Court Opinion

ID: 9742021
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:05:27.390706+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:27.847166
License: Public Domain

VOGEL, Justice,
dissenting in part and concurring in part.
I dissent, for reasons which a mere reading of the majority opinion should make evident. Part I of that opinion says correctly, in my view, that it is our duty to decide the question involved in this case (especially since the tie-votes anticipated at the time of submission have since occurred). But Part II abdicates our responsibility and tells the Legislature it can keep on doing what it has been doing because it has been doing it. To let a shifting legislative majority decide constitutional issues is nothing but an abdication of this Court’s duty to decide those issues.
Furthermore, it is not even logical to say that the Legislature has had a consistent practice through the years. If the Lieutenant Governor has declined to break ties nine times out of ten in the last 88 years, that fact does not necessarily mean what the majority here thinks it does. If the Lieutenant Governor is faced with a tie-vote, he has three choices, not two. He may vote aye, in which case the bill passes. He may vote nay, in which case it is lost. Or he may pass his vote, in which case, again, it is lost. Thus, if he wants the bill to lose, he may either vote nay or pass his vote. Either way, the result will be the same. To say that passing his vote is a recognition that he has no power to vote is simply not correct. It may mean simply that he wanted the bill to die, and chose one of the two available alternative methods to kill it.
I will return to the majority opinion under Point X, below. First, I will discuss (as the majority refuses to do) the interpretation of the constitutional provisions involved in this case.
I
Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution of the United States, says, in part:
“The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
The pertinent part of Section 77 of the Constitution of North Dakota, as originally adopted, read:
“The lieutenant governor shall be president of the senate, but shall have no vote unless they be equally divided. . . . ”
An amendment to Section 77 of our Constitution was adopted by the voters in 1974, and reads:
“The powers and duties of the lieutenant governor shall be to serve as president of the Senate, but he shall have no vote unless they be equally divided. .” [New language italicized.]
The Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789, and from then until now, the . Vice President has broken tie-*911votes on all measures, substantive and procedural, before the United States Senate. When the North Dakota Constitution was adopted, in 1889, its draftsmen used identically the same words used in the United States Constitution as to the breaking of ties. The authors of the North Dakota Constitution had the benefit of 100 years of experience with the practice of the United States Senate, and used the language of the United States Constitution, knowing exactly what it meant, and knowing that the presiding officer in the North Dakota Senate would break tie-votes just as the presiding officer of the United States Senate had done for 100 years.
The power of the Vice President to break ties was understood when the United States Constitution was adopted. In “The Federalist,” No. 88, Alexander Hamilton gave as a reason for having an outside person, not a Senator, act as presiding officer:
“ . . . To secure at all times the possibility of a definite resolution of the body [the Senate], it is necessary that the president should have only a casting vote.”1
II
The use by the North Dakota Constitutional Convention of the language of the United States Constitution was intentional, not inadvertent. The first draft of the North Dakota Constitution provided that the Lieutenant Governor would have a “casting vote,” which has the same meaning as the language ultimately adopted. See fn. 1, supra; Journal, Constitutional Convention, p. 90. Nevertheless, the Committee on Revision and Adjustment of the convention recommended striking the words “only a casting vote” and adding “but shall have no vote unless they be equally divided.” Journal, p. 228. This change was adopted by the entire membership of the convention. Journal, p. 281.
III
Coming now to the supposed conflict between Section 65 of the Constitution, providing for passage of bills by a “majority of all the members-elect,” and Section 77, providing that the Lieutenant Governor has a vote when the body is equally divided, it is apparent to me that Section 65 was intended to relate to an entirely different subject — the question of whether a bill or resolution could be passed by a majority of a quorum (which could be as few members as one more than 25 percent of the total) or whether it was to be passed by a majority of the members-elect (meaning as few as one more than half of the elected members). That this analysis is correct is proved by the Journal of the convention. The so-called “Williams Draft,” which was largely followed in the drafting of the Constitution, provided in Article XI, Section 42 [Journal, pp. 83-84], that bills be passed by a “majority of all members present.” The Committee on the Legislature made no change, and recommended the language as part of Section 42 [Journal, p. 141]. The change to “majority of all the members-elect” was made by the Committee of the Whole on August 2, 1889 [Journal, p. 179]. The Committee on Revision and Adjustment made no change in the language, but made it a part of Section 65 [Journal, p. 225], and this language was adopted by the convention [Journal, p. 280].
