It opened the court up as a site for political gain,” said Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor at Drake University. It was supercharged by an Iowa campaign in 2010 to remove three justices who overturned a ban on same-sex marriage. What’s underway now is part of a long-term project by conservatives to transform state courts, dating back to the 1980s and efforts such as Republican strategist Karl Rove’s campaign to unseat liberals in Texas. Michael Shover of Christ the Redeemer Church in Pella, Iowa, left, argues with Ryan Maher, of Des Moines, as anti-abortion and pro-choice protesters clash in the Iowa Capitol rotunda while the state legislature convenes for a special session to pass a 'fetal heartbeat' ban on July 11, 2023. This year alone, five recently reconstituted state supreme courts have heard or are due to hear cases about abortion restrictions. Constitution, and state supreme court justices have the final say on what those are.Ĭivil rights, taxes, LGBTQ+ rights, labor law, policing and more - all of it hangs on which justices take the bench. ![]() State constitutions often grant rights that aren’t guaranteed in the U.S. The shifts on state supreme courts resonate far beyond the ornate chambers where justices confer and issue rulings. In 2023, 15 legislatures considered bills to increase partisan influence in judicial selection, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Other Republican-led states have taken notice. But it's not as hard, frankly, to turn over a state supreme court,” said Michael Kang of Northwestern University. It's really expensive to win a governor's race. “It's hard to flip a whole state legislature. That’s despite the key role that state courts, which hear 95% of all cases in the U.S., play in American democracy. This paved the way for rulings in Iowa and North Carolina that overturned precedents and rulings from just a few years, or months, before.īut while individual rulings have attracted public scrutiny, the changes to the courts have flown under the radar. And Iowa, Idaho, Montana and Utah granted Republican governors greater control over the process of picking justices. Arizona and Georgia expanded the number of justices. North Carolina and Ohio made their judicial elections partisan contests. The moves have pushed the courts to the right or solidified conservative control. In less than a decade, Republican politicians in eight states have transformed their state supreme courts - altering the process by which justices reach the bench, or the size of the court. He added, “Governor Reynolds and our legislators played a huge role in that win - by changing the way we select judges in Iowa.” Hurley told the room that “Iowa is on the verge of limiting the barbaric practice of abortion” after the court’s decision. Chuck Grassley and then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, was just over the Des Moines River from the Supreme Court. The gathering, which was attended by Republican Gov. One month after the ruling, Chuck Hurley, the chief counsel of influential Iowa conservative group the Family Leader, took the stage before a sold-out convention center crowd. But the justices on the bench had - and so had the role state politicians play in putting them there. The state constitution hadn’t changed in the four years between the state Supreme Court’s two rulings. “It's hard to tell patients that, it's hard to see their reaction, it's hard to go through that over and over and over again.” “It's devastating,” said Jordawn Williams, the clinic manager. Staff had to inform patients already at the clinic that they couldn’t operate, as they scrambled to understand the decision. The day the ruling was issued, staff at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Des Moines’ south side were preparing to perform surgical procedures. ![]() Iowans could no longer rely on a constitutional protection that existed just hours before. ![]() That 2018 ruling? It had “a one-sided quality to it,” the new majority found. Iowa’s constitution does not, the justices decided, guarantee a right to abortion after all. Just four years later, the court reversed itself. In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution included a right to abortion, finding that “nothing could be more fundamental to the notion of liberty.” This story was published in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, a newsroom that investigates inequality in America.
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