May 26,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, More or less all lawyers in New Jersey who are both intelligent and honest will freely admit that, even though the New Jersey Supreme Court has boldly declared and decreed that our state constitution mandates the ready availability of so-called “affordable housing”, the actual text of that document mandates no such thing. In other words, the New Jersey Supreme Court made it all up based on its policy preferences.
For its part, the New Jersey legislature subsequently failed effectively to fight against the Supreme Court’s usurpation of its constitutionally-bestowed power to devise and enact generally-applicable public laws. So why has the unconstitutional Mount Laurel regime survived and become so well-ingrained in New Jersey? Because the vast majority of New Jersey attorneys have regrettably maintained decades of strict radio silence on this issue, thereby allowing the Mount Laurel regime to develop the necessary patina of legitimacy. Some have done this because they fear the professional consequences of vocal dissent. In other words, they are ruled by political correctness. However most do so because they so heartily support the underlying affordable housing POLICY that they are willing to accept however much DAMAGE the Mount Laurel regime will unavoidably wreak on the integrity of our state constitution.
This is such a brutal attack on the New Jersey State Constitution that it arguably amounts to a violation of the United States Constitution. This is because the Mount Laurel regime is both judicially-created, and judicially-enforced, and therefore deprives New Jersey residents of the small “r” republican form of government the U.S. Constitution guarantees to all U.S. citizens. As a rueful result, New Jersey is now poised to be used by political progressives as a constitutional-law-based model for imposing a similar housing policy on the rest of the country, much like Massachusettes’ all-encompassing healthcare regime (i.e., Romneycare) was used by Obama and Ridgewood’s own Jonathan Gruber as a template for foisting the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) on every U.S. citizen that currently draws breath.
