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A powerful anti-abortion group wined and dined an Arizona lawmaker who could be a deciding vote on whether to abolish the state’s draconian abortion ban — and the senator might have been accompanied by her husband, an Arizona Supreme Court justice who ruled the abortion ban could take effect. But as Katya Schwenk reveals in today’s featured story, the public can’t know for sure, because threadbare oversight allows many state supreme court justices to hide their conflicts of interest. Also: - 🎧 On today’s Lever Time Premium for paid subscribers: Did Ronald Reagan destroy middle class wealth? According to Stacy Mitchell, an expert on corporate monopolies, the answer is yes. Senior Podcast Producer Arjun Singh sits down with Mitchell to discuss how the government went from breaking up monopolistic corporations to coddling them, and how that change widened the U.S. wealth gap. Click here to listen now.
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The Great Unknown About Conflicts Of Interest In Arizona’s Abortion Ban
By Katya Schwenk
[View in browser] In Arizona, a deep-pocketed anti-abortion group has been wining and dining a lawmaker who may be a deciding vote on a new effort to repeal the state’s draconian abortion ban — and the senator might have been accompanied by her husband, an Arizona Supreme Court justice who ruled earlier this month that the ban could take effect. But the public doesn’t know for sure whether the justice attended the meals, because Arizona law doesn’t require justices to disclose gifts that don’t add up to more than $500 a year, even if these perks could have a direct bearing on cases they are deciding. As the U.S. Supreme Court rolls back long-standing federal protections, leaving such matters to the states, judicial watchdog groups say they are increasingly concerned about ballooning special-interest money influencing state justices. Now a new report has found that thanks to weak financial disclosure laws, many state justices do not have to disclose gifts and perks that they or their spouses receive that could influence their increasingly momentous decisions on issues like abortion rights. On the federal level, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s refusal to disclose lavish gifts, real estate deals, and travel perks from a billionaire benefactor with a vested interest in cases that came before the high court almost certainly violated federal disclosure laws. Yet in many states, supreme court justices are not required to disclose such handouts, even if the largesse has the potential to sway their decisions, recent research found. The analysis, published last month by the legal watchdog group Fix the Court, found that across the country, state justices are often allowed to “hide finances and perks from the public.” According to the report, in nine states, judges do not have to disclose any gifts they or their family members receive. In 11 states, judges can conceal their investments and investment income, and in an additional two states, they must only provide limited information about some investments. Another 20 states do not require justices to disclose their real estate interests. In 26 states, justices do not have to disclose positions they hold on the board of an organization or company. “States are effectively withholding information about their top judges to shield them from accountability or repercussions for their actions,” the report concluded. “Caught With Their Hands In The Cookie Jar”On April 9, Arizona Supreme Court justice Clint Bolick was one of four justices who reversed a lower court decision and ruled that an 1864 law that bans abortions with virtually no exceptions could come into effect in Arizona, a devastating blow to reproductive rights in the state. Bolick, a longtime conservative activist, was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court under former Republican governor Doug Ducey, who spent his tenure working to stack the state’s high court. Ducey added two seats to the court and appointed his political allies, securing an enduring conservative majority. Bolick’s wife, Shawnna Bolick (R), is a Republican Arizona state senator. She has served as a state lawmaker since 2019. Like many of Arizona’s conservative state lawmakers, Sen. Bolick took office with the support of the Center for Arizona Policy, an extreme anti-abortion group that for decades has led the fight to rescind abortion protections in the state. The group spent more than $5,000 in support of her campaign in 2020, and spent another $5,000 opposing her challenger, helping Bolick win a seat in a competitive district in Phoenix that year. “The Center for Arizona Policy is at the epicenter of the anti-abortion movement at the legislature,” said Marilyn Rodriguez, an Arizona lobbyist with progressive lobbying firm Creosote Partners. For decades, she said, the group has fought to “ensure that in Republican primaries, as much as possible, any pro-abortion Republican loses their election.” And throughout Sen. Bolick’s tenure at the Arizona state house, she has been wining and dining with the group, The Lever found. Lobbying records reviewed by The Lever show that over the last several years, Sen. Bolick has received more than $750 worth of food and drinks from the Center for Arizona Policy, including a single $300 meal at an October 2023 dinner attended by several lawmakers. It’s unclear whether her husband joined her at the dinners — but it would not be unprecedented. As longtime Arizona state house lobbyist Gaelle Esposito noted, “The senator and Justice Bolick have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar before, in terms of playing fast and loose with ethics concerns.” In 2019, Clint Bolick joined his wife as a guest at a dinner paid for by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing legislative lobbying group, leading to accusations of ethics violations. “They go out socially together,” Rodriguez said, noting the couple’s open ties to right-wing institutions in the state. “They’re friends with a lot of these people. It’s their social circuit.” The Center for Arizona Policy is closely intertwined with the Arizona abortion case. The group intervened in the case before the Arizona Supreme Court, submitting an amicus brief in the fall supporting the ban. The organization also has close ties to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Scottsdale-based anti-abortion group that brought the abortion case to the Arizona Supreme Court and argued it before Justice Bolick. The two organizations have worked together on legislation in the past, and lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom have represented the Center for Arizona Policy when it intervened in other cases. After the abortion ruling came down this month, the Center for Arizona Policy celebrated Clint Bolick and his colleagues’ votes in favor of blocking abortion rights. Now, lawmakers are trying to pass legislation to repeal the state’s abortion ban — and Sen. Bolick may prove to be a deciding vote. On Wednesday, three Arizona House Republicans defected from the party line and voted through a bill that would repeal the 1864 total ban. The bill — if it is not blocked by House GOP leadership — now heads to the Senate, where Sen. Bolick, despite supporting the ban in the past, has signaled support for the new legislation. Assuming that all Senate Democrats support the legislation, the bill would require just two additional GOP votes to pass. If the bill reaches the governor’s desk, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has indicated she will sign it. Though Roth said it was “hard for [him] to make an assessment” on how the wining and dining by the Center for Arizona Policy might have influenced Justice Bolick, he noted that the expenses would be prohibited on a federal level. “Why is it legal for a lobbying shop to spend $300 on food and beverage for a state lawmaker?” he asked. He emphasized that the public needed to be aware of justices’ financial interests, as well as those of family members, in case they failed to recuse themselves from deliberations in which they had a conflict of interest. “If you have a financial stake in a case, you should be stepping aside from that case,” Roth said. Given the growing power of state supreme courts, he said, “we should have a better understanding of the potential conflicts and entanglements of public officials that sit in those supreme court bodies.” Sen. Bolick did not respond to The Lever’s requests for comment. Justice Bolick declined to comment through a spokesperson when asked about the lobbying expenditures and whether he attended the dinners.
