Over a dozen Minnesota state legislators have joined ranks with the Free Minnesota Small Business Coalition to stop what they argue are Governor Tim Walz’s unconstitutional abuses of power. A hearing in the case will take place, July 16, 2020, in Minnesota District Court.
Minneapolis attorney Erick Kaardal of Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson, P.A. is representing the group in a lawsuit against Governor Walz, whom they are charging with overstepping his bounds and interfering in the legislative process, violating civil liberties of legislators, business owners, and the 5.6 million Minnesotans.
Kaardal explains that in addition to robbing legislators of their authority, Walz has also reduced his 5.6 million citizens to “wards of the state” status.
“In Minnesota, when a child is made a ward of the state, it is only because there are no better alternatives. By refusing to take any of the available less-extreme options Walz has placed Minnesotans under his own thumb with his flagrant and unconstitutional curtailing of civil liberties,” says Kaardal.
“The Minnesota Constitution makes it clear that the state’s legislature is the body that enacts the laws and the governor vetoes or signs off. Governor Walz’s emergency powers are limited, and he is abusing that power over every single Minnesotan by his arbitrary and unfounded dictates,” stated Kaardal, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School.
Kaardal further explained how businesses – and by extension average Minnesotans – are being devastated by the governor’s orders, which forces them to remain closed under tenuous legal grounds.
The group originally filed a petition for Quo Warranto on May 28, 2020. This petition asked the court to ban Governor Walz from enforcing his COVID-19 executive orders and from issuing new COVID-19 executive orders.
“When the governor issued his executive orders,” says the Minneapolis attorney, “he exceeded his authority under the Minnesota Constitution’s separation of powers principle regarding the non-delegation doctrine.”
Walz has both “denied the legislature its rights regarding his orders” and “invoked emergency powers for a public health emergency, an authority which he has no right to exercise.” Bottom line, as Kaardal sees it, “the end result of his autocratic behavior is that businesses are suffering, jobs are being lost, and people’s incomes have been devastated.”
Kaardal and the other attorneys at Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson, P.A. are committed to securing the civil rights of the plaintiffs, both business and legislative. His goal is to highlight Walz’s gubernatorial behavior as incredibly irresponsible and assert that Minnesota’s governor has been “acting like a drunken monarch” at a time when he should be supporting American enterprise.
