Georgia: Brian Kemp maneuvers to cancel key Supreme Court and DA elections

[Celerity]

BRIAN KEMP’S SHAM DEMOCRACY IN GEORGIA

The poster boy of Republican voter suppression is using loopholes in state law to cancel key Supreme Court and district attorney races in 2020.

https://theappeal.org/politicalreport/brian-kemp-georgia-supreme-court-district-attorney-elections/



Brian Kemp rose to national prominence in 2018 after eking out a narrow victory in Georgia’s gubernatorial race, in which he deftly leveraged his position as Georgia’s secretary of state—the person responsible for administering elections—in order to win the promotion he coveted. As Democrat Stacey Abrams vied to become America’s first Black woman governor, his office froze the voter registration applications of more than 50,000 Georgians, nearly 70 percent of whom were Black. It purged 1.4 million voters from the rolls between 2012 and 2018, and stood by as county officials closed hundreds of polling places, many of which were located in low-income and minority communities. Two days before in-person voting began, Kemp even accused Democrats of “hacking” the state’s voter database in an announcement on the secretary of state’s website; 16 months later, the Georgia attorney general’s office closed its investigation of the governor’s claim after finding absolutely no evidence to support it.

Republican-coordinated voter suppression is hardly a new phenomenon in America, but the sheer brazenness of Kemp’s efforts to flout the democratic process has since made his name synonymous with the practice. As governor, Kemp has pivoted from hollowing out democratic elections to simply cancelling them. At a moment when the death of Ahmaud Arbery has drawn national attention to the administration of justice in Georgia, he and other high-profile officials are exploiting legal loopholes to block voters from choosing new leaders for the state’s criminal legal system. Thanks to a series of eleventh-hour maneuverings, three of this year’s key races—two for seats on the state Supreme Court and another for a competitive district attorney race in his hometown of Athens—will not take place after all. Brian Kemp, instead, gets to decide them by himself.

—

Over the past few months, two of the Georgia Supreme Court’s nine justices have announced plans to resign from the bench, even though their terms were already set to expire at the end of this year. In December, Chief Justice Robert Benham revealed that he would retire on March 1; in February, Justice Keith Blackwell announced that he, too, would leave his post, effective on November 18, 2020. (As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Bill Torpy explains, this extended lame-duck period allows Blackwell, who previously made one of President Trump’s shortlists for the U.S. Supreme Court, to reach the 10-year service requirement necessary for his pension to vest.) The Georgia Constitution gives the governor the right to fill temporary vacancies on, in theory, a temporary basis: Interim appointees to any “public office” serve the remaining balance of the term “unless otherwise provided by this Constitution or by law.” Otherwise, if a justice’s six-year term reaches its natural conclusion, an election takes place. Had Blackwell and Benham not quit, they would have been on the ballot this year, in a contest originally scheduled for May 19 and later postponed to June 9 for COVID-19-related safety reasons.

You might think these provisions would entitle Benham’s and Blackwell’s replacements to serve only through the end of 2020, spending a few uneventful months keeping the seats warm for their duly elected successors. That “unless otherwise provided” caveat is an important one, though, because the state constitution also specifies that appointees to elected judicial positions automatically get extra time in office, serving through the year of the next general election that is more than six months out from their appointment. Put differently: If Brian Kemp makes you a Supreme Court justice with fewer than six months to go until an election for Supreme Court justice, that election gets bumped for two full years. Sure enough, on March 1, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger cancelled the contests for both seats on the grounds that Kemp would fill these vacancies himself. The policy rationale for this loophole sounds sensible enough: It prevents rookie justices from having to learn the ropes of their new job while simultaneously running a hastily assembled campaign to keep it. But maneuvers like Blackwell’s and Benham’s are less about easing bureaucratic transitions than they are about transforming seats on the court into prizes for the governor to dole out as he sees fit. When resignations conveniently arrive this close to an election, Kemp gets to dispense entirely with the burden of holding one.

snip

[northoftheborder]

1. Dictator aspirations at work

[Celerity]

2. I think normalcy bias has so, so many thinking that an actual military dictatorship can never

happen here.

Trump and the Rethugs SHIT on the Constitution every day. Who is going to stop him if he just says fuck it, martial law via POTUS declaration of a National State of Emergency (which gives him extraordinary powers that so many simply do not know about), no election, etc and most of the Red states and Red run swing states go along (as the States control their elections), or Rump simply just ignores the election results? Come January 20th, if he refuses to leave power and the military and police at all levels do nothing, it is on like donkey kong.

It may not be probable, but it sure as hell is possible. Trump is insanely drunk with power and will do ANYTHING he is allowed to get away with. So much of the US lives in a bubble of complete belief in systemic invincibility/infallibility. My neck of the woods knows better.

[Midnight Writer]

3. Exactly. People seem to take it for granted that our Checks and Balances will hold.

They don't recognize what an extraordinary situation this is, when an entire political Party colludes to kill our Democracy.