announced that they did not intend to contest the recall petition<\/a> before the Alaska Supreme Court and used the occasion to denounce the supreme court and its chief justice, alleging that the court had prejudged the issue and that Chief Justice Joel Bolger “refused” to recuse himself, though he was a “material witness.” Instead, they would place their “trust in the voters, not unelected judges.”<\/p>\nThe language is all-too-reminiscent of the rhetoric that one hears on the national scene and is a disgrace to those attorney advocates associated with “Stand Tall.” It is likely that the Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allows the recall petition to go forward — Alaska law weighs heavily on the side of the petitioners — but nothing in the court’s order of Feb. 14 establishing an expedited briefing schedule (one that recall opponents themselves also requested) suggests a predetermined outcome.<\/p>\n
The charge that the chief justice has “refused” to recuse himself implies that he has been requested to do so. “Stand Tall” has made no such request. The reason for recusal: he is a “material witness” Really? The recall allegation was the governor’s failure to make a judicial appointment within the time specified by the Alaska Constitution. As administrative head of the judicial branch, the chief justice simply advised the governor that he had a duty to pick from the list of nominees made by the judicial council. In that sense, we’re all “material witnesses.”<\/p>\n
Bruce Botelho<\/p>\n
Douglas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Benefiting from Corona virus and ‘Stand Tall’ is stooping low. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":58578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-58577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58577"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=58577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}