Members of the West Virginia Senate have been ready to sit down because the court docket of impeachment in 2018 when articles have been offered towards state Supreme Courtroom justices, however the proceedings have been halted by court docket order. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Trump believes Modification 1 will restore the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
Former Delegate Isaac Sponaugle opposes Modification 1 as a result of it might intervene with due course of rights of elected officers in future impeachment proceedings. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
Members of the West Virginia Senate have been ready to sit down because the court docket of impeachment in 2018 when articles have been offered towards state Supreme Courtroom justices, however the proceedings have been halted by court docket order. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
CHARLESTON — West Virginia voters will determine on a constitutional modification in November that would make it clear that impeachment powers lie solely with the Legislature, however opponents imagine it might present no recourse for future political retributions.
Voters have 4 state constitutional amendments on the poll when early voting begins on Oct. 26 and on election day on Nov. 8, together with Modification 1.
Modification 1 would add language to the Structure stating “courts don’t have any authority or jurisdiction to intercede or intervene in or intervene with impeachment proceedings of the Home of Delegates or the Senate.”
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Modification 1 additionally clarifies that no judgments rendered by the Senate in an impeachment trial might be appealed or reviewed by circuit courts, the brand new Intermediate Courtroom of Appeals or the state Supreme Courtroom of Appeals.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Trump, R-Morgan, mentioned Modification 1 was a response by the Legislature to actions taken in 2018 by an appointed panel of judges appearing because the Supreme Courtroom after former justice Margaret Workman filed a lawsuit to halt her impeachment trial within the Senate after the Home of Delegates filed articles of impeachment towards all of the justices of the excessive court docket at the moment.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Trump believes Modification 1 will restore the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
“I and plenty of others at all times thought the Structure was clear…it was by no means in anybody’s creativeness that the judiciary might intervene or intercede in that course of,” Trump mentioned. “It’s critically vital that we keep the constitutional checks and balances…and that we don’t create a super-authority in a single department of presidency that has authority over the opposite two in all instances.”
Isaac Sponaugle is an lawyer and a former Democratic member of the Home of Delegates from Pendleton County. He led the opposition within the Home to the articles of impeachment towards Workman, Davis, and Walker. He’s involved Modification 1 would insulate lawmakers from scrutiny in the event that they determine to violate an official’s due course of rights in future impeachment proceedings.
“In essence, the modification would strip away due course of rights for a person going by way of the impeachment course of,” Sponaugle mentioned.
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Gov. Jim Justice known as a particular session June 2018 for the Legislature to begin impeachment proceedings after months of studies and audits exhibiting waste, fraud and abuse by a number of justices, together with former justices Loughry and Menis Ketchum, each of whom have been charged by the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Ketchum resigned in July 2018 and pleaded responsible to 1 rely of wire fraud previous to impeachment proceedings. Loughry was convicted of 11 expenses in U.S. District Courtroom in October 2018.
Former Delegate Isaac Sponaugle opposes Modification 1 as a result of it might intervene with due course of rights of elected officers in future impeachment proceedings. (Photograph courtesy of WV Legislative Pictures)
In August 2018, the Home adopted 11 articles of impeachment towards Loughry, Workman, Davis and Walker. Davis resigned the day after impeachment earlier than she may very well be tried within the Senate. Solely Walker, who now serves as chief justice, confronted an impeachment trial originally of October 2018. She was acquitted and censured within the one catch-all impeachment cost that accused all 4 justices of maladministration.
Workman, who was subsequent to be tried earlier than the Senate on her impeachment expenses, filed swimsuit earlier than the Supreme Courtroom. An all-appointed Supreme Courtroom panel made up of circuit court docket judges put a cease to Workman’s impeachment trial in a 3-2 determination in October 2018.
The judges acknowledged of their ruling that the Home didn’t observe its personal impeachment guidelines it adopted to question Workman, Walker and the opposite justices. The court docket additionally argued the Home violated the separation of powers by citing the Canons of Judicial Ethics in a number of of the impeachment expenses.
