Budget Order Turns State House into a Mad House
Molly Parker of The Clarion-Ledger catches up in today's paper with key figures in the fray caused by last week's Mississippi Supreme Court order forbidding Gov. Barbour to cut the judiciary's budget.
The short version is this: what has happened is what one should've expected to happen. The executive branch is full of people wondering about the scope and force of the Court's order and trying to figure out how to proceed with the project of trimming the state's budget.
My main man Prof. Ron Rychlak also chimes in, echoing what most folks immediately concluded: an appeal, for all practical purposes, is out of the question.
Ultimately, the questions left unanswered provide a good lesson in the imprudence of advisory opinions -- which I think anyone, Barbour supporter or not, would have to agree is what we're dealing with here.
I was hearing the "advisory opinion" line this morning, and it may be valid.
However, it's true that the MSSC wears two hats: it's the high court of the state, *and* it's the highest authority over the judicial branch, in an "administrative" sense.
That I take it is why it issued an "administrative order," not an opinion.
The problem however is that its order purported to order the State Fiscal Officer not to impose certain cuts. I don't see how the court had that authority in its administrative capacity.
Better would have been to make the court's position crystal-clear without that order, and then let the normal judicial process roll if the SFO decided to implement the cuts anyway.
But it would be interesting to see whether and how an executive-branch officer can be held in contempt of an *administrative* order issued by the MSSC, which in that capacity has, I would think, zero authority over the SFO. Guess we won't find out, this time.
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Concur in full.
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