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KingCast says "Hey Governor Lynch and Speaker Norelli, put your hands together for this!"

By Christopher King

III. RESPONDENT NORELLI
Respondent Norelli must provide the sought emails for the same reasons as those applied to Respondent McLeod. The emails and other communication were sent to her on behalf of a public body as in Kidd v. Department of Justice 362 F.Supp.2d 291 D.D.C.,2005 (letters to a Senators produced pursuant to FOIA request). Again the operative language reads:

III. ?Governmental records? means any information created, accepted, or obtained by, or on behalf of, any public body, or [?or? ? note the disjunctive element] a quorum or majority thereof??

Put simply, any sixth grader with a decent English background will correctly point out the fact that the disjunctive phrase means that ?Governmental Records? applies to both sets of records for individuals (who receive or create them on behalf of the larger public body of congress) and committees as it is written and any other interpretation would be an absurd result. While Respondent trumpets Hughes, 152 NH 292 (2005) that case involves discussion between legislators and free flow and debate in meetings; it had nothing to do with Right-to-Know requests for documents. Again, Hughes does NOT involve emails to and from Representatives as contemplated by Kidd, supra, in which the constituent emails were produced.

Put even more simply, the act of giving and receiving emails is not a legislative act, and no amount of obfuscation can change that fact. Rusack v. Harsha, 470 F. Supp 285 (M.D. Pa 1978) doesn?t work for Respondent because that case only stands for the proposition that the letter sent from an executive branch official could not form the basis of a Defamation action. The letter itself (actually there were several) were produced. So Rusack falls in favor of Petitioner.

Same result for Respondent Norelli?s cited case of State v. Neufeld 260 Kan. 930, 926 P.2d 1325 Kan.,1996 in which the Court held:

(1) conversations between defendant and second legislator, in which defendant threatened to tell second legislator's wife that he had been caught in compromising position with other women unless he voted in particular manner on pending legislation, was protected by speech or debate clause and was not admissible in blackmail prosecution.

But again the communications themselves were produced. So Neufeld falls in favor of Petitioner, and so on and so on and so on. The emails must be produced pursuant to Kidd.

The legislature can adopt its own rules, but only to the extent that those rules do not violate any other provisions of the New Hampshire Constitution, RSA 91-A or FOIA.

Full post as published by Chris King's 1st Amendment Page on November 08, 2008 (boomark / email).