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It's April 30, and I saw that yesterday the Department of Justice is suing New Jersey over the Law Enforcement Officer Protection Act, which restricts when law enforcement officers, including federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can have masks on. This stood out to me because this is exactly what Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said was going to happen. Remember this clip?
“The love of God and all that is good. Can you differentiate between the fact that we don't make laws that control the federal government? My God, what are we doing here? I'm not a lawyer. I was an English teacher and I comprehend that. My fifth grade middle school English students would understand it. I am coming to you not from a point of ideology because I know in the minority party, we already lost that argument. You guys are way, way out in the ether with that. I'm not even hoping to win the ideology. I'm hoping to win the logical argument to say, why do we keep passing laws that are gonna end up in court, we lose, and the taxpayer gets shafted over and over and over? You cannot vote yes for a law that controls local, county, state. Oh, oops. And federal. No. Federal's gotta come off for this to count. The only reason why you're passing it is to affect federal agents. Hello? Lights on. No one's home. I'm not an attorney. I need a freaking honorary degree after going through this for four hours yesterday saying, what? Don't a roomful of lawyers understand? Ludicrous. Oh my goodness.”
What does that mean for us as taxpayers? I did see in New Jersey Spotlight News they reported that New Jersey's attorney general's office had spent over $53,000,000 in one year on outside private lawyers alone, on top of their in-house staff costs. Now for my question that came next, maybe somebody else would have a better source for this, but I just asked Rock about how much something like this would cost as a lawsuit. The initial response in motion practice is somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 because that's mostly in-house attorneys. The discovery and hearings is $100,000 to $300,000 if it gets contentious. It says the common range for litigation is another $250,000 to $800,000. And then appeals, if New Jersey loses appeals, could range anywhere from $150,000 to $400,000. So that brings us in a range from $300,000 to $1,200,000 over this case. No matter where we stand on the issue, we should know how much it's going to cost us.