Opinion: May 19th Election: Will Radicals Poison Georgia’s Supreme Court?

Georgians are already voting in the May 19 primary election (supposedly non-partisan) for three slots on the Georgia Supreme Court. If voters who believe in the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, the Georgia constitution and rational judges whose decision-making isn’t driven by their politics don’t turn out, there’s a big problem. The ACLU, Planned Parenthood, NARAL and a host of other left-wing organizations will succeed in getting their two handpicked radical activists elected to the state’s Supreme Court.  

And that will be just the beginning.   

Besides the huge amounts being spent by those organizations, the Democratic Party is also spending the most money on judicial races than it has in 20 years to support Jen Jordan and Miracle Rankin. They are challenging two incumbents– Sarah Hawkins Warren and Charlie Bethel– on the nine-member court.  A third justice, Ben Land, is running unopposed. 

Warren and Bethel were both appointed to the court by GOP Gov. Nathan Deal to fill vacancies and then won their subsequent elections in 2020. (Members of the court serve six-year terms before standing for re-election.) Both had distinguished careers before ending up on the state’s highest court, including service in the legislative, judicial and executive branches of state and local government.   

Warren is the former Solicitor General of Georgia, and clerked for two well-known and highly respected federal judges: J.L. Edmondson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and Richard Leon of the D.C. district court. Bethel clerked for federal judge Charles Pannell, Jr. of the Northern District of Georgia, and previously served in the state Senate and as a member of the Georgia Court of Appeals.   

Warren and Bethel have proven throughout their legal careers that they are professionals. They understand that their job as judges is not to make policy but to abide by the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, and to apply the laws of Georgia as intended and written by the state legislature, not to achieve the social, political, or economic outcome that the supporters of their challengers want regardless of the law. As Bethel’s campaign website says, he believes judges “must set aside their personal preferences” and “follow the law, even when the outcome may be unpopular.” 

But both Jordan and Rankin are abortion activists— which is why they’ve been endorsed by NARAL. They are running to create a nonexistent right to abortion in the state constitution and, no doubt, other legal fantasies of the radical left. Jordan is such an extremist that in 2019 she testified against banning abortions after five months before the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee. She made the utterly absurd claim that women who suffered miscarriages would be “at risk of a criminal indictment” for behavior such as smoking, drinking or “using legal medications.”   

Rankin is a tort-chasing plaintiffs’ lawyer who specializes in personal injury lawsuits– the kind of litigation that causes our insurance premiums to go up.  One of her campaign ads is very revealing about how she will make decisions: She promises to “interpret the laws of the state and the constitution of Georgia in a way that fairly applies them to every citizen of this state.” 

“Fairly” is often a code word for applying the law to achieve the policy result that liberals such as Rankin think is “fair,” no matter what the law actually says. It is a recipe for manipulative judges unbound by the law to implement their political agenda. There seems little doubt that she and her cohort would also attack Georgia’s election reforms like voter ID. 

Up until now, Georgia has avoided the poison that has spread into other state supreme courts in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where social justice ideologues and Democrat partisans have run for office and taken control of the state supreme courts. The resulting lawlessness from those courts, when they refuse to enforce constitutional provisions or laws they don’t like, or to twist the language to achieve the political and cultural outcomes they want, is something the Peach State doesn’t need. 

Yet the same type of financing by the ultra-rich denizens of the Left that was a key factor in partisans taking control of the supreme courts in those states is now going on in Georgia. If Rankin and Jordan win, they will still be a minority on the seven-member court. But their success will inspire more efforts to unseat the other rational judges on the Georgia Supreme Court as their terms come up for renewal.   

It has been more than 100 years since a sitting Georgia justice was defeated in an election, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If these liberal activists win, it will be the start of the effort to corrupt the state Supreme Court and change it from a law-abiding, law-applying judicial body that understands the constitutional limits on its authority, to a Star Chamber that can be used to veto anything the state legislature does that they don’t like. And it will lead to implementing policies they can’t get through the representational, democratic process. 

It will be the start of judicial tyranny.   

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom Foundation. 

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.