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The Senate and Home appealed the Supreme Courtroom determination to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom in 2019. After arguments by each Workman and the Legislature have been submitted, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom declined to overview the state Supreme Courtroom’s ruling on the constitutional points raised by its halting of the impeachment trials.
Trump mentioned Workman’s attorneys additionally filed motions earlier than the Senate appearing because the impeachment court docket elevating points with how the Home performed itself when crafting the articles of impeachment. These arguments have been legitimate to make, however they need to have been made through the impeachment trial as an alternative of the state Supreme Courtroom, he mentioned.
“There have been arguments that have been raised by then-justice Workman that I might characterize as non-frivolous arguments about whether or not or not there have been defects in the best way the articles of impeachment have been adopted within the Home of Delegates,” Trump mentioned. “However the place to make these arguments – and the one place to make these arguments – was the West Virginia Senate, which has the only real constitutional authority to strive impeachments.”
However Sponaugle mentioned that future impeachment proceedings would profit from having third-party scrutiny to step in. Whereas he believes that the courts can’t overrule the Senate if it guidelines in favor of an article of impeachment, Sponaugle does imagine the courts have a proper to step in if the Home violates its personal guidelines it makes use of to give you articles of impeachment.
“The entire level of due course of is when the state appearing right here, it will be the Legislature, the proceedings must be honest,” Sponaugle mentioned. “The state can set no matter guidelines it desires to set, however they should observe the foundations. If you happen to don’t observe your personal guidelines, that’s when due course of kicks in.”
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Trump additionally cited a 2010 state Supreme Courtroom determination in Holmes v. Clawges, the place justices dominated in favor of the Legislature in a matter the place a circuit court docket tried to pressure the Legislature to take away point out of a pardon from its official journals. Trump believes the appointed Supreme Courtroom in 2018 ignored prior precedents upholding the Legislature’s authority over its personal procedures.
“It’s a basic precept of constitutional regulation that below the Separation of Powers doctrine, courts don’t have any authority– by mandamus, prohibition, contempt or in any other case — to intervene with the proceedings of both home of the Legislature,” Ketchum wrote within the majority opinion on the time.
“That’s the standing syllabus level…that governs the query of whether or not or not the judiciary can simply interject itself into these proceedings,” Trump mentioned. “The court docket itself eight years earlier than mentioned completely not below any circumstances. That’s what separation of powers requires, that the three branches of presidency keep in their very own lane.”
Sponaugle agrees with Trump that the courts can’t intervene with the interior guidelines of the Home and Senate. It’s when the Home and Senate act exterior of these guidelines when the courts ought to have jurisdiction.
“There are checks and balances on all three branches of presidency,” Sponaugle mentioned. “There can be no checks and balances with Modification 1. There would simply be one physique that may be weighing in on it. I feel the judiciary has a really restricted examine with regard to impeachment proceedings and judgments, however I do suppose it’s a superb examine. On the finish of the day, you wish to ensure that these are good checks on the proceedings. If you happen to remove that and if there are not any guardrails, then something can occur.”
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No matter what occurs with Modification 1, Trump doesn’t wish to undergo one other impeachment means of state elected officers anytime quickly.
“I hope with all my coronary heart that no future legislature or the residents of West Virginia by no means once more must undergo a scenario the place excessive judicial officers of the state are impeached and must bear impeachment trials,” Trump mentioned. “I hope there’s by no means any future circumstances when this happens.”
Steven Allen Adams might be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Strong upper level winds are expected to keep rain totals in West Virginia on the lower side from the moisture produced by Hurricane Helene.
The National Weather Service map on Thursday afternoon. (NWS)
National Weather Meteorologist John Peck said the rain and wind will arrive Friday morning and strong winds will hit the mountains and squeeze out a lot of moisture keeping rainfall totals at moderate levels.
“You’ll basically have downslope winds coming off the mountains and that kind of eat the rain as it tries to fall through the columns,” Peck told MetroNews.
The lowlands will probably pick up an inch of rain or maybe a little more. The rain will begin in the pre-dawn hours Friday. The strong winds aloft will be between 50-70 mph with gusts between 30-40 mph at ground level.
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The main part of what’s left of Helene will pass over West Virginia Friday afternoon.
