BREAKING NEWS! RFK Jr discusses lawsuit filed today!
Extra, extra hear all about it!
Scott Street handles a broad range of business litigation and trial work, for both plaintiffs anddefendants. Mr. Street participated in a high-profile civil rights trial against the LAPD; he also handled several other high profile civil rights cases in Southern California. He defended a regional bank in a purported class action based on its use of the “365/360” method to calculate interest on short-term loans. He defended a commercial real estate broker against negligence and breach of fiduciary duty claims. He also helped defend an appliance manufacturer in a $10million products liability case filed by a local magazine publisher (the case was settled favorably just before trial).
Mr. Street represents real estate companies, developers, Fortune 500 companies, local businesses, public interest organizations, and individuals. He has served on the Board ofDirectors of Five Acres — the Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society of Los Angeles, and on the Advisory Board of the Western Center on Law and Poverty.
Hey everybody, we have a really exciting show today.
I have my friend, my colleague, Scott Streep, who is an extraordinary lawyer, and we are announcing today on this podcast that we filed this morning a lawsuit representing the Orange County Board of Education against Abbott Newsom in the California Supreme Court, the highest court in the state.
challenging the use of these emergency powers as a violation of the administrative laws of California.
I'm very, very excited because I think this is a suit that has a good chance in prevailing and bringing down the House of Guards.
Scott, why don't you tell us about the case?
Thanks, Bobby.
And thank you for having me on.
Real pleasure and privilege for me to be here talking to you about this important issue.
Basically, you're right.
What we did is we filed an action.
This is directly in the California Supreme Court, highest court in California.
What we're asking the court to do is we're asking the court to order the governor to terminate the state of emergency that he declared related to COVID-19 last March.
And we're saying essentially 18 months is enough.
The state of emergency, by definition, cannot be indefinite.
And the biggest problem that we've seen here in California is the state of emergency has been We're good to
go.
Transparent, in the open, with an opportunity for public debate.
And that hasn't been happening because the governor has said during the emergency, we shouldn't have to do that.
So those are the fundamental issues of governance that are at stake and that we're asking the Supreme Court to restore to the people of the state of California.
So that people understand kind of the context for how laws normally or regulations normally are promulgative.
The legislatures have the power to create laws.
They can do that without any kind of environmental impact statement or really any other process other than the legislative process.
But the Constitution says when they delegate their rulemaking power to a regulatory agency, that regulatory agency cannot Promulgate a regulation without going through certain steps that assure that the people of the state are participants in the regulatory process so that it doesn't just become a dictator situation,
a regulatory dictator, a technocracy, just passing down regulations that are arbitrary and capricious.
And so you need due process.
And the due process, the standard laws that are required in the state of California is that prior to passing or promulgating a regulation, a regulatory agency has to publish the proposed rule in a newspaper of record so the public knows about it.
And at the same time, they have to publish An environmental impact statement or a regulatory impact statement, an economic impact statement.
It looks at the cause and the benefits to all the different members of the society of that role.
Who's going to be helped?
Who's going to be hurt?
What is the economic and other cause of that regulation?
And they have to show the scientific basis.
They have to cite the scientists, cite the particular peer-reviewed publications that they're relying on to reach those conclusions.
They then have to give a comment period, and that could be 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days, And then there's a public hearing in which the regulatory agency has to attend with their experts who testify about why they believe this rule is necessary and why it is narrowly tailored.
And then the other side, people who object to the rule have a chance to cross-examine it.
And there's a judgment by an administrative law judge that's based upon a rational reading of the record.
So his judgment cannot be arbitrary and apricious.
And if it is, anybody can challenge that in a regular court.
None of that ever happened here.
You just have a couple of people who we've never met, we don't know who they are, who are not elected officials, who are handing down all of these rules, and you can do that as you say, Scott.
If you have a two-week emergency in two weeks or three weeks, you want to flatten the curve, you need to act very quickly.