IV
If there is a conflict between Section 65 and Section 77, it can be resolved in several ways. One way of resolving such a conflict is to determine which measure was passed at a later time, and rule that the later in time prevails. State ex rel. Walker v. Link, 232 N.W.2d 823 (1975); Sec. 1-02-09, N.D. C.C. Under this rule, too, Section 77 will prevail, since it was approved at a later *912hour, although on the same day, than Section 65 was approved. The Journal shows that both were approved on August 14, 1889, but Section 77 came later in the day. The approval of Section 65 is on page 280 of the Journal, and the approval of Section 77 is on page 281 of the Journal. Earlier, the Committee on Revision and Adjustment had followed the same order, approving Section 65 on August 13 [Journal, p. 225], and Section 77 on the same day, but later, as shown on page 228 of the Journal.
V
An additional reason for holding that Section 77 prevails is the fact that the language of Section 77 was reapproved by the voters of North Dakota in 1974, without changing the meaning of the section. The Legislature, in 1973, by Chapter 531, Session Laws of 1973, proposed an amendment to Section 77, leaving unchanged the language as to the tie-breaking power of the Lieutenant Governor. That amendment was approved on November 5, 1974, and is presently part of the Constitution. Thus the voters, in 1974, ratified and reapproved the language of the Constitution as to the tie-breaking power of the Lieutenant Governor. This alone should prove that Section 77 prevails over Section 65. See, again, State ex rel. Walker v. Link, supra.
VI
The conflict between Sections 65 and 77 can be readily resolved, giving effect to both, by simply holding that the Lieutenant Governor is a member-elect of the Senate for the limited purpose of breaking ties. So construed, both sections are given full effect, and both are treated as of equal importance. It is our duty to construe the Constitution so as to reconcile its provisions, if possible.
This construction is supported by language elsewhere in the Constitution, indicating that the Lieutenant Governor is a member of the Senate for some purposes.
Section 195 of the Constitution says:
“All impeachments shall be tried by the senate. . . .No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members elected. . . . ”
Section 199 says:
“On trial for impeachment against the governor, the lieutenant governor shall not act as a member of the court.” [Emphasis supplied.]
Thus the Lieutenant Governor is a member of the Senate, acting as court of impeachment, and I believe he is a member-elect of the Senate for the purpose of breaking ties.
VII
Coming now to the case law from other States, I submit that it favors the interpretation that the presiding officer may break all ties. There are four decisions from other States, two each way. Opinion of Justices, 225 A.2d 481 (Del.1966); State ex rel. Easbey v. Highway Patrol Board, 140 Mont. 383, 372 P.2d 930 (1962); Coleman v. Miller, 146 Kan. 390, 71 P.2d 518 (1937); Kelley v. Secretary of State, 149 Mich. 343, 112 N.W. 978 (1907). The two older cases hold that the Lieutenant Governor may not break ties, while the two more recent cases hold that he may.
More important, the two later cases, Delaware and Montana, discuss the issues judiciously and completely, while the two older cases, Kansas and Michigan, do not. The Montana case points out that the Michigan case was decided without any citation of authority and after little consideration. The opinion was issued the second day after submission. 112 N.W., at 978.
The Kansas decision is really dictum, so far as our question is concerned. It was decided primarily on the point that ratification of a constitutional amendment is a Federal function, not the passage of a bill or joint resolution, and therefore there was no question as to the Lieutenant Governor’s right to vote. The rest of the opinion is unnecessary dictum.
Furthermore, the Montana and Delaware courts gave consideration to the older cases *913and found them unconvincing. The Delaware court said, at page 485:
“We have considered Kelley v. Secretary of State, 149 Mich. 343, 112 N.W. 978 (1907) and Coleman v. Miller, 146 Kan. 390, 71 P.2d 518 (1937). We find those cases unpersuasive.”
The Montana court said that the Michigan opinion was arrived at “ . . .by strained and unwarranted construction . . .” 372 P.2d 930, at 944. I agree.
VIII
The Attorney General of North Dakota also finds the older cases unpersuasive. On February 18, 1975, he gave an opinion to the Lieutenant Governor, reversing a previous opinion, and concluding with these three paragraphs:
“Although we are reluctant to withdraw a previous opinion of this office, in our opinion appellate court holdings since the 1945 opinion are persuasive and require, under these specific circumstances, a contrary opinion. Two such cases are illustrative of court interpretation of this difficult issue since the February 19, 1945 opinion. They are State ex rel. Easbey v. The Highway Patrol Board, 140 Mont. 383, 372 P.2d 930 (1962), and Opinion of the Justices (Supreme Court of Delaware), 225 A.2d 481 (1966).
