GOP majority passes scheme to save anti-abortion judges

The Republicans who control the Arizona Legislature passed a resolution (Senate Concurrent Resolution 1044) that will go on the November ballot and asks voters like us to give up our right to vote.

I’ve got to give the schemers behind this atrocity some credit. Using the democratic process to kill an element of the democratic process is diabolically ironic.

In this case, GOP lawmakers are trying to prevent Arizona voters from dispatching Arizona Supreme Court Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, who sided with Justices John R. Lopez IV and James P. Beene to restore the barbaric 19th century abortion ban.

Bolick and King come up for retention this year, as happens periodically for judges in Arizona. That means we get to decide if their votes for the abortion ban make them too extreme for our taste or not.

Unless SCR 1044 passes.

Judges would get lifetime appointments

The resolution not only gives judges lifetime terms with no more periodic review from voters, but it has a provision that makes it retroactively effective to Oct. 31, 2024, meaning that any judge voted off the bench on Nov. 5, 2024, would be able to keep his, or her, job.

During the party-line vote (Republicans for, Democrats against) that passed this sham legislation, Republican Rep. Matt Gress said he was voting for the proposal because it kept the judiciary “insulated from the political views of the extreme left or the extreme right” and because he wanted “to give the people of Arizona a choice in whether they want to retain an independent judiciary or not.”

It would be nice, every once in a while, if elected officials said what they actually meant.

Bolick: Arizona needs the system that appointed me

Judges are political appointees.

Bolick and King were appointed by former Gov. Doug Ducey, who wanted to stack the court and got the Arizona Legislature to expand it from five to seven members, even though then-Chief Justice Scott Bales said that additional judges were not needed and expansion “is not warranted when other court-related needs are underfunded.”

Our vote is what protects us from extremes

The fact that citizens get to decide whether they want to retain judges or not is the only defense we have against the “extreme left or extreme right.”

So, when politicians like Gress ask you to give up that right, they’re not arguing for an “independent judiciary” but for a judiciary beholding only to the politician who gave them lifetime jobs.

As things stand, we get to vote on whether judges like Bolick and King are too extreme for our taste or not.

If SCR 1044 passes, whether judges are extreme left or extreme right or extreme … period … they’ll have their jobs for life, and there won’t be a damn thing we could do about it.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Republicans pass scheme to save anti-abortion judges