Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Circuit Judge for 12th Circuit District Dead

We reached dead, dead, dead status.

When the bill came to the floor for final approval, a representative made a point of order, saying the final bill had sections that were not in the original bill, which is something you're not suppose to do. However, people use this method all the time in order to get things through all the time; and it's a tactic, because of our first bill was killed because of the same fight, that we had to use to get it to this point.

However, because there was an internal dispute in the Madison/Rankin county delegation on how their new circuit judge would be elected, one of their representatives made a point of order and sent the whole bill back to conference. Knowing that the point of order will be made again if it's brought back out with our circuit judges still in, all of the judges were taken out of the conference report.

So because this representative didn't like the way a judge in his/her county would be elected, he/she effectively killed the entire bill and seemed perfectly fine with doing it. So both the Forrest County circuit district (12th) AND the Lamar County circuit district (15th) will miss out on judges, because one person thought that his/her own local fight was worth making all of us miss out on something we desperately needed.

1 comment:

John Wesley Leek said...

Crap. Why leave them nameless? I know you want to be nice, but that's petty.