This is what I said about it today, on behalf of the New Hampshire Legal Rights Foundation (NHLRF):
Everyone, the New Hampshire Legal Rights Foundation (NHLRF) put out a press release as of yesterday explaining why the Executive Council should refuse to confirm Mr. Jim Bassett as a NH Supreme Court Justice. That press release can be found online HERE. In the meantime, as the chairman of the NHLRF board of directors, I have been interviewed…
…at some length today by the Union Leader, so we’ll see how they play it in the paper tomorrow morning (they asked about my past work with the Free State Project, by the way). I have also been interviewed at some length by Skip Murphy of GraniteGrok.com, and that audio interview will be posted on the GraniteGrok website later this evening, I believe.
The bottom line is this: The Executive Council has a 5 – 0 majority of Republicans on it. Gov. Lynch has nominated Jim Bassett, a lawyer who believes in the judicial activist philosophy that bypasses both the legislative branch and the executive branch, in favor of forcing their own policy prescriptions and political positions on the rest of us in a most undemocratic way that is harmful to the state and people of New Hampshire. He has said that he will “obey and follow” the Claremont decisions, which are simply not grounded in the NH State Constitution, but rather are “policies” that the Supreme Court judges want to force upon the state. Mr. Bassett said those decisions “have been there for a long time,” and thus should be followed. In response, I would point out to him that the New Hampshire state Constitution has “been there for a long time” also, more than two hundred years longer, in fact. And it is not a good idea to let a group of politicized judges shove aside the words of a constitution that have been understood for over 200 years to mean one thing…in favor of the judges’ own policy preferences today.
We must now lay a “marker” down, starting with the vote of the Executive Council tomorrow, and make it clear that we are not going to tolerate the nomination and placement of anti-democratic judicial activists on the state Supreme Court from this point onward. At the present, only Executive Counselor David Wheeler seems to understand these facts. My hope is that a solid majority of the Executive Council will understand them by tomorrow when they vote.
Timothy Condon, Esq., 12 Liberty Lane, Grafton, New Hampshire 03240
Ofc: 307 S. Fielding Ave., #2, Tampa, Florida 33606 Phone 813-251-2626
