By definition, complaints not grounded in an injury, an injustice, or a wrong, are groundless.
The parade of green complainers before the BOCC, so overwhelmed with love for the environment that they must testify their fealty at every public microphone, have not experienced an injury, an injustice, or a wrong, and do not even have the reasonable potential that any of these things might occur to them. So, their complaints remain groundless.
Still, they fear, and they claim, that injury is inevitable, foreseeable, virtually certain to occur. The EPA, however, recently said it has not found a single case in America where produced water from shale gas fracturing has injured a potable groundwater aquifer. Not one. But no matter. Green love is a deep pool. It needs no facts to sustain it.
When the Greens benefit from a government action, the government can do no wrong. But when the government fails to uphold a green agenda item, it must be corrupt, in the pocket of industry, the idiot bastards must be recalled, etc. Green rhetoric is tediously predictable in this respect.
All courts have a standing requirement – an injury in fact must exist before the court will listen to you. Courts don’t convene to discuss groundless fears, and our BOCC, a quasi-judicial body, should not consume public time, money, and bandwidth entertaining interminable political questions, regardless of how green they look.
Political questions are for the ballot box, not BOCC business meetings.
B_Imperial
ref:
1st Amendment
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
BOROUGH OF DURYEA v. GUARNIERI
Opinion of the Court
564 U. S. ____ (2011)
Pp. 7-8
Both speech and petition are integral to the democratic process, although not necessarily in the same way. The right to petition allows citizens to express their ideas, hopes, and concerns to their government and their elected representatives, whereas the right to speak fosters the public exchange of ideas that is integral to deliberative democracy as well as to the whole realm of ideas and human affairs. Beyond the political sphere, both speech and petition advance personal expression, although the right to petition is generally concerned with expression directed to the government seeking redress of a grievance.
Courts should not presume there is always an essential equivalence in the two Clauses or that Speech Clause precedents necessarily and in every case resolve Petition Clause claims. See ibid. (rights of speech and petition are “not identical”). Interpretation of the Petition Clause must be guided by the objectives and aspirations that underlie the right. A petition conveys the special concerns of its author to the government and, in its usual form, requests action by the government to address those concerns. See Sure-Tan Inc., supra, at 896–897.
Black’s Law Dictionary defines grievance as:
An injury, injustice, or wrong that gives ground for a complaint.