Government has the capacity to invoke its emergency authority and do that.
The courts traditionally have said that emergency has to be of a definitive length and it has to be as short as possible.
And our argument in this case is that you pass that Landmarked that milestone months and months ago, and we've had time now for democracy.
Even if you're going to promulgate these regulations, let's have some democracy here.
None of that has been done.
And I think it's illegal, and you think it's illegal, and I think that we have a really good chance of winning this case.
And forcing a change to these emergency declarations, not only in California, but hopefully across the country.
Yeah, you make some good points, Fabia.
And, you know, it's interesting.
This whole system of administrative rulemaking, the history of it is fascinating because before the New Deal, really, and then World War II, There was not much administrative rulemaking in the United States or elsewhere.
Everything was decided through the legislature.
And with the expansion of the federal government during the New Deal, that changed because government became so large and so complex that it was almost impossible to issue all rules and regulations through Congress.
And so we started seeing, and of course, that expanded to the states.
I mean, now you have the government of the state of California is as big and complicated as many countries.
But, you know, hand in hand with the rise of the administrative states was this concern about giving unelected bureaucrats too much power, right?
Because you're right, and we don't know who these people are.
We don't know what they're relying on.
You know, during this pandemic, one of the things that's concerned me is, you know, you have...
Multiple people coming in and out of these positions.
So, for example, the State Department of Public Health in California was initially headed by a woman named Sonia Angel, who was only on the job for about nine months before she was forced to resign last summer.
Another person named Erica Pan came in and had that role for about six, seven months.
And then she was replaced by somebody else.
So we've seen three or four state health officials who are the ones signing these orders.
Now, whether they're the ones who are making the decisions, we don't even know that.
But they're the ones signing the orders.
And we literally know nothing about them.
No one elected them.
We don't know how they were chosen.
We don't know what they're relying on.
And so it's critical in times like this that we have transparency in government, that we have an opportunity to To know what the government's relying on and to question it.
I mean, that is part of the process of government as much as it is the process behind science, right?
The scientific method.
The same rules apply to the government.
Really, in any time, but especially, I would argue, when in times like this where you have the government exercising powers that it has never exercised before.
And that's something that's really important to point out to everyone.
We've never had mass business closures.
We've never had the state government or the CDC telling educators how children have to be educated at the local level.
I mean, we're in a whole new level, right?
This is not what was done back in 1918 with the influenza pandemic.
This is new, and it really calls for more judicial oversight and more transparency in general about how people are making decisions.
We've never had...
Government officials are telling adults they have to be vaccinated in order to go to work, to go to a ballpark, to go to a bar.
And with vaccines that have never been adequately tested, that aren't even approved yet.
And we've never had government officials who told every business in the state, you've got to close down without citing any kind of science, without explaining why we think that lockdowns are going to work.
I would venture to say that 99% of the people in the state, if They had evidence, and lockdowns were, and masks were, and there was a scientific rationale behind these mandates that everybody would do it without complaining.
There's a lot of people who are angry, and their businesses are being closed, their children are being put in masks without anybody doing studies about what their psychological impacts are on children.
All the science is mitigating.
Those children get no benefit from the mask, they get no benefit from the vaccine.
And yet we're seeing them required to do those things standing within.
And one of the exciting things about this lawsuit, and this is the brief, I mean, this extraordinary complaint that you drafted, the great thing about this complaint is that we think that this complaint can be a template for complaints We're challenging these lockdowns and we want to help attorneys and people,
doctors, frontline healthcare workers who are being ordered to vaccinate, ordered to do other things without any kind of rationale.
We think we can use this suit to address those issues and we're anxious to start filing these suits all around the country.
Yeah, you know, you're right, Bobby, and I think it's one of the challenges, maybe one of the problems in some of the lawsuits that have been brought during this pandemic is, you know, there is an impulse among people, both lawyers and clients, to, in times of crisis, you know, run to court, you know, citing the United States Constitution.
