The Blunt Canons of Constitutional Construction

As Cole pointed out in a recent post, Matt Blunt this week made an appointment to the state Conservation Commission despite the fact that his constitutional power to do so had lapsed.  Blunt's power to appoint a new commissioner, according to Article IV section 40(a) of the Missouri Constitution, extended only for the period ending thirty days after the end of the previous commissioners term.  Blunt made the appointment 38 days after the term's expiration.

The Blunt team speciously claims that the Constitutional thirty-day provision applies only when a commissioner leaves office early but, as David Lieb points out today, this conflicts directly with a legal judgment made by former GOP Governor John Ashcroft in 1991.  

But the most telling part of the Lieb piece is the statement from Blunt's press shop about how they came to parse the meaning of the state constitution differently from John Ashcroft:

When asked Wednesday to reconcile Blunt's
position with that of Ashcroft's, a Blunt spokeswoman stood by the
current interpretation but did not directly answer the question.

"I
don't know what politics were in play at that time and I wouldn't be in
a position to make a judgment on what Ashcroft did or did not do," said
Blunt spokeswoman Jessica Robinson.

Of course. Everything the Blunt administration does is simply a matter of politics --the award of no-bid state contracts, use of the highway patrol, tax credits-- so why should interpretation of the constitution be be dictated by anything other than "the politics in play at the time"?

Good thing we'll soon have a governor for whom the law is simply the law.­