Court Opinion

ID: 9712995
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:04:38.172813+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:15.680239
License: Public Domain

HENDERSON,
Justice (dissenting).
I join in Justice - Dunn’s dissent which would strike down Senate Bill 256 of the 1983 South Dakota Session Laws as being unconstitutional as it violates Article III, § 21 of the South Dakota Constitution. Senate Bill 256 clearly embraces more than one subject for it amends four separate and distinct, pre-existing original acts. These *747original acts, sought to be amended, pertain to (1) bank holding companies, (2) ownership of banks, (3) taxation of banks, and (4) taxation of insurance companies. The State of South Dakota fought like a tiger to spread before this Court the entire history of Senate Bill 256, not to mention all of the economic and political background of this bill. From the legislative history which has been spread before us, it is apparent that Senate Bill 256 has a history disclosing that a number of distinct subjects contained within its body were added subsequent to the original introduction of the bill, but the title was never altered or enlarged. This reinforces Justice Dunn’s viewpoint that the true intent of the act is not contained in the title.
Senate Bill 256 was introduced through a rules suspension, passed both houses of the legislature without hearing or notice of hearing, was approved by the Governor and filed with the Secretary of State to become effective immediately due to an emergency clause, all between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 6:47 p.m. on March 4, 1983. This was ram and jam legislation affecting every man, woman, and child in this state and has a profound effect on the lives of the citizenry of South Dakota.
Can the State Legislature literally do anything it wants to do, at any time, to anyone, without answering to a form of constitutional government which this state has? The answer is an emphatic “No!”
Senate Bill 256 is unconstitutional when tested within the framework of Article III, § 17 of the South Dakota Constitution, which provides that “[ejvery bill shall be read twice, by number and title once when introduced, and once upon final passage, but one reading at length may be demanded at any time before final passage.” Although this bill had two readings in the Senate, the Journal of the House of Representatives for March 4, 1983, discloses that there was never any first reading in the House of Representatives. The legislators of this state who enact the laws by which our citizens must live, should conform to the highest law of this state, the State Constitution, when they enact laws. In a spirit of fairness, the people of this state should be given a meaningful opportunity to be heard on matters of far-reaching consequence which affect their daily lives. This was not done on Senate Bill 256. Joint Senate and House Rule 6-12 requires that every bill shall be read twice, by number and title, once when introduced, and once upon final passage. Joint Rule 6-30 requires that no bill shall have its second reading or be put upon its final passage until at least one legislative day after the same has been reported to the House by the committee to which the same was referred and such report read to the body. Joint Rule 6-30 further provides that no report of any standing committee shall be acted upon until at least one legislative day after it has been read to the body. The Senate Journal discloses that there was no committee references or committee report between the first and second readings in that body. Why are there such rules of lawmaking? Article III, § 9 of the South Dakota Constitution provides the answer: “Each house shall determine the rules of its proceedings .... ” These rules adopted by each house must necessarily be something of substance upon which the people of this state have the right to reasonably rely. They cannot be shallow expressions of meaningless quality and they should not be treated with disdain. Joint Rule 7-1.2 requires that agendas pertaining to bills and any other proposals which are to be considered at any meeting of a standing committee shall be posted on the bulletin board in each of the houses, and it is mandatory that at least one legislative day shall intervene between the date of posting and the date of committee hearing. On Senate Bill 256, the journal shows no committee reference, there was no hearing before the standing committee, and no notice of hearing. It is difficult to fathom why this legislation of such great economic impact to the people of this state was treated with callous disregard of the legislative process.
*748Article III, § 13 provides:
Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings and publish the same from time to time, except such parts as require secrecy, and the yeas and nays of members on any question shall be taken at the desire of one-sixth of those present and entered upon the journal.
Our State Legislature currently maintains daily legislative journals which are printed and distributed to members of the legislature on each successive day. Each day, a legislative committee reviews these journals. If approved by the committee, they are adopted and certified on a daily basis. SDCL 2-7-8 provides that the daily journals are printed and delivered to the legislature on or before the convening of the legislature on the following legislative day. Great care is taken to see that each legislator is provided with a copy and these journals are printed at sizeable expense to the taxpayers. Am I now to believe that I should pay little heed to this constitutional mandate of keeping journals and disregard the importance of the legislators receiving these journals? SDCL 2-7-10 provides that the corrected daily copies of the journal of both the Senate and House of Representatives shall constitute the permanent record of the legislative proceedings. Aggregately, the State Constitution and state law cry out that these journals are creatures of absolute mandate. By inserting the constitutional mandate, the people of this state had to have intended that each body of the legislature should give a true and complete account of its legislative activities. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the application of the “enrolled bill rule,” either in its original or modified form, forsakes the mandate of the people in the constitution and permits the legislators to be unaccountable as a practical matter for the procedures which they followed in the enactment of the law. The States of Minnesota and Michigan support my viewpoint. It is, in my opinion, the more enlightened approach. Bull v. King, 205 Minn. 427, 286 N.W. 311 (1939); McClellan v. Stein, 229 Mich. 203, 201 N.W. 209 (1924).