Peck said this week’s rain has been good but way short of what’s needed to break the drought.
“To get the groundwater recharged we need about 10 inches or so and this time of year or don’t have those big systems coming in,” Peck said.
Some areas of the southern coalfields have received 3 to 5 inches of rain since Tuesday while other areas were closer to an inch.
“We’re just going to need just a long period of relatively light rain,” Peck said.
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Next week’s weather pattern has a few more opportunities for rain but not a lot, Peck said.
“It’s going to be relatively dry outside any tropical influence,” he said.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia’s new drug czar has a very personal reason for wanting to end the state’s opioid crisis: He was once addicted to prescription painkillers himself.
Dr. Stephen Loyd, who has been treating patients with substance use disorder since he got sober two decades ago, says combating opioid addiction in the state with the highest rate of overdose deaths isn’t just his job. It’s an integral part of his healing.
“I really feel like it’s been the biggest driver of my own personal recovery,” says Loyd, who became the director of West Virginia’s Office of Drug Control Policy last month. “I feel that the longer I do this, the more I don’t mind the guy I see in the mirror every morning.”
Loyd is no stranger to talking about his addiction. He has told his story to lawmakers and was an inspiration for the character played by Michael Keaton in the Hulu series, “Dopesick.” Keaton plays a mining community doctor who becomes addicted to prescription drugs. Loyd was also an expert witness in a case leading to Tennessee’s first conviction of a pill mill doctor in 2005, and has testified against opioid manufacturers and distributors in trials spelling out their culpability in the U.S. opioid crisis, resulting in massive settlements nationwide.
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West Virginia was awarded nearly $1 billion in settlement money, and a private foundation has been working with the state to send checks to affected communities to support addiction treatment, recovery and prevention programs.
Loyd says he is ready to help advise the foundation on how to distribute that money, saying the state has a “moral and ethical responsibility” to spend it wisely.
The doctor started misusing painkillers when he was chief resident at East Tennessee State University hospital. He was given a handful of hydrocodone pills — opioid painkillers — after a dental procedure. He says he threw the pills in his glove compartment and forgot about them until he was stopped at a red light, driving home after a particularly hard day at work.
Anxious and depressed, he was struggling to cope with his more than 100-hour-a-week hospital schedule.
“I thought, ‘My patients take these things all the time,’” he says. “And I broke one in half and took it. By the time I got home, all my ills were cured. My job wasn’t as bad, my home life was better. And I wasn’t as worried.”
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Within four years, he went from taking half a 5-milligram hydrocodone pill to taking 500 milligrams of oxycodone — another opiate — in a single day.
He understands the shame many feel about their addiction. To fuel his addiction, he stole pills from family members and bought them off a former patient.
“Back then, would I steal from you? Yes,” he says. “I would do whatever I needed to do to get the thing I thought I would die without.”
But he didn’t understand he was addicted until the first time he felt the intense sickness associated with opiate withdrawal. He thought he had come down with the flu.
“And then the next day, when I got my hands on pills and I took the first one, and I got better in about 10 minutes,” he says. “I realized I couldn’t stop or I’d get sick.”
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It was a “pretty devastating moment” that he says he can never forget.
A family intervention ended with Loyd going to the detox unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in July 2004. After five days, he joined a treatment program and, he says, he has been sober ever since.
In recovery, Loyd threw himself into addiction medicine with a focus on pregnant heroin users who often face judgment and stigma. He said his own experience enabled him to see these vulnerable women in a different light.
“I couldn’t believe that somebody could just keep sticking a needle in their arm — what are they doing? — until it happened to me,” he says.
It was when he was in the detox unit that Loyd first noticed disparities in addiction treatment. There were 24 people on his floor, and the then-37-year-old doctor was the only one who was referred for treatment. The rest were simply released.
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“I get a pass because I have MD after my name, and I’ve known that for a long time,” he says. “And it’s not fair.”
He calls this “the two systems of care” for substance use disorder: A robust and compassionate system for people with money and another, less effective model “basically for everybody else.”
He’s intent on changing that.
