Democrat leads in NC Supreme Court fundraising
Democrats are putting a lot of money up to get a leftist lawyer elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court - hoping to block or roll back Republican legislative gains.
From the News & Observer:
In 2016, the most expensive judicial race in the country was in North Carolina, for a seat on the state Supreme Court. This year there’s another seat on the court up for grabs, and the candidates have already raised more money than those running two years ago.
Lawyers, doctors, real estate developers, business owners and political activists are among the biggest donors identified in the campaign finance reports that the two main candidates filed at the end of July — which showed how much they’ve raised and spent through the end of June.
Later in the story, we learn that media moguls, pollsters, and "Big Pharma" consultants also donated almost as much as legally allowed to Anita Earls.
▪ $5,200 each from Sesha and Dean Debnam. Dean Debnam has several businesses in the Triangle, including the liberal-leaning firm Public Policy Polling.
▪ $5,200 from Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and liberal activist from California.
▪ Nearly $5,200 each from Barbara and Jim Goodmon. Jim Goodman is the CEO of Capitol Broadcasting, which owns WRAL and the Durham Bulls.
▪ $5,000 each from John and Ann Campbell. John Campbell founded the Campbell Alliance, a consulting firm that works for pharmaceutical companies.
▪ $1,000 from Frank Daniels Jr., a former publisher of the News & Observer.
This is why Democrats' campaign slogan of "fair courts" is nothing more than a ruse. Leftists are trying to buy this seat for a leftist lawyer because they expect her to rule in favor of leftist causes and ideology.
The report also proves (again) how Chris Anglin's candidacy is, in fact, a dishonest and deceptive one - designed to help Earls win.
There’s also a third candidate, Chris Anglin, who only entered the race last month and did not raise any money in the first several days of his campaign, according to a campaign finance report filed in early July. He hasn’t filed any more recent finance reports, as Earls and Jackson have.
Anglin is a dark-horse candidate, and most observers see the race as a contest between Earls and Jackson, who have been endorsed by their respective political parties.
Anglin (a Democrat who registered as a Republican just before filing to run for the seat) is not raising any money because he doesn't intend to win. Fundraising isn't really necessary to accomplish his goal - because his goal is to siphon votes away from the GOP incumbent, Barbara Jackson.
Speaking of judicial activism
The NC Supreme Court race is a good example of the difference between conservative and progressive judicial philosophy (and it's why Anglin's dishonest campaign is self-evidently so).
Democrats believe that if Anita Earls (who has sued the Republican General Assembly repeatedly) can get onto the Supreme Court, she'll find ways to block GOP legislation.
Conservatives tend to be textualists and originalists - meaning they default to the text of the laws as they are written. They do not attempt to divine novel meanings through a "living Constitution" outlook. This is also called "interpretivism" - meaning judges rule on constitutional issues based on precedent and laws written in the Constitution.
Progressives tend to believe in a "noninterpretivism" approach - where judges use the existing laws and documents as starting points simply to create and expand norms or rights that are not explicit in the texts to which they refer.
It's how the Supreme Court "found" abortion in the Constitutional right to privacy, for example.
Naturally, progressive judges will use the texts and precedents to support progressive rulings when they can. But they have shown great willingness to ignore those same texts and precedents when they don't advance progressivism.
The personification of this is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg - who was confirmed 25 years ago today. Ed Whelan at National Review points notes - she was confirmed by a 96-3 vote:
...a former ACLU activist who, among other things, had stridently criticized the Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling that the Constitution does not require taxpayers to fund abortions … who had stated her strong sympathy for the proposition that there is a constitutional right to prostitution and a constitutional right to bigamy … who had proposed abolishing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing them with an androgynous Parent’s Day … who had criticized the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts for perpetuating stereotyped sex roles … and who had urged that prisons be co-ed rather than single sex?
Anita Earls - the Democrat candidate for NC Supreme Court - is cut from this same progressive cloth. She founded the Southern Coalition for Social Justice - a progressive outfit that sues for "social justice."
Indeed, at her campaign website, she says she "became a lawyer to fight for social justice."
But social justice is not justice.
Their list of donors is a Who's Who of leftists - from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to George Soros' Open Society to BlueprintNC.
Also, Earls' campaign rhetoric reads almost identical to Anglin's.
Here is Earls'...
And here is Democrat-turned-Republican Anglin's...
But, wait! There's more!
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Republican state senator Ralph Hise and his Democratic challenger got into a "testy" email exchange.