America’s New Battlefront

Even as U.S. politics became more contentious and polarized over the past quarter century, a few pockets of the government remained comparatively above the fray, including the courts, which sought to position themselves apart from politics, and state capitols, where pragmatism trumped partisanship.

But those redoubts have fallen in recent years. The Supreme Court has become more ideologically aligned with the Republican Party, and state legislatures host pitched ideological battles. Now institutions that sit at their intersection—state courts, especially state supreme courts—have emerged as a site of bitter fights.

This fall, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are mulling plans to impeach Janet Protasiewicz, a recently elected liberal justice on the state supreme court, before she has even heard a case—by all appearances for the crime of having been elected as an outspoken liberal. In North Carolina, Anita Earls, a liberal justice on the state supreme court, has sued the state’s Judicial Standards Commission over an investigation it began into fairly anodyne comments she made about implicit racial bias in a press interview.

These two examples are only the latest in a trend of punishing judges to impeach four of the five Democrats on the state’s highest court. In 2022, Ohio Republicans state-supreme-court chief justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican and former lieutenant governor, over rulings about redistricting. In Montana, to make the state’s Judicial Standards Commission more partisan and give it more power to levy consequences on judges.