(Photo by Maury Phillips/Getty Images for Leigh Steinberg)
Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona is a human rebuttal to the concept of a meritocracy. He’s a rich pud who made his money selling ice cream — which doesn’t take a rocket scientist because it’s f**king ice cream and that’s basically like selling crack without having to invest in a security team. Warren Buffet runs an ice cream business as a lark with his pocket change, that’s how unchallenging it is to run an ice cream business. Then he parlayed his empire of adult-onset diabetes into a political career where he’s taken the bold stances on the issues that really matter to Arizona, like opposing the removal of Confederate monuments for the exact same reasons Arizona spent years fighting Martin Luther King Day. He’s a talentless hack who has clawed out a political existence at the waning end of Arizona’s racist zeitgeist.
So it’s unlikely that Judge Neil Wake, a George W. Bush appointee from the District of Arizona, feels much sting to learn that Governor Ducey doesn’t think highly of his jurisprudence. Ducey’s people have claimed the Republican jurist is a “biased, activist judge” because words have no meaning anymore. For his part, Ducey says, per Tucson.com:
“Judge (Neil) Wake puts on a robe in the morning and thinks he’s God,” Ducey said late Tuesday in the immediate wake of the decision saying the governor and state acted illegally in taking money from an education trust account without getting required congressional approval. “But he’s not.”
To recap, Ducey tried to gut state school spending in an effort to enrich his rich buddies and then found himself with a shortfall in education spending that he needed to bridge. Unable to raise taxes like any principled executive would, Ducey and his cronies got a ballot measure passed to invade the principal of the State Land Trust to cover the gap despite the fact that no one ever went to the federal government to secure congressional approval for this move rendering it all, you know, illegal. So much for textualism!
Ducey claims he got approval when he had the request dropped into a 2,400-page bill at the last minute in an effort to put a stop to the lawsuit. Judge Wake offered a lesson on the finer points of mootness but mostly used his opinion to shoot down Ducey’s ludicrous claim that if he managed to get a perfunctory approval once, then he won’t need to get one again when his piss-poor management of the school budget bites Arizona again.
For his part, Ducey’s going to appeal the ruling and who knows what happens with these screwy circuits these days. Still, one would think anyone with a copy of the relevant laws and passing grasp of the language would be able to affirm this quickly. On the other hand, we’ve been monitoring these new appointees across the country and we might be setting the bar too high here.
(Check out the whole ruling on the next page.)
Gov. Ducey calls federal judge ’embarrassment to the legal community’ [Tucson.com]
Judge rebukes Ducey as ‘defiant,’ says Prop 123 education funding is ‘illegal’ [AZ Mirror]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.