Yesterday, the Lower Nazareth Township Board of Supervisors moved to take me to court to remove me from office since I no longer reside in the township. I explained why their claim is incorrect in the below audio file.
Ironically, the supervisor, Robert Hoyer, who made the motion to remove me as a duly elected auditor is himself not elected, only appointed. In fact, two of the four supervisors present (Hoyer and Bert Smalley) last night are unelected appointees. Their complaint is that I do not reside in the district. I endeavored to explain to them their mistaken reading of the township code, and asked for clarity on their income tax hike and invited them to a discussion on the lack of transparency on free access to township documents, as you can hear in the audio below.
When the audio begins, the township solicitor, Mr. Gary Asteak, had just spent several minutes reading his letter to me and spends about 3 minutes expounding the data he collected suggesting I moved out of the township. While Mr. Asteak is a renown lawyer (Lower Nazareth Township can afford to hire the best!), you can hear me mutter “bad example” when he gives a hypothetical example of the Congressman who moves to France. This is because the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 2, clearly states representatives only need to be inhabitants of the state they are elected from at the time of their election in addition to the other qualifications. However, I did not think it productive to point out the falsehood.
For the next 10 minutes or so, I delivered the remarks close to verbatim from this post.
The last three minutes are telling since the township supervisors and solicitor were clearly not there to discuss anything rationally. They just wanted to shut me up and make their motion to take me to court to remove me from office. They did not even bother to ask the estimate of the solicitor’s cost to do so. The chairman, James Pennington, engaged in some gavel pounding to cut my answers short and not allow me to speak. Their silence on the lack of transparency and hostility towards a duly elected auditor is truly deafening. It reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode, The Obsolete Man, which is free to view on Netflix.
“You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.…
Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man… that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for “Mankind” – in The Twilight Zone.”
– Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone, The Obsolete Man)
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