Schoenbeck Law review article on impeachment by Pat Powers on Scribd
State Senate President Pro Tempore Lee Schoenbeck has an article in the latest edition of the South Dakota Law Review published through the Knudson School of Law as it relates to the impeachment proceedings of the South Dakota Legislature against Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg. As noted in a preface to the article:
This article is intended as both a historical account of events surrounding South Dakota’s first impeachment trial and as a guide for those in other states (hopefully not South Dakota again) that may have to deal with an impeachment.
I thought the best takeaway was towards the end, where Senator Schoenbeck noted..
Even though the process starts in the House of Representatives, the Senate needs to engage immediately. There are decisions that need to be made or monitored jointly. For example, the Senate expended $3,271.18 on legal services. Because the Senate took a hands-off approach to House activity, there was no check on the House spending. The House spent $132,611.35 on legal services, with no trial.
The legislature was sued by the media over the House attempting to restrict access to votes made by House members on the petition for a special session.
The Senate stopped the litigation by releasing the votes, but conflict could have been avoided by the Senate being fully engaged in all decisions even before articles of impeachment reached the Senate. The legislative process is owned by both bodies, and both need to be fully engaged.
You can read it above, or in the South Dakota Law Review.
I can’t see where to find them online, but I know the SD Law Review invited articles from several other people involved in impeachment, including Reed Holwegner (the LRC director), and Will Mortenson (who filed the impeachment articles and deserves a lot of credit for pushing the issue forward).
Hopefully when those links are available we can see them too. Should make for good reading.
Mortensen was not the one that pushed it through the House of Representatives. He filed it but others pushed it with all their might.
There is not one SD Legislator involved who ever thinks back to these proceedings with any pride or self congratulatory thoughts. We were put into a horrible position without a positive outcome possible by someone who made a series of truly poor choices. If facts matter this case ended exactly where it should have ended and hopefully doesn’t occur for another 100 years.
And it really doesn’t matter which body paid for the hearings and staff needed to investigate this matter as it was the peoples business which needed to be laid down on the table with sunshine covering it all.
South Dakota Historians will appreciate Senator Schoenbeck’s effort to put down a contemporary account of our state’s first impeachment proceeding. Historians will be studying this account and other records for the next hundred years. Parts of it are like a novel dealing with political infighting by two young, ambitious politicians and their cadre. Parts of the story could have been written by Rod Serling for the Twilight Zone…A successful young man’s career is shattered by 20 seconds of indiscretion and poor judgement. And, part of it reads as a historical account of bickering and rivalry between the two legislative houses ruled by the same political party.