provide affordable housing,” said Mr. Doherty, a Republican representing 24 of Hunterdon’s 26 municipalities. “There is not even an acceptable definition of what constitutes ‘affordable.’
“Our intent is to take such nebulous terms out of the hands of the court system and ultimately let the voters decide whether they should subsidize new housing in their towns. The infrastructure costs associated with this directive are enormous, and are ultimately borne by the taxpayer. This resolution will correct a misguided public policy.”
Mr. Carroll said the amendment “restates — for a judiciary that wrote its own policy preferences into the Constitution — that property tax payers owe no obligation to subsidize development of any kind.

We commend the efforts of Assemblymen Doherty and Carroll for taking this first step towards ending COHA mandates. Of course, Steve Lonegan has been very much at the forefront of this issue as well, with one of his priorities being to put this issue before the voters via referenda should he win the governorship.

Ultimately, this is exactly what needs to happen in order to re-establish the right of the people to govern themselves and thwart a renegade NJ Supreme Court.

Read more COAH news here:

• Impact on Randolph, NJ/Highlands Area: We’re being pressured to sign on
• Marlboro team trounces COAH in resolution

Cross-posted at Red County.

In yet another outrageous decision by the reckless, runaway New Jersey Supreme Court, the 7 lawyers in black robes in Trenton have now ruled that striking workers are eligible for unemployment benefits. Via mycentrtaljersey.com:

Unemployment benefits are normally reserved for people who are forced from their jobs, not people who simply walk off their jobs — except in New Jersey, that is, where all common sense was toppled this week in an odd and strained ruling by the state’s Supreme Court, which determined that nurses who went on strike at a South Jersey hospital are entitled to receive jobless pay. As troubling, the decision upheld a backward state law that says strikers can receive unemployment benefits so long as their company remains open.

It is a “pro-labor decision,” said Fred Askin, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark. “It’s a progressive decision.”

No kidding.

And so the high court let political bias shape its thinking by rearranging long-established law.

The Social Security Act of 1935, which created the Federal-State Unemployment Compensation Program, is clear and unambiguous in its intent and language. The program’s main objective is “to provide temporary and partial wage replacement to involuntarily unemployed workers who were recently employed,” with emphasis on “involuntary.”

The ruling was 6-1. The lone court member to get it right, Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto, called the decision “perverse,” noting it “upends the common sense notion that striking employees have left their employment voluntarily and, hence, should be disqualified from unemployment compensation benefits.” His was a direct, succinct and accurate rendering of the flawed thinking of his fellow Supreme Court justices.

It’s bad enough that so many politicians in Trenton are beholden to Big Labor in New Jersey but for the highest court in our state to thumb their nose at the Rule of Law to support a liberal constituency is utterly unethical and shameful.

The Court has yet to come up much in the gubernatorial race but it ought to. The New Jersey Supreme Court, with its outrageous decisions on affordable housing (COAH), Abbot Districts and voting on state borrowing, has consistently overstepped its bounds and unleashed havoc on the people of New Jersey.

Electing Republicans to state goverment is just a first step towards fixing this state and addressing this particular problem. Once elected, Republicans will need to confront the Court head on by using the power of the elected branches to hold it to the authority it has constitutionally been given. Conservative justices will need to be appointed and those who consistently rule with no basis in law need to be held to account. To put it simply: Enough is enough!

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude!

In a blow to New Jersey taxpayers, a Superior Court Judge in Bergen County dismissed a lawsuit by Steve Lonegan which aimed to block the state from spending $3.9 billion on school construction without voter approval. As I detailed in a previous post last week, New Jersey’s Supreme Court opened the floodgates to out of control state spending when they decided against Lonegan in two previous cases (Lonegan I & II). By virtue of this decision, New Jersey taxpayers have no recourse in preventing the state from continuing to recklessly spend our tax dollars and pile up even more debt.

However, Lonegan plans to appeal the ruling and his lead attorney Seth Grossman sees this is just one step towards ultimately having the case heard in the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Steve Lonegan will be appealing Superior Court Judge Jonathan Harris’ ruling dismissing the Lonegan v. Corzine case that seeks to block the sale of $3.9 billion in school construction bonds to be marketed without voter approval.

“This is what we expected” said Attorney Seth Grossman. “A lower court judge will not overturn a Supreme Court decision and this is just the first step on our march to the State Supreme Court for them to review and overturn their prior 4-3 decision against taxpayers.” Grossman said.

The decision is just one battle in the long war to return sanity to New Jersey’s State Government. Since 2001, New Jersey’s debt has soared from $11.7 billion to over $40 billion in debt, or more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the state.

Of course, GSP will keep you posted as this story unfolds!

New Jersey’s fiscal woes are not only to be placed at the feet of Corzine, McGreevey and the state’s legislature (as well as Governor Whitman I might add). It should be noted that New Jersey also has a runaway Supreme Court which has time and again overstepped its constitutional authority and legislated from the bench.

