Conservatives in Georgia have desperately tried to silence a candidate for Georgia's Supreme Court who has voiced support for abortion rights ahead of a consequential election on Tuesday.
Former Democratic Rep. John Barrow is challenging incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Andrew Pinson in Tuesday’s vote, using an abortion-rights playbook that helped liberals recapture the majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court in an election last year.
Barrow is a staunch supporter of abortion rights while Pinson, in a previous role as solicitor general, supported efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. But Georgia conservatives haven’t wanted Barrow speaking about any of that. The state's Judicial Qualification Commission, whose members have all been appointed by conservative political leaders in the state, claimed Barrow was violating ethics rules by publicly showing support for abortion rights.
A judge dismissed a free-speech lawsuit Barrow filed challenging the commission’s findings, meaning he could face repercussions — and potentially even impeachment — if he wins.
The ruling certainly favors conservatives in Georgia, who have an incentive to be noncommittal on abortion rights during campaigns at a time when abortion advocates have notched key election victories in typically conservative states.
Unlike Wisconsin, the majority is not at stake in the race. Georgia’s Supreme Court is technically nonpartisan, but all but one of its current members were first appointed to the position by Republican governors. Pinson, a former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was appointed by Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
In an interview with the ReidOut Blog on Tuesday, Barrow compared his situation to that of Janet Protasiewicz, who won that Wisconsin seat only to face calls for impeachment over comments she made during her campaign about voting rights.
“In Wisconsin, they had a huge campaign. And the whole country watched two candidates taking precisely the same tack that I and my opponent are taking in this race,” he said, noting other similarities.
“What my opponent and his supporters have tried to do is to shift and divert attention away from the debate about whether or not women have rights under our state constitution that incorporate rights they used to have under Roe,” he told me. “They want to shift debate away from that discussion, and have a discussion instead about what I’m allowed to say.”
He also explained the absurdity of requiring judicial candidates to stay silent about their interpretations of the law.
Per Barrow:
If we do have opinions, we’re supposed to keep them to ourselves, because that’s the only way that someone can know that we are fair and open minded. Here’s the problem with that. Judges are not supposed to be open minded about the law. They’re supposed to be open minded about the facts of the case. And they’re supposed to be fair and open minded about applying the facts of the case to the law of the case. But judges are not supposed to be open minded about the law of the case.
Conservative judicial nominees all the way up to the Supreme Court have shown a willingness to use claims about judicial ethics to avoid sharing their views on whether abortion should be deemed legal.
Barrow referred to this as “ridiculous theater”:
They have gone so far as to try and convince people that this ridiculous theater that we see being played out with every United States Supreme Court and judicial nominee — basically refusing to say what they believe about the most important issues that they’ll have to deal with — is not only something that the judicial nominees have a right to do. They’re conning people into believing that that’s what [nominees] have an obligation to do, which is just not true.
Republicans have deployed various tactics to prevent anger over the loss of abortion rights from hurting them — everything from confusing wording on ballot initiatives to blocking ballot initiatives from reaching voters, and now, even prohibiting judicial candidates from speaking about abortion during their campaigns. That seems like the clearest indicator that they know this is not a winning issue for them politically.