“Both of these cases considered the precise issue at hand under constitutional language substantially the same if not precisely the same as contained in the North Dakota Constitution. Both decisions were unanimous by the highest appellate courts of Montana and Delaware. Both cases held that the lieutenant governor has the power to vote on bills when the Senate is equally divided.
“While there are some cases that indicate a contrary holding, they were decided prior to the two cases cited herein and considered unpersuasive by the Montana and Delaware Courts. We believe the recent decisions by the Montana and Delaware Courts are indicative of the current judicial attitude on the question. Accordingly in direct answer to your question, it is our opinion that the lieutenant governor may cast the deciding vote on the final passage of a bill.”
IX
The argument made by the respondents that the Lieutenant Governor is a member of the executive branch of government, not the legislative branch, is really irrelevant. I mention in passing that nowhere in the North Dakota Constitution is there a statement that the three branches of government are separate or independent. Even aside from that fact, however, and recognizing that for most purposes they are distinct, we still realize that the Constitution provides that many functions are to be performed by representatives of two or more of the three branches of government. There are many areas of overlapping powers of those three branches.2 A few examples will suffice to prove this point:
The Governor has a veto power [N.D. Const., Sec. 79]; the membership of the Board of Pardons includes the Chief Justice (judicial branch) as well as the Governor (executive branch) [N.D.Const., Sec. 76]; the membership of the Reapportionment Commission includes the Chief Justice (judicial branch), the Attorney General and the Secretary of State (executive branch), and the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives (legislative branch) [N.D.Const., Sec. 35]; and the Senate (legislative branch) has the judicial duty of trying impeachments [N.D.Const., Sec. 195],
X
I return now to the majority opinion. As I pointed out in the introduction, it abdicates our responsibility. It decides the case almost exclusively on one basis alone: the *914claimed existence of a long-continued constitutional interpretation by the Legislature of its own powers.
“Long-continued interpretation” is not a rule of construction; it is an “aid to interpretation and can be overriden by other more compelling considerations.” 2A Sands' Sutherland Statutory Construction, Sec. 49.07, p. 252. For other possible aids to construction or canons of construction, see Karl N. Llewellyn, The Common Law Tradition/Deciding Appeals (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), Appendix C, p. 521, for a list of 45 “Canons of Construction” which are often contradictory. Included in the list is the canon cited by the majority, and with it the contrary rule that “The court is not bound by an administrative construction,” citing Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co., 285 U.S. 1, 16, 52 S.Ct. 275, 281, 76 L.Ed. 587 (1922).
Of course, this Court has used the canon of long-continued interpretation as an aid to construction in the past. The majority opinion cites several such cases. But a reading of them shows that the canon was used as an aid, along with other analyses, in arriving at a decision. The present case is the first, so far as I can tell, to rely almost entirely upon the canon in reaching a decision. It is also the first time that the Legislature’s (or the Lieutenant Governor’s) acts interpreting the extent of the Senate’s powers has been held solely determinative of those powers.
This Court has also refused to follow the same canon in other cases. If “long-continued interpretation” were as sacrosanct as the majority opinion makes it, we would have had to decide differently such cases as Kuhn v. Beede, 249 N.W.2d 230 (N.D.1976), where the previous judicial construction was that absent voters ballots not initialed and stamped would be counted [see my dissent]; and Kitto v. Minot Park District, 224 N.W.2d 795 (N.D.1974), where previous judicial and legislative interpretation was that governmental subdivisions were immune from tort liability. The list could be extended indefinitely.
The very paragraph quoted by the majority from 16 C.J.S. Constitutional Law § 34, gives as a reason for the consideration given to continued interpretation:
“The injustice that would inevitably result by the disturbing of such constructions after a long period of acquiescence therein, during which many rights will necessarily have been acquired, is a very strong argument against it.” 16 C.J.S. p. 113.
There has been no suggestion that any rights have been acquired by the nonvoting of the Lieutenant Governor.
The same paragraph also says that such construction is not controlling [pp. 113-114]; that “plain, direct, and unambiguous provisions of a constitution cannot be modified or amended by practice or custom, no matter how long continued”; and that the weight of the interpretation depends in part “on the number of instances in the execution of the law in which opportunity for objection in the courts or elsewhere is afforded.” Nine times in 88 years is not many.
Furthermore, as the majority opinion shows, the first time the Senate ever had a rule forbidding the Lieutenant Governor to vote on all but procedural matters was during the current (45th) Legislative Assembly. Thus the present challenge by Lieutenant Governor Sanstead was the first possible challenge to a Senate rule on constitutional grounds. Contemporaneous construction of former ambiguous rules has no bearing on the constitutionality of a subsequent rule, mandatory in terms.
