Child Support Guidelines Case at the Mass. Supreme Court: Challenge to the Regulatory State

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has decided to take the appeal of a case challenging the way child support guidelines were manufactured out of thin air by one judge and a secret committee.  This case goes way beyond the actual issue of child support guidelines, and challenges the very heart of the way government now does business - it imposes law by fiat of bureaucrats and judges.  If the appeal succeeds, it could be the beginning of the restoration of constitutional limitations to the leviathan state. If it loses, it could cement the regime's iron grip on the culture even more securely.

Here is why this matters. We challenged the imposition of new child support guidelines, not on the basis of them being too high, although they surely are. The challenge was too the METHOD of how they were made into law, namely being imposed by one judge, relying on the recommendation of a secret committee that the judge hand picked to give him the results he wished have.

Chief Justice of Administration and Management (abbreviated the CJAM) Robert A. Mulligan is the one who actually made this determination.  When challenged with a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court, the judge there justified Justice Mulligan's action, and dismissed the case.  I guess it didn't help that we were suing his boss, who could have sent him to preside in Gopher Gulch District Court for the rest of his life if he didn't do the "right thing", i.e. rule in favor of Justice Mulligan's unilateral imposition of child support guidelines.

In federal law, child support guidelines may be established by administrative, judicial or legislative action.  However, in Massachusetts, as in most states, our constitution requires that laws be passed by our legislature.  The original Massachusetts Constitution, including a 30-article Declaration Of rights, was written by John Adams (yes, THAT John Adams) in 1780.  Here, we can pass laws in only one way.

Article 30 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights contains the most clear, unambiguous, impossible to misinterpret clause about the legislature being the only body which can pass laws. It says, in pertinent part:

In the government of this Commonwealth. . . The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

Could it be clearer?  Even the most slippery slimeball of a weasel lawyer couldn't twist that into saying that a judge could pass a law instead of the state legislature, could he?  Well, he did.

And to add insult to injury, the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General is defending that hypocritical position.  Shouldn't the highest legal officer in the state defend the Constitution?  One might think so, but one would be wrong.  They are defending the chief justice, not the law.

The principle involved in this case goes far beyond the establishment of child support guidelines.  The executive and judicial branches go around the legislature on a daily basis.  If this appeal is successful, it would re-establish some limits on the power which these departments have illegally grabbed.

Ironically, the courthouse in which the hearing in this matter will take place is named after the very man, John Adams, whose timeless Declaration of Rights rebukes the government's raw power grab in this case, and its cowardly defense of that usurpation. I wonder if the justices on the Supreme Judicial Court will take note of the irony.