The Prince William County Board of Supervisors has, wisely I think, decided against suing the Commonwealth of Virginia on a legal theory that approaches being sanctionably stupid
Chairman Corey A. Stewart, R-at large, said Prince William County would not sue the state of Virginia for what he called a mistreatment of Northern Virginia commuters.
In March, Stewart said the state violated the 14th Amendment of the constitution by arbitrarily funding road projects, which makes life miserable for the residents of the region.
“That comment got a lot of attention and got some things moving in the transportation negotiations,” Stewart said on Thursday.
He called the potential lawsuit a “nuclear bomb of transportation options” that he hoped would expose the disparity between traffic congestion in Northern Virginia and the rest of the state.
I may have to dust-off my copy of the 14th Amendment, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in there about transportation, and I am also quite certain that the drafters didn’t consider having an easy commute to work among the civil rights deserving of protection by the Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Nope. Not in there. I almost wish the Board had gone forward with this threat, just so I could see the lengths to which they would go to twist those words into a coherent legal argument. Something tells me it never would’ve survived a 12(b)(6) motion. Heck, one would think that any attempt to do so would violate Rule 11.
But I’ve really got to wonder. Is threatening baseless lawsuits what the taxpayers of Prince William County are paying their leaders to do ?
