This Week in Statehouse Action: State of Mind edition

• Like back in 2011, when Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC), created in 2000 via a voter-initiated ballot measure that removed the drawing of state legislative and congressional district maps from lawmakers’ hands, drew new congressional maps that failed to give sufficient advantage to Republicans.
  • Brewer proceeded to fire the head of the IRC for this affront.
    • The Arizona Supreme Court found that Brewer had insufficient reason to remove the commission’s chief and reinstated her.
    • The “offending” maps were approved by the IRC and went into effect for the 2012 elections.
  • But Arizona’s Republicans weren’t done messing with the IRC.
    • If we can’t control it, they decided, let’s get rid of it. So the legislature’s GOP majority sued to have the IRC declared unconstitutional, saying it unlawfully removed power over redistricting from the lawmakers themselves.
    • The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, and Arizona Republicans were forced to let the IRC remain in existence.
    • Arizona Republicans then tried to get the maps themselves declared unconstitutional, but that didn’t go their way, either.
  • Yet, years later, Arizona Republicans kept trying to twist the IRC into something they could control (with some real success).
    • The commission is set now, though, so further shenanigans will keep until after the GOP decides if it likes the maps it gets or not.

But courts remain Republicans’ favorite target.

• In 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling finding the state’s method of funding public schools both inadequate and unfairly distributed.
  • This upset the Republican-controlled legislature, which responded with a pair of retaliatory laws that created a catch-22 of sorts for state courts.
    • The first law stripped the state Supreme Court of administrative power over lower courts; the second stripped the state’s entire court system of funding if a court struck down any part of the previous law.
      • In other words: If you don’t rule exactly the way we demand, we’re going to take away every penny that funds your operations—from the copy machines to the clerks to the judges themselves.
  • That first law removing the court’s authority was at least pretty straightforwardly unconstitutional, and the Kansas Supreme Court ruled thusly.
  • But that triggered the law that eliminated the state court system’s financing.
    • This didn’t last too long, though; it’s hard to run for re-election after you’ve destroyed the judicial system and your state’s become a lawless hellscape, after all.
    • A few weeks later, the legislature blinked and passed a bill restoring the courts’ funding.
  • But Republicans weren’t going to let this perceived affront go without a further fight.
    • Proposals surfaced to broaden the grounds for judicial impeachment, to give the governor and the legislature complete power over judicial selection, and to begin electing judges to state courts.
    • These efforts stalled out, and now the legislature has a bigger, more immediate foe in the form of its Democratic governor. But don’t sleep on this fight in years to come.
• And we can’t forget about North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor in 2016.
  • The state’s Republican legislators, then occupying comfortable, veto-proof supermajorities in both the state House and Senate—obtained through gerrymanders that have since been ruled unconstitutional by the courts—were positively incensed that a Democrat had the temerity to win this race.
    • So the GOP set about removing as much power from the executive branch as they conceivably could.
    • In December special sessions, with McCrory still in office but content to go out in a blaze of sour grapes, Republican legislators passed measures that fundamentally altered the state’s election oversight boards and forced the governor’s cabinet appointees to submit to state Senate approval.
    • They also slashed the number of gubernatorial appointees from 1,500 to 425.
  • The North Carolina Supreme Court ended up blocking most of this Republican legislative power grab and restored much of this authority to Cooper shortly thereafter.
  • So, presented with some judicial rulings they didn’t like, Republican lawmakers set about messing with North Carolina’s court system itself.

Republican lawmakers also dislike being watched and investigated by agencies they can’t control.

• In 2015, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature disbanded the state’s nonpartisan elections and ethics oversight agency, the Government Accountability Board (GAB).
  • The GAB was created by a near-unanimous vote of the legislature back in 2007, and it had been hailed as “a national model for ethics and elections.”
    • But after facing eight years of investigations of possible campaign violations, Republicans decided it was time to go back to the bad old days of partisan oversight.
  • Almost all of the GAB’s critics were Republicans, and their ire was largely motivated by a GAB investigation into possible (and illegal) coordination between GOP then-Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and conservative groups during the 2012 recall election.
  • Democrats lacked the numbers in the legislature to halt the GOP’s bill to dismantle the GAB, and in 2016, the board was officially dissolved and split into a separate ethics commission and an elections oversight commission.
    • Commission members are now selected by legislative leaders or the governor—the very same partisan officeholders the commissioners are supposed to oversee.
    • Critics called the move “a deliberate attempt to doom effective enforcement of Wisconsin election laws.”
• And let’s not forget the ongoing threat from Pennsylvania Republicans to gerrymander that state’s Supreme Court after it ruled in 2018 ruling that their gerrymandered congressional map violated the state constitution.

This is just a small sampling of the most egregious attacks Republicans have leveled at the judiciary and other independent agencies and branches of government, but it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

The bottom line: The GOP’s contempt for courts and other government branches and agencies they lack power over burns intensely.

This isn’t a both-sides thing.

Worse, it’s the Republicans who are organized around electing their own to judgeships across the country.

Democrats, well … [[crickets chirping]]

Well, that’s enough of a jog down memory lane for one week.

Stay tuned for a return to our regular programming of GOP voter suppression, anti-protest, anti-transgender, anti-anything good and right in the world legislation next week.

In the meantime, remember:

It’s not your imagination. Not only are they really out to get us, but they want to take away any possible redress we might have by undermining the institutions of government they can’t actually control.

And where does that leave us?