He says he also wants to expand access to prescription drugs such as methadone and suboxone, which can help wean people with substance use disorder off opioids. Loyd says he was never offered either medication when he was detoxing 20 years ago “and it kind of makes me angry that I suffered unnecessarily.”
One of Loyd’s priorities will be working out how to measure meaningful outcomes — something he says happens in every field of medicine except addiction medicine.
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A cardiologist can tell a patient with heart disease about their course of treatment and estimate their chances of a recovery or of being pain free in a year or 18 months, he says.
“In addiction, we don’t have that. We look at outcomes differently,” Loyd says.
When people are referred for treatment, the metrics are not the same. How many showed up? How many engaged in the program and graduated? How many continued to recover and progressed in their lives?
“We don’t know how effective we’ve been at spending our money because I don’t think that we’ve really talked a lot about looking at meaningful outcomes,” he says.
As for his own measurable outcomes, Loyd said there have been a few, including walking his daughter down the aisle and serving as his son’s best man.
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And on his phone he has a folder of baby pictures and photographs celebrating recovery milestones, sent to him by former patients.
“It’s what drives me,” he said. “The great paradox is you get to keep something by giving it away. And I get to do that.”
WASHINGTON — The speaker of the Rhode Island House described how his state has tackled affordable housing and how it could be a model for local and state governments across the country in a Wednesday hearing before members of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee.
“My mantra has been: production, production and more production,” Rhode Island House of Representatives Speaker Joseph Shekarchi said.
Shekarchi and housing experts urged the senators to take a multipronged government approach to tackling the lack of affordable housing, such as reforming zoning, expanding land for building and streamlining permits.
“I really believe this is an all-hands-on-deck crisis,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said.
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Murray said that in her state, there is a shortage of 172,000 homes. She asked one of the witnesses, Paul Williams, the executive director at the Center for Public Enterprise, how the federal government could help state and local governments tackle the issue. The Center for Public Enterprise is a think tank that aids public agencies in implementing programs in the energy and housing sector.
Williams said the federal government should encourage municipalities to look at local permitting and zoning processes to see if those delay new apartment construction projects or prevent them from happening.
He added that financing can also remain a challenge.
Tax credits
Another witness, Greta Harris, the president and CEO of the Better Housing Coalition, an organization based in Virginia that aims to produce affordable housing, said the federal government should consider expanding the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. That program provides local groups with a tax incentive to construct or rehabilitate low-income housing.
“The low-income housing tax credit program has been extremely effective in allowing us to produce more housing units and also preserve existing affordable housing units,” Harris said.
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She added Congress should consider expanding federal housing vouchers, and that closing and down payment assistance in home purchases is crucial. Federal housing vouchers help provide housing for low-income families, those who are elderly, people with disabilities and veterans.
Most wealth building is through owning a home and acquiring equity in that home, she said.
“People can use that equity for retirement, to help their kids go to college, to start a business, and to be able to breathe a little bit,” Harris said.
How a state can be successful
Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the chairman of the committee, asked Shekarchi to describe some successful impacts of the state’s approach to housing.
Shekarchi said that “we haven’t substituted state control for local control,” and have instead made the process to get building permits and address land disputes easier. He added that Rhode Island also created a role for a housing secretary, to address the issue.
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“Overall, you’re seeing an increase in building permits,” he said.
Indiana GOP Sen. Mike Braun asked Harris if housing should be left to local government and private entrepreneurs, rather than Congress.
“Left to its own devices, the market is not equitable and it serves certain portions of our society and not all,” she said.
She said the government at all levels — local, state and federal — should participate in addressing the housing crisis.
GOP bashes Harris plans
The top Republican on the committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, blamed the Biden administration for the cost of housing
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He also criticized a housing plan released by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, that would provide $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time home buyers — a proposal that hinges on congressional approval.
“Economists from across the political spectrum have noted how such policies would backfire by pushing up housing prices even further,” Grassley said of Harris’ policy.
Ed Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute Housing Center, said that there is a shortage of about 3.8 million homes. He argued that Harris’ plan to give down payment assistance “is almost certain to lead to higher home prices.”
“The millions of program recipients would become price setters for all buyers in the neighborhoods where the recipients buy,” Pinto said.
