Thursday, January 3, 2008

House Clerk Monahan Deposed; Testimony To Be Released Today

From WBAL:

The chief clerk of the House of Delegates was questioned for about fourhours
during a deposition Wednesday relating to a legal case brought byRepublicans who
are seeking to overturn laws passed in Maryland's specialsession.

The deposition was taken in Annapolis after more than a week of
legalwrangling over whether Mary Monahan should be required to answer questions
inthe case.

Mary Monahan, of course, is the clerk who records the proceedings for the House of Delegates, and therefore can verify the authenticity and timeliness of the notification from the Senate of their adjournment.

A spokesman for House Speaker Michael Busch fails to look beyond partisanship:

(Alex) Hughes called the Republican lawsuit "highly partisan."

"Unfortunately this is an attempt to drag non-partisan staff into apartisan
lawsuit, because the plaintiffs (the Republicans) did not like theoutcome of the
special session," Hughes said.

At some point in time, defending the Constitution has become an improper, partisan Republican tactic. Let's stop and think for a minute--when this deposition is made publicly available, it is possible that elected officials at the highest levels conspired to defraud the citizens in a manner that violated express provisions in the Constitution. What else will they be willing to do? It sounds to me like they should be impeached, were such a conspiracy to have taken place.

This is not partisan politics. Even if you wanted to debate the $1.whatever billion in new taxes as a partisan matter, knowingly breaking the law pervades all classifications.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Defending the constitution has ALWAYS been a partisan tactic. It just depends on who is in charge when the constitution gets defended as to whom the partisan in question is...