The rules are for chumps

Defiance in Georgia points the way forward

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

Today was scorching hot here in Manhattan, where the Knicks and Rangers are in the midst of giving us our best spring in 30 years, rents are rising at obscene rates, and Stormy Daniels has been regaling jurors with unsavory details of her night with the host of The Apprentice in now looks likely to be the only trial that Donald Trump will face this year (and perhaps ever).

By the way, did you know that Judge Aileen Cannon recently failed to disclose receiving two all-expenses-paid trips to conservative legal conferences sponsored by a law school that is named after Antonin Scalia and bankrolled by Leonard Leo? It’s too bad that rules only apply to Democrats — or, as tonight’s newsletter suggests, that’s changing, too.

In other news, President Biden announced tonight that the US would not send Israel weapons for its invasion of Rafah, where 1.4 million displaced Palestinians were sent as their homes were destroyed by the IDF. Biden should have cut Israel off months and months ago, but it’s good politics to acknowledge when somebody agrees to a demand. Let’s hope this portends an imminent collapse of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychotic coalition.

OK, let’s get to the newsletter.

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A rare show of defiance turns back a GOP power play

Former Rep. John Barrow has been doing something a bit unusual lately, at least as far as Democrats with connections to the judiciary are concerned: Fighting.

Last week, the Georgia Democrat received a letter from the state’s judicial watchdog with a reprimand over his promise to protect reproductive rights if elected to the state Supreme Court later this month. The Judicial Qualifications Commission’s complaint ordered Barrow to immediately alter all of his campaign materials and speeches, a demand that he answered on Monday with a federal lawsuit.

Barrow has made abortion rights central to his campaign against Justice Andrew Pinson, the state’s former solicitor general, who was appointed to the Georgia Supreme Court by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.

The Georgia Supreme Court allowed state’s six-week abortion ban to remain in place last fall while litigation makes its way through the legal system. It’s likely to wind up back at the high court, and in its letter to Barrow, the commission alleged that his promise to protect abortion rights represented “a failure to act in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.”

In his response, Barrow asserted that the US Supreme Court pointed out that Pinson was the state’s attorney when it joined Mississippi in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and mocked the idea that there’s any mystery as to how the Kemp appointee would vote on the issue.

“Because of my opponent’s record of helping to overturn Roe and defending the current abortion ban, I believe that he’s already voted to uphold the abortion ban in just about every way that a lawyer could,” Barrow said in a statement. “Meanwhile, he has refused to state a position on the issue one way or the other — and promises that he will be ‘fair and impartial’ when the issue comes before him as a judge. Sure he will.”

Barrow’s response also asserted that a decades-old Supreme Court decision protected his right to speak on the issues and that the commission was incorrect in its interpretation of state code. During a televised “debate” with the Atlanta Press Club in late April, he made a similar point while also hammering Pinson for refusing to show up.

“The only thing worse than his record,” Barrow said, “is that he’s too chicken to come here and stick up for himself.”

He also called Pinson a “pampered Wall Street associate” for good measure.

Shrinking blue violets

No Georgia high court justice has lost re-election since 1922, so it speaks to the GOP’s anxiety about Barrow’s campaign and the unpopularity of its abortion ban — 62% of voters opposed it as of October 2022 — that the party is pulling out all the stops in a cynical campaign to neutralize it, from a glut of outside spending to turning official government agencies against him.

Last month, five former Georgia Supreme Court justices and ten former presidents of the state Bar Association wrote a letter expressing great concern about Barrow’s comments and the threat of partisanship — as if an all-Republican court affirming a GOP-passed abortion ban is totally apolitical. It was a transparent appeal to a false sense of propriety that all too often is successful in intimidating Democrats into obedience.

Not subtle, but he’s not trying to be

This time, however, Barrow is calling their bluff, dismissing all the phony hand-wringing with the contempt and derision it deserves. It’s pivotal that voters know the difference between the candidates, especially when it’s over such a pivotal issue, and no tut-tutting, attempt to shame, or financial penalty should be allowed to get in the way.

Pearl-clutching, especially over process or rhetoric, is a go-to tactic for conservatives who want to obfuscate actual issues and draw false equivalences with their unpopular stances. It works especially well on a political media that sees itself as dispassionate play-by-play announcers and defenders of the status quo.

Most recently, conservatives raged when Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, finally got the gumption to send a subpoena to Leonard Leo. The Supreme Court’s vast corruption has been a dead issue ever since, with Durbin retreating back to his reverence for a long-obsolete idea of the high court as impartial, apolitical body trusted by Americans of all stripes.

In some places, it doesn’t even require a disingenuous public tantrum, because the specter of it, paired with a Democratic love for following rules, is enough to make them fall in line. In fact, there’s a heretofore untold story that provides an even better and instructive example of this ultra-dangerous dynamic.