This letter was sent in response to the last one, which argued that judicial elections in Georgia should not be viewed through a partisan lens. -Chris Dowd
In recent decades, elections to the Georgia Supreme Court have attracted little attention, with extremely conservative Republican-appointed justices sometimes running unopposed. This lack of media and voter attention does not, however, mean that the current court is anything other than a highly partisan, Republican-dominated body. Progressive voters should see the Court for what it is, and take advantage of the current election to begin reigning in the Court’s runaway conservative supermajority by electing progressive candidates.
In 2016, Governor Nathan Deal and the Republican majority in the legislature rammed through a bill to pack the Georgia Supreme Court. The new law added two seats to the previously seven-member Court. Although the Court was already dominated by conservative Republican-affiliated justices, Governor Deal further increased its ideological and partisan imbalance by filling these newly created vacant seats with activists with close ties to the right-wing Federalist Society. Britt Grant, who was then 39-years old and a former member of Deal’s Congressional staff, had served as the president of the Stanford Law School chapter of the Federalist Society. She was later nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit under the first Trump Administration. Deal’s other appointment, Nels Petersen, who currently serves as the Chief Justice of the Court, was the Executive Vice President of the Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society.
This Republican court-packing scheme flew under the radar. Thanks to poor media coverage, not many voters were aware of it at the time and even fewer remember it today. But now, with energized Democratic voters paying increased attention to off-cycle and so-called “nonpartisan” elections that Republicans have long dominated and used to expand their dominance of state government, the time has come to restore balance to the Georgia Supreme Court by voting for progressive candidates such as Miracle Rankin and Jen Jordan.
