SJC Hearing on Foreign Nationals/ Disclosure Petition

[nick bokron]

     Hi All,

            For those who did not know, we also had petition language this year dealing with foreign nationals influencing our political process by ensuring total disclosure of donations used for political purposes. We tried to ensure that this language would also affect dark money. The language was not certified by the AG's office and our effort has been thwarted by AG Healy as she is demanding that the Clerks not certify the signatures unless we file an affidavit stating that the required amount of signatures had been gathered. This was applied to our Amendment last year, which we agreed to under duress as we had no fallback petition to gather signatures for. The results were terrible for us and this year we decided to not agree to that same Order and fight back. We believe that the Order that we had to agree to last year was never used previously.

           We lost and an appeal would be before the full bench of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. I have attached the decision and the cases cited will be linked to in case any have interest. This case was about getting petition forms and being treated as if the language was certified by the AG's office. In 2016 and 2014 the AG's certification/ non-certification was overturned. We feel that since the AG is not infallible on certification, our petition language could be perfectly constitutional and we are being stripped of our equal protection rights and also being treated as guilty until proven innocent.

           If any would care to voice their concerns about how AG Healy would be against treating us in a just manner that had been precedent for decades, especially with our effort to address foreign national influence on our political process, please contact Assistant Attorney General Juliana Rice at 1 617 963 2583.

           Obviously we have our petition dealing with limiting political contributions from outside of MA that was certified and we are gathering signatures for.

                                        Thanx,

                                              Nick
                                              781 715 7822

http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/392/392mass79.html
http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/390/390mass780.html