Many of you will be going to the polls on Tuesday and the contests for state and federal elections may be paramount in your thinking. Please, however, understand that Question One on the state ballot will ask you to vote to amend the New Hampshire Constitution. I urge you to vote against this amendment.
As a general principle, citizens ought to be cautious when asked to amend either the State or Federal Constitutions. But on the merits of the question, this amendment ought to be defeated. This amendment seeks to change the normal balance between the legislature and the courts, thus upsetting the normal system of check and balances that has been the hallmark of our system of democracy. We risk having the courts become impacted by the political issue that faces the legislature. Passage of this amendment would be quite unhealthy to the concept of justice and would have a corrosive effect upon the rights of every citizen of the state.
When I am asking you to defeat is the amendment that would take away the administration of the courts from the courts. In essence, the legislature would run the courts. We simply ought not to venture in this direction. An independent judiciary sometimes has to make decisions that may be unpopular either to protect an individual’s right or to fix the responsibility of a governmental agency. Judges should not be constrained by fear of reprisals by a legislature that would administer the courts. Independence of the judiciary is important if you want to have a system of laws and not politicians. This amendment was first considered and defeated in a reaction to the Claremont school funding case. Many members of the legislature did not approve of the New Hampshire Supreme Courts mandate that the State fund an adequate education for school children. The ghost of this school funding issue lives on, and destroying the independence of the judiciary should not be how we resolve this political issue.