Smackdown?

You be the Judge.

Judge Yolanda Ciccone dismissed the case today, which means the Borough’s rejection of the Ordinance stands and we don’t get to vote on it ourselves.

Here’s what I said in my portion of the oral argument: outline-for-oral-arguments.doc 

Subsequent discussion was remarkable in its unremarkableness. Defense Attorney Philip George never addressed any of the self-governance issues in his oral arguments, and Judge Ciccone’s only comment, on dismissing the case, was that the ordinance was “clearly discriminatory.”

Reasonable people can differ.

We now know some very useful things:

1. The Borough government does not represent the People; it represents the State.

2. The State Legislature does not represent the People; it represents the corporate aristocracy that writes the preemptive statutes that prevent local communities from full exercise of our police powers to protect our health, safety and welfare.

3. The State Courts do not represent the People; they represent the same corporate aristocracy, as evidenced by their unswerving support in rulings that favor the preemptive statutes written by the corporate lobbyists and adopted by the State Legislature and enforced by the local municipal government, over the self-governing authority, against the health, safety and welfare, and at the expense of the People.

That’s quite a bit of information to gather – not bad for a bleak morning in January.

So, what’s next? When our ancestors confronted this kind of poo-poo, they put up with it for as long as they could, and then they threw a little tea party in Boston Harbor.

We’ve got some decisions to make.

We can simply accept that the box we live in has no discernable doors out: not through talking ourselves out of breath at public hearings locally or at state regulatory agencies; not through circulating petitions, at least of the sort that confront the root causes of our being boxed in; and not through filing lawsuits.

We can continue with the steady community-building, problem-solving work. Write and circulate a Shade Tree Commission ordinance for initiative adoption. Coordinate our participation in upcoming Master Plan review hearings this year to advocate historic and ecological preservation and sensible economic development planning. Conduct our own economic development studies and environmental resource studies and write up reports to present to the local boards and commissions, who are, of course, not legally obliged to do anything with that information. (It’s still probably a good idea to take that kind of action: we’ll know exactly what they refuse to learn about. But it has limited potential for creating lasting change, at least in the current local political climate with the bunker-like mentality of the local pols.)

To address that problem, we can look at vetting and supporting new candidates – from any party, for any local office - by screening them for their commitment to genuine local self-governance (the kind that threatens the power monopoly held by the state Legislature) and building open, collaborate, responsive relationships with local residents.

We can look at charter change through the Optional Municipal Charter Law, which is a set of local governance formats also established and enforced by the state Legislature, so as to make sure we don’t have genuine local self-governance authority through any of those structures.

We can look at convening a North Plainfield Constitutional Convention, modelled on the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, open to any North Plainfield resident who wants to be a delegate, and we could use that forum to write a local Constitution, setting forth and establishing protections for local self-governing rights not currently recognized or protected by the local government, the state government or the Courts.

We can think about direct action, like a tea party, or, ultimately secession, like the Declaration of Independence.

Lots to think about and discuss.