How fascism operates in MT, intimidating, harassing, politicizing the judiciary
The Rule of Law or the Rule of Lie
Setting aside those at the national level, these efforts in Montana, are stunning, and include, by way of non-exclusive examples:
+ making baseless and vague charges of improprieties designed to lessen the reputations and integrity of members of the Supreme and District Courts and to destroy Montanans’ trust in the court and judiciary;
+ causing one Justice to have to (successfully) litigate his being subpoenaed by the legislature;
+ seizing judges’ emails off the Department of Administration server (many of which contained case-sensitive information and information pertaining to the deliberations of the court);
+ subpoenaing members of the Supreme Court and Court do ents for “investigative purposes;”
+ the Attorney General’s office blatantly refusing to comply with a Supreme Court order;
+ the legislature and Governor summarily scrapping the Judicial Nomination Commission and the merit selection of judicial appointments and replacing the merit system with a patronage system controlled solely by the Governor;
+ resurrecting the plan of electing Supreme Court justices by district, and ignoring, in the process, precedent which had determined the district-election plan was uncons utional. Indeed, this plan was and is simply a scheme to elect partisan justices from gerrymandered “districts;”
+ trashing Judges and Courts as being “partisan” and “activist;”
+ Turning the most recent Supreme Court retention election from, what should have been a nonpartisan contest, into a partisan free-for-all, with a hand-picked partisan candidate, financed in large part by money from the Republican State Leadership Committee;
+ And, finally, proposing a mind-boggling list of court and tort “reform” bills to be considered—and no doubt enacted— in the 2023 session by the Republican super-majority in the legislature.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12...e-rule-of-lie/
MT, where the govenor body slams a reporter for asking a question