Two of the Court’s most egregious decisions were handed down in what is known now as Lonegan I and Lonegan II. In those cases the NJ Supreme Court essentially turned the New Jersey constitution on its head and green-lighted runaway spending by the Governor and state legislature.

Here, Steve Lonegan summarizes the sequence of events and alerts New Jerseyans that it will likely take another law suit to undo the damage the court has unleashed on New Jersey taxpayers.

Just over five years ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided on two of the most important cases in the state’s fiscal history– Lonegan vs. State I 174 NJ 435 (2002) and Lonegan vs. State II  176 NJ 2 (2003).

A disappointing loss in Lonegan I allowed Republican Governor Whitman’s plan to borrow $8.6 billion without voter approval to construct schools in 28 urban districts as ordered by the Supreme Court in Abbot vs. Burke. The Supreme Court would not allow voters to reject something it had mandated, no matter how costly or destructive.

But the court claimed it was troubled by the method used to borrow money without voter approval as required by Article VIII of the NJ Constitution.  A “shell entity,” also known as a straw man, the NJ Economic Development Authority, issued bonds to borrow the money—even though it had no income. Then the state made contracts to pay all obligations on those bonds with tax revenues for the next 30 years. The problem is that there is no guarantee that future payments will be made. These annual payments are subject to approval by the legislature and conceivably can be voted down. Most purchasers of this contract debt are not aware of this risk, but investment firms continue to sell these bonds as if they are risk free.

Supreme Court Justice Stein, writing in 2002, was alarmed that this gimmick had been used to borrow $10.8 billion, 75 percent of the state’s bonded debt, without voter approval. He urged the Court to agree with my assertion and end the practice.

But the Supreme Court delayed that part of the decision until after Justice Stein, clearly sympath et ic to my case, had reached the mandatory retirement age, and was replaced by Justice Albin, appointed by Governor McGreevey.

In Lonegan II, the Supreme Court in a heart breaking 4-3 decision approved all state borrowing for any purpose without voter approval—as long as a shell entity did the borrowing without pledging the full faith and credit of the state. In essence, the State Supreme Court is complicit in what could be the largest consumer fraud scheme by any state in the country-selling bonds as if they have been approved by voters.

The result has been an absolute financial catastrophe for New Jersey.  In his 2008 State of the State Address, Corzine blamed Supreme Court decisions for “the sharp deterioration of our State’s finances,” which included $32 billion in bonded debt, only $3 billion of which was approved by voters. I agree with the Governor’s statements. But Governor Corzine’s actions do not follow his words.  Six months after criticizing New Jersey ’s “credit card culture” that ignored our Constitution, Governor Corzine approved using the old gimmicks to borrow $3.9 billion more without voter approval.

There are other reasons to reconsider and overrule the previous Lonegan decisions. First, Lonegan II relied on bad history.  It claimed that New Jersey’s 1844  Constitution, which first  required voter approval of new state debt, was framed to prevent states from defaulting on debts backed by the “full faith and credit” of taxpayers.

However, many scholars today, like University of Maryland Professor of Economic History John Joseph Wallis, take a different view.  They suggest that the 1844 framers wanted to end “systematic corruption” where politicians had too many opportunities to get bribes and political support by favoring some businesses at the expense of others. The framers of 1844 reduced those opportunities by requiring voter approval of new state debt.  Other reforms in that 1844 Constitution time included uniform laws that took the politics out of forming new corporations and local governments.

Second, Lonegan II put way too much faith in Wall Street .

“(T)he state has responded to changes in the financial markets that reflect modern economic realities…yesterday’s speculation has become ‘sound and economical current business practice. . . “ Lonegan, supra, 176 NJ at 14.

In his October 23, 2008 testimony to Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan showed the framers of New Jersey’s Constitution to be far more reliable than today’s Wall Street “geniuses.”

“In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts. . .  The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. . .”

Finally, last November 4, 2008, New Jersey voters approved amendments to Article VIII of New Jersey’s Constitution which prohibits this type of borrowing without voter approval. But this case is far from moot. The Amendment only applies to future borrowing.

Also, the new Amendment has this troublesome language, which did not appear in the ballot question:

“No voter approval shall be required for. . . refinancing of all or a portion of any outstanding debts or liabilities of. . . an autonomous public corporate entity…”

Does that mean the state can refinance NJ’s $29 billion of old “contract debt” with new debt backed by the full faith and credit of the state—without voter approval?    Future litigation may be needed to decide that issue.   But in the meantime, there are many reasons to reconsider and reverse Lonegan I and Lonegan II, and the future fiscal health of New Jersey will rest on this decision.

Steve Lonegan
State Director
Americans For Prosperity

Additionally, today Steve Lonegan officially launched his candidacy for the governorship. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently supporting Steve’s candidacy. For more on his speech today, please see this post from Conservatives with Attitude!.