The courts: Targets of opportunity
by Tom Sullivan
An acquaintance asked Saturday what happens if the Supreme Court rules this summer to lift gay marriage bans across the country. It seems unlikely the Roberts court will overturn rulings in 36 states, he said. He worried that, since so many of the shifts on gay marriage across the country originated in the courts, that the right will not simply use the decision to energize their base in 2016, but to further colonize and control the courts. In fact that has already been occurring, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies:
Today, special interests are spending record amounts of money on court elections in the 38 states that elect justices to the bench. As a Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies report showed, more than $3 million poured into races for North Carolina’s higher courts in 2014, the first election since state lawmakers — with the help of millionaire donor and political operative Art Pope — eliminated North Carolina’s judicial public financing program.
The controversy over Big Money’s attempted takeover of the courts is now coming to a head. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing Williams-Yulee vs. The Florida Bar, a case involving a challenge to Florida’s law barring judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions.
A constellation of groups have filed an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to uphold Florida’s ban as a necessary measure to protect the integrity of state courts. As Bert Brandenburg of the court watchdog group Justice at Stake said in a statement unveiling the brief, “Our courts are different from the other two branches of government. If money influences what a legislator or a governor does, it reeks. But if campaign money influences a decision in the courtroom, it violates the Constitution.”
Having rigged most everything else, Republicans were already mucking about with the courts in North Carolina last summer in a way not seen in any other state:
After passing laws imposing new conditions on abortions and elections, taking away teacher tenure and providing vouchers for private school tuition, Republican state legislators have seen those policies stymied in state and federal courtrooms.
So they have passed another law, this one making those kinds of lawsuits less likely to succeed when filed in state court. Beginning in September [2014], all constitutional challenges to laws will be heard by three-judge trial court panels appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
To help ensure passage, GOP lawmakers inserted the provision into four different bills.
Conservative Christian and political leaders seem already to have conceded the legal fight on marriage equality. Per comments at Huffington Post, they plan instead to “shore up the theology around holy matrimony, and fight to defend their religious liberty rights to oppose same-sex marriage.” Still, far be it from the right wing to shun using the animus in its base over hot-button social issue to rally its voters at election time. That’s expected if SCOTUS strikes down remaining gay marriage bans.
But the right also has a knack for blindsiding political opponents legislatively. For example, North Carolina’s 2013 “motorcycle abortion” bill, and the voting restrictions legislation that ballooned overnight from 17 to 57 pages. And since we’ve seen quite a lot of that here in North Carolina, the question about control of the courts prompts one to ask how the GOP might use the SCOTUS ruling to further consolidate power there. Frankly, I don’t know, but it is worth considering now and keeping a watchful eye on later.
Anticipating unfavorable demographic shifts, in 2008 the GOP began investing heavily in the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, to gain control of state legislatures, and thus, once-a-decade redistricting in 2010:
“The rationale was straightforward,” reads the memo. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.”
Democrats got caught napping (or at least underfunded). It led to the largest GOP majorities we’ve seen in Congress for decades. Furthermore, GOP-controlled state legislatures implemented a raft of voting changes in states across the country to erect roadblocks to voting that, on balance, would hurt Democrats more than Republican voters: voter identity cards, shortening or eliminating early voting, voting roll purges, etc.
In North Carolina and elsewhere, new Republican policies seem designed to blow holes in municipal budgets, especially in large cities where the big blocks of Democratic voters are. They are cutting state taxes, pushing costs down to the cities, limiting local taxing authority, and privatizing public services to cut into cities’ revenue streams. In short, either driving cities into insolvency or leaving them no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut popular services. It’s the next phase of Defund the Left. And since the tax cuts and privatization are big, wet kisses for corporate sponsors, the strategy is a twofer.
In a few years, Republicans will run on Democrats’ “mismanagement” of city governments in fiscal crisis, counting on voters to have forgotten who engineered the crises. Here, they could either dissolve city governments or, elsewhere, take them over through emergency manager acts, as happened to Detroit. As is still happening in Detroit.
Republicans and their backers are playing the long game and they’re playing to win. They use losses as opportunities to further expand their influence. They’ve been very methodical. They’ve anticipated and planned to win the future much as the left has not.
The comments I heard Saturday about the future of the courts made me wonder what we might need to watch out for next.