What all of this means, of course, is that we 'have a duty to consider all the aids to construction, including the history of the constitutional provision, the help we can get from other courts which have been faced with the same question, the opinion of the Attorney General (by which the Legislature should have been bound while this appeal was pending, but which it ignored), and every other aid to an intelligent and reason*915able resolution of the problem we can find.3 We should not pick out one canon of construction from among dozens of often-contradictory ones and say we have the answer. Where the majority describes the analysis of the Constitution and precedents made in the Attorney General’s opinion [see VIII, supra] and the Montana and Delaware Supreme Courts’ opinions [see VII, supra ] as an “abstract legal argument over the application of legal doctrines of constitutional construction,” it airily renounces the methods of constitutional interpretation used by the better appellate courts from the days of John Marshall to the present. Instead, it apparently proposes that we should hereafter select one of many often-conflicting alternative canons of construction. This approach is an example of what Professor Karl N. Llewellyn called the Formal Style of writing opinions and which he found deplorable. See The Common Law Tradition, supra, pp. 5, 38. It was prevalent during the period when the Michigan and Kansas cases were written (1907 to 1937).
The Formal Style is characterized, says Llewellyn, by opinions which “run in deductive form with an air or expression of single-line inevitability. ‘Principle’ is a generalization producing order which can and should be used to prune away those ‘anomalous’ cases or rules which do not fit, such cases or rules having no function except, in places where the supposed ‘principle’ does not work well, to accomplish sense — but sense is no concern of a formal-style court.” The Common Law Tradition, supra, p. 38.
The result of this approach is what Llewellyn, paraphrasing Pound and Parke, describes as “one in which by the employment of pure legal reasoning one arrived inescapably at a conclusion which no layman could possibly have foreseen.” The Common Law Tradition, supra, n. 31, p. 39.
The majority opinion in the present case starts with the “principle” that continued interpretation by a legislature is controlling, and from that faulty premise inexorably arrives at the conclusion which no laymen (and few lawyers) could possibly have foreseen: that a Lieutenant Governor cannot break ties, even though he is also president of the Senate.
Finally, on the question of what weight, if any, should be given to the canon of contemporaneous construction, I mention the fact that none of the four other Supreme Courts which have been faced with the same question [see VII, above] considered the canon of construction important enough to mention, and certainly did not rely on it. Neither should this Court.
CONCLUSION
If there is a conflict between Section 65 and Section 77, there are generally recognized ways of resolving that conflict. By every standard, Section 77 should prevail. One standard is that each should be interpreted in connection with the purpose for which it was passed. Section 65 relates to the question of how many votes are required to pass a bill (majority of a quorum or majority of members-elect), while Section 77 relates to the tie-breaking power of the Lieutenant Governor. Another way of resolving the conflict is to decide which is a general provision (Section 65) and which is a specific provision (Section 77). Another is to look at the time when each was approved, and give recognition to the one passed later in time. Again, Section 77 prevails, because it was approved later in the Constitutional Convention and because it was reapproved by the voters of North *916Dakota in 1974. And because the history of the Constitutional Convention shows that the language of Section 77 was deliberately chosen to conform to the United States Constitution, using language under which ties are broken by the vote of the Vice President, the conflict can be resolved, giv- • ing effect to both provisions, by holding that the Lieutenant Governor is a member of the Senate for the limited purpose of breaking ties.
For all of the reasons I have given in this dissenting opinion, I believe the majority is in error and that the Lieutenant Governor has now, and always has had since the Constitution was adopted in 1889, the power to break all ties, whether substantive or procedural, in the Senate of North Dakota.

. “CASTING VOTE. Where the votes of a deliberative assembly or legislative body are equally divided on any question or motion, it is the privilege of the presiding officer to cast one vote (if otherwise he would not be entitled to any vote) on either side, or to cast one additional vote, if he has already voted as a member of the body. This is called the ‘casting vote.’ Brown v. Foster, 88 Me. 49, 33 A. 662, 31 L.R.A. 116.” — Black’s Law Dictionary.

. The same situation existed in State constitutions at the time of the adoption of the United States Constitution. See “The Federalist,” No. 47, written by Madison.

. For example, see Section 1-02-39, N.D.C.C., listing seven "Aids in construction of ambiguous statutes,” one of which is: “6. The administrative construction of the statute.” The others are:
“1. The object sought to be attained.
“2. The circumstances under which the statute was enacted.
“3. The legislative history.
“4. The common law or former statutory provisions, including laws upon the same or similar subjects.
“5. The consequences of a particular construction.
“6. . . .
“7. The preamble.”