The manifest important purpose of requiring the Legislature to keep a journal is that the people whom they represent may be able to learn whether a published law has in truth been constitutionally enacted, and to have a permanent and reliable primary record evidencing its validity.
McClellan v. Stein, 201 N.W. at 212. For the record, it should be perceived that Min-nehaha County v. South Dakota State Bd. of Equalization, 84 S.D. 640, 176 N.W.2d 56 (1970), predated by eight years the adoption of the modern Rules of Evidence by the Supreme Court in 1978 and codified in SDCL ch. 19-9. The entire purpose of these new Rules of Evidence is to develop the law of evidence so that in the end the truth will come out and proceedings will be justly determined. I do not believe in an archaic rule of evidence which prohibits this Court’s ability to determine whether or not the legislature has followed constitutionally mandated requirements in the passage of laws. Looking at an enrolled bill, and no further, is to forsake the purpose of Article III, § 13 which mandates legislative journals. In O’Neil v. Demers, 44 R.I. 504, 511, 118 A. 677, 680 (1922), the Supreme Court of Rhode Island said:
Article 4, section 8, of the state Constitution provides that each house of the General Assembly shall keep a journal of its proceedings. These journals constitute public records of the matters therein contained. In our opinion, when a question arises, as in this case, regarding the validity of an enrolled act and depending for its proper determination upon the nature of the action of the houses of the General Assembly, we may, in the consideration of that question, receive the evidence furnished by the public records embodied in the legislative journals.
A more recent case elaborated:
While we give all due deference to the legislature as a coordinate branch of government, it is our solemn obligation to determine whether the act now before us was enacted in pursuance to the provisions of our constitution. Accordingly, *749we have, in our quest for an answer to this question, taken judicial notice of the legislative journals for the ... General Assembly.
State Terminal Corp. v. General Scrap Iron, Inc., 107 R.I. 24, 30, 264 A.2d 334, 337 (1970). That case appropriated the rationale of 1 Cooley, Constitutional Limitations 277 (8th ed. 1927):
Each house keeps a journal of its proceedings, which is a public record, and of which the courts are at liberty to take judicial notice. If it should appear from these journals that any act did not receive the requisite majority, or that in respect to it the legislature did not follow any requirement of the constitution, or that in any other respect the act was not constitutionally adopted, the courts may act upon this evidence, and adjudge the statute void.
My position is this: The legislature can suspend the rules and pass wise or foolish laws, but, in that lawmaking process, it cannot directly contravene the State Constitution; making laws is the State Legislature’s business but protecting the State Constitution is this Court’s business. Viewing an enrolled bill and blessing it as being legal is to forsake, often times, truth. The “enrolled bill” should be the starting place to resolve disputes concerning the constitutional enactment of a statute. Journal entries should be permissive rebuttal of the presumption of the legality of an enrolled bill. We must not spurn SDCL 2-7-12, which essentially provides that a duly certified copy by the South Dakota Secretary of State of the legislature’s daily journal shall be received in all courts of the state as original evidence. This Court completely overlooked this statute in its 1970 decision in the Minnehaha County v. South Dakota State Bd. of Equalization case. The state relies upon four old decisions in this Court concerning the “modified enrolled bill rule”: Barnsdall Refining Corp. v. Welsh, 64 S.D. 647, 269 N.W. 853 (1936); State v. Schmidt, 42 S.D. 267, 173 N.W. 838 (1919); Krakowski v. Waskey, 33 S.D. 335, 145 N.W. 566 (1914); Narregang v. Brown County, 14 S.D. 357, 85 N.W. 602 (1901). These cases, in my opinion, would disallow a challenge or impeachment of the “contents” of a bill enacted by the legislature. However, these decisions should not be interpreted to mean that the modified enrolled bill rule should be held to apply to the determination of whether the legislature has followed mandatory constitutional procedures in the enactment of legislation. The people, as I have endeavored to note, have placed constitutional restrictions upon the methods of legislation and if the legislature neglects or willfully refuses to conform to these constitutional rules or is pressured to such extent that they forsake their constitutional duties, in the end, their labor, will be held to be of no effect and this Court has a duty to so declare. Metropolitan Casualty Ins. Co. of New York v. Basford, 31 S.D. 149, 139 N.W.2d 795 (1913). This Nation was founded with a checks and balance system. So it is, also, with this sovereign state. It is this Court’s duty to determine when the legislature has disregarded constitutional mandates and restrictions. To vault a rule of evidence over the State Constitution and state law denigrates the role of this Court in a constitutional system of government. The constitution should be our rock and neither the legislature nor a rule of evidence conceived by the legal academe should prevail against it. When the legislature has flouted the State Constitution, and introduced and passed a law within nine hours, not giving the people of this state any due process in the lawmaking process, this Court owes its citizenry a duty to uphold the constitution. Like a lighthouse in a stormy night, the constitution can bring us to port safely but we shall surely shipwreck on the shoals if we pay it no heed.