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“The Public Just Does Not Know”After the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision revoked federal abortion protections and turned the question of reproductive rights over to state judiciaries, money began to flood judicial elections. “State supreme courts, in my mind, have as much power as they ever have,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, which published the report on state judicial disclosures. Last year, outside spending in the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin state supreme court elections shattered previous campaign spending records, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute. In Pennsylvania’s state supreme court election, candidates and interest groups spent a historic $22 million on the race. In Wisconsin, that figure was $51 million. “The post-Dobbs era is a very different era for state supreme courts and the politics around them, and we should expect to see more record-breaking races,” said Douglas Keith, senior counsel with the Brennan Center’s judiciary program. Ultimately, liberal justices won in both states, to the relief of reproductive-rights advocates. But judicial watchdogs are still paying close attention to the growing amount of campaign cash being funneled into state supreme court elections. Across the country, special interests, including oil and gas interests, right-wing organizations, and local billionaires, now account for a higher share than ever of spending in state judicial elections, the Brennan Center analysis found, reaching 40 percent in the 2022 midterms. State judicial elections are subject to a patchwork of state campaign finance laws, many of which fall short of transparency, Keith said. In some states, weak campaign disclosure laws mean that judges may not have to disclose campaign donations that they received from attorneys or parties to a case they are overseeing if the donations fall below disclosure limits. “Because these courts fly under the radar, and because there are so few rules requiring both judges and the donors to judges’ campaigns to make public information about the kinds of financial support that judges are receiving, the public just does not know the extent of the conflicts of interest,” Keith said. Little AccountabilityOnce judges are in office, judicial watchdog Fix the Court found that in most states, justices do not have to report key details about their finances. In many states that require such reports, the disclosures are not posted publicly, making it difficult for the public to access the information. And Arizona isn’t the only state where this lack of transparency may be influencing abortion rulings. In Idaho, where a state supreme court last year ruled that abortion bans in the state could go into effect, imperiling the future of abortion access in the state, the finances of the state’s supreme court justices are kept completely secret. The Idaho justices — who sit on one of the most conservative state courts in the nation — do not have to disclose any outside income, investments, or gifts they receive.
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Even when the public discovers that a judge appears to have a conflict in a case they are overseeing, it may not change the outcome. In some places, recusal rules — which govern when a judge’s conflict of interest requires them to step aside — allow judges to oversee cases even if they involve their campaign donors or other people who gave them gifts. “If you’re a judge, I can give you a gift today and you can hear my case tomorrow in many states,” Roth said. The effect is that apparent conflicts of interest are running rampant in state supreme courts. In North Carolina, a state supreme court justice has for years sided with a major gas and electric utility in cases he has continued to hear, despite reporting that he owns more than $10,000 in stock in the company. In California, a supreme court judge recently weighed in on a case involving TEGNA, a media company in which she had reported owning between $10,000 and $100,000 in stock, according to research by Fix the Court. In Louisiana, a state supreme court justice oversaw a case involving oil behemoth ExxonMobil, despite owning at least $5,000 in stock in the company. When asked about the matter by Fix the Court, counsel for the Louisiana justice said that no state law required a judge’s recusal based on stock ownership. Louisiana’s code of judicial conduct, however, does require that a justice “divest himself or herself of investments and other financial interests that might require frequent recusation.” These concerns emerged because both Louisiana and California require judges to report investments of significant value. If those cases had come before justices in states that allow justices to hide their financial interests, such potential conflicts may never have come to light. In Arizona, another abortion case may soon arrive at the Arizona Supreme Court. An ongoing grassroots effort to protect abortion rights by bringing the question to voters on the November ballot will likely face legal challenges that bring the matter before the high court. “We are not done with Clint Bolick and abortion,” Rodriguez said.
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