I just listened to a remarkable recording of a Zoom meeting between some lawyers in the offices of the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, and some Croydon town officers, including the supervisors of the checklist and the town moderator.
Here is a summary of the ‘guidance’ offered by the lawyers, led by Bud Fitch:
- We all took an oath to apply the law as written, and not as we think it should be written.
- You should ignore the law as written (for example, the part that says correcting a checklist and making additions to the checklist are two different kinds of actions; that special meetings have different rules from regular meetings; and so on) in favor of the way we think it should have been written (as if words that mean different things really mean the same thing; as if words that appear in statutes don’t actually appear there; and so on).
It should be noted that one of the lawyers participating was Anne Edwards, from the AG’s office. If you followed the Croydon town tuitioning case, you’ll remember her as the one who argued in court — while keeping a straight face — that the phrase including but not limited to actually means limited to.
In this meeting, she tells the town moderator (who is himself a lawyer) that he can just ignore some of the words from a statute that he’s asking about:
Moderator: You’re saying it doesn’t mean anything.
Anne Edwards: We are saying it doesn’t mean anything any longer.
Moderator: I don’t understand how you can not interpret a phrase that’s in the statute, and just disregard it.
But that’s exactly what he’s being told to do here: To disregard the words in the statute governing the meeting he’s supposed to moderate because they get in the way of the result that Bud and Anne want.
This is the state of the law in the state of New Hampshire.
Which raises an interesting question: If the words of statutes can just be ignored when you don’t like them, or redefined when they’re inconvenient, then why pretend that statutes — which are made of words — mean anything at all?
Also, if the statutes created by the state legislature — in which the supreme legislative power is vested by the state constitution — can be rewritten at will by the executive branch, why bother to pass them in the first place? Why not just set up a hotline to Bud Fitch’s office, or Anne Edwards’s office, so they can tell you what the law is?
But there’s always a silver lining, right? I’m looking forward to the next time someone at a meeting of our select board, or our school board, tries to cite an RSA to support the idea that something must be done, or must not be done.
‘Oh, haven’t you heard? According to the Secretary of State and the Attorney General, the words of statutes don’t actually matter. They mean whatever we want them to mean. Let’s move on…’
