The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Wes Oswald
Maybe you’ve seen the signs at busy Tucson intersections: “Keep Politics Out of Our Courts.” I couldn’t agree more, and that’s why I will vote “do not retain” Arizona Supreme Court Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King. These two handpicked Supreme Court justices have been abusing their positions for years to serve a political agenda.
I walked out of my classroom in the spring of 2018 and marched on the Arizona Capitol alongside tens of thousands of parents, students, and community members demanding more funding for Arizona public schools. The REDforEd moment was pivotal for me — it was the first time I got involved in anything so big. After years of teaching and solving problems on my own caused by a broken education system, it seemed we had a solution. Surrounded by like-minded community members, I felt hopeful for Arizona’s future.
Ducey’s meager 20x20 Plan added $500M into Arizona’s underfunded education system, but I knew we needed more to truly solve Arizona’s education crisis. The summer after the walkout, I got involved in Invest in Education, an unprecedented citizen-driven ballot initiative. Together, we volunteers collected 150,000 signatures in just five weeks. 55,000 of those signatures were from Tucson. You may have signed at The Racket Club or at the base of Tumamoc Hill. Perhaps you signed because a teacher friend came to your house and explained how the Invest in Ed Initiative would put Arizona’s public schools on a better path by allocating an additional $800M into our schools by enacting a tax on the wealthiest 1%.
The Invest in Ed Initiative (ballot Proposition 208) was passed by Arizona voters in the middle of the pandemic. However, Arizona public school classrooms and teachers never saw a penny extra. Bolick made sure Invest in Ed was never enacted, using his position on the Arizona Supreme Court to overturn the will of the voters.
Why would he overturn a voter-approved, citizen-driven initiative? Because prior to serving on the Supreme Court, Clint Bolick was Vice President of Litigation at the right-wing, anti-tax Goldwater Institute.
A year later, Ducey introduced a flat tax to shield Arizona’s wealthiest families from having to pay their share to fund Arizona classrooms. I was part of a coalition of thousands of public education supporters across the state who asked you to sign another petition so Arizona voters could weigh in on the flat tax. We secured enough signatures, but we never got the chance to vote on the flat tax because Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King were two of five justices to side with the Goldwater Institute, who argued that tax measures are immune to repeal by voters.
Ducey’s flat tax, coupled with unchecked expansion of the ESA private school voucher program, are bankrupting our state and stripping millions of dollars in revenues from county and city budgets. Public education advocates have been volunteering in summer’s brutal heat for years now collecting signatures with the goal of fixing Arizona’s education crisis, but it turns out this simply isn’t possible with agenda-driven justices like Bolick and King in the Supreme Court.
A proven track record of using the courtroom to override Arizona voters in favor of personal pet projects ought to be enough to reject Bolick this November, but this justice is connected to another issue Arizonans care deeply about: abortion. Bolick and King joined two other Ducey-appointed justices, John Lopez IV and James P. Beene, in reinstating our disgraceful and barbaric 1864 total abortion ban making Arizona a pariah in our treatment of women seeking reproductive health care.
We have a rare opportunity to put a dent in a politically conservative super-majority on the state Supreme Court by voting to not retain Justices Bolick and King, and by rejecting Proposition 137, which would remove our right to vote on judicial retention at all. Don’t be fooled; politics have been deep in our courts for the last eight years. This is our opportunity to restore dignity, common sense, and our basic rights to our judicial branch.
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