What they don't realize is the United States Constitution sets forth certain minimum rights, and constitutional litigation, something that I've done, you know, for many years, It's very, very difficult.
It's very difficult to beat the government in those cases.
And so one of the things I've been doing over the past year and a half is finding more creative ways to solve these problems.
And that includes using, here in California, some principles.
The California Constitution has gone wrong.
Far beyond the federal constitution and extending certain rights to people, individual rights and freedoms to people, including a fundamental right to privacy that really doesn't exist anywhere else in the country and doesn't exist under the federal constitution.
And combining those principles, which have been developed and we've made great progress in over the past 50 years, combining those principles with principles of administrative law that I know you have been successful in litigating under during the past 25, 30 years, To actually figure out, okay, what are these rules based upon?
Let's see some evidence.
Let's see some justification for it.
Because those strategies can be successful.
And they don't necessarily happen immediately.
There's a case that I handled, as I think you know, for a statewide alliance of gym owners here in California last year.
We took the long route.
We litigated against the governor's office for nine months.
And we resolved that case successfully.
Because we took the long approach, right?
And because we focused on getting the evidence that we needed to prove our case, the governor's office was so afraid of giving us that evidence that they resolved it instead of giving it to us.
That's the kind of approach that could be successful in many other cases, both inside California and in other states.
Yeah, I agree.
I can't wait to depose people, for example, health officials, on why they think the vaccine is now effective since we have the Delta variant, which is agnostic about whether you're vaccinated or unvaccinated, and ask them actually to walk with me.
Through the vaccine adverse event reporting system and ask them, how many people have died from this vaccine?
How many of them have been injured?
How do you know that the cost of the vaccine, that the vaccine is not, it is averting more costs, more deaths, more injuries than it's causing?
There's very little data for us to be able to make those calls, I think.
Most health officials that sit on that, they're not actually looking at the data that a lot of critics are looking at And when we get them under oath, they are going to find that this mandated vaccination is absolutely indefensible, and I can't wait till we get an accusation.
Scott, tell us a little, we're running out of time, because we want to keep this under half an hour.
Tell us a little bit about yourself, because most of the people who are involved in this issue today have been kind of right-wing Republicans or conservative But that's not your background.
No, no, no.
It's not my background.
My background actually is in the political business on the left side of the aisle, starting in the Clinton White House, where I worked after I graduated from UCLA. And then I worked for a number of Democratic elected officials, including Dick Gephardt, Dianne Feinstein, and Joe Biden, among many others.
So yeah, I don't come at this from a political perspective.
And To be honest, bringing some of these cases has involved me suing people who I've previously worked with and who I really think highly of.
And the reason I do it is not because I want to score political points or get on TV or win an election, but because I think it is incumbent on people like me who are value-oriented and who really put their faith more in the rule of law and the Constitution than in any kind of political party.
It's incumbent on us to show the moral courage to stand up to people, including our friends, and demand that they adhere to those same principles.
It's really interesting.
Going through this process led me back to reading some remarks that your dad said.
He spoke about moral courage being a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.
And I think that's really true, and we've seen that in the last year and a half.
I can't tell you, especially going through last year's election, How many people, fellow Democrats, including people who I've worked with on Democratic political campaigns, called me and told me that they agreed with what I was doing because they didn't feel like they could speak up and say anything.
And that's only getting worse.
And so it's important for people like me and people like you to stand up to our friends and to say, this isn't right.
You need to follow the law.
Here's what the law says.
And if you don't Do it voluntarily, then we're going to hold you accountable for it.
I think every American has to start recognizing that the politicization of this issue is harming all of us.
The polarization is harming all of us.
There are no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children, and that we have the moral obligation to protect all of these children.
Scott Street, thank you so much.
Tomorrow in the Defender, we're going to have telephone numbers that people can call if they want to start filing these lawsuits in their state.
So stay tuned, everybody.
Make sure to read the Defender and read about the lawsuit and contact us if you have a plan for doing it.
