MAGA Justice Clint Bolick Must Be Voted Off the Arizona Supreme Court

Ever smug and vain, Clint Bolick got a scorpion tattooed on his index finger after winning a lawsuit against the city of Mesa in 2012. He had just used the courts to weaken a city safety regulation. But today, his toothless grin has faded, and now he must face voters to be retained on the Arizona Supreme Court.

Bolick, age 67, voted to restore the 1864 total abortion ban on April 9, horrifying Arizonans. The ruling was so repellent that the state legislature – including his own wife, Sen. Shawnna Bolick – took only 15 days to repeal Bolick’s abortion ban.

The abortion ban highlighted Bolick’s career of partisan attacks on:

• Citizen initiatives
• Public schools
• Voter rights
• Unions
• Municipal protections for citizens
• Renewable energy
• Obamacare

Bolick’s targets are a MAGA checklist of legal destruction. Bolick is unfit to serve and must be kicked off the court in the November 5 retention vote.

No judicial experience

Rather than serve as an impartial jurist, Bolick has been an active right-wing partisan in his eight years on the Supreme Court. Arizona deserves an independent judiciary to protect our free society. Voters have removed six judges since 1978, and it’s time to vote Bolick out, too.

Bolick was appointed with no judicial experience whatsoever. Arizona has 436 sitting judges to choose from – all of whom had more experience than Bolick, who has never held a trial, called witnesses or ruled on a motion.

It was “the most chilling political appointment that you’ve probably never heard of,” said Ian Millhiser, a columnist for ThinkProgress.

Goldwater Institute’s voucher militant

But Republicans didn’t care if he was unqualified and inexperienced. Bolick had the partisan background Republicans wanted as the “Institute for Justice” founder. Using money from the infamous billionaire Charles Koch, Bolick created the institute in 1991 as an appendage of the MAGA Goldwater Institute. He created a job for himself as the director of litigation.

At a stint with the Reagan Justice Department in 1985, Bolick became pals with Clarence Thomas. Today, Thomas is a corrupt U.S. Supreme Court member who took 103 payoffs worth more than $2.4 million between 2004 and 2023. Because malice is a trait of both Thomas and Bolick, Thomas is the godfather to Bolick’s second son.

Bolick spent the 1990s job-hopping between right-wing legal foundations. He argued cases in state courts to defend school vouchers for the wealthy and to sabotage public schools in Arizona, Missouri, Maine, Ohio, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Puerto Rico.

For example, Bolick argued cases before:

• The Wisconsin Supreme Court which ruled in 1998 that it was permissible for the government to fund school vouchers to Catholic schools.
• The U.S. Supreme Court upheld his arguments in favor of Cleveland’s school voucher plan in 2002, in which 82 percent of students attended private religious schools.

Legal attacks on consumers

Bolick also pursued many fruitless legal attacks on programs that benefit consumers.

In an attack on a renewable energy policy, Bolick sued the Arizona Corporation Commission in 2008, claiming it had no power to require utilities to generate electricity from sustainable sources like solar, wind, landfill gas, and biomass generation. These are cleaner, cheaper, and are infinite resources. Thankfully, Bolick lost at trial, and an Arizona Appeals Court ruled against him in 2011.

In 2010, he sued Obamacare in a pointless challenge to the Independent Payment Advisor Board, which controls Medicare spending. Obamacare is highly popular because it requires insurance companies to cover pre-existing medical conditions. Obamacare has been challenged more than 2,000 times in court. Bolick lost his Obamacare attack at trial in 2012, and in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Bolick’s appeal.

Legal attacks on businesses and workers

Bolick sued the city of Tucson to overturn a 2012 ordinance supporting local businesses after the Great Recession. The ordinance boosted existing and new companies, increased jobs, raised income levels, and generated commercial investment. A judge ruled that the ordinance was unconstitutional in 2014 because it violated the Arizona Gift Clause.

In 2015, Bolick won a legal attack against worker “release time,” which allowed Phoenix union members to conduct union business while being paid. He stabbed labor in the back again in 2024 by writing the Arizona Supreme Court opinion that struck down the release time statewide. Bolick crippled the rights of sanitation workers, childcare providers, detention officers and 911 dispatchers statewide.

Hostility to Voter Initiatives

Bolick has been consistently hostile to voters across Arizona, inventing technicalities to throw hard citizen ballot initiatives off the ballot.

For instance, Bolick voted to knock the “Stop Surprise Billing and Protect Patients” initiative off the 2020 ballot. The state Supreme Court struck 28,000 signatures on August 20, 2020, leaving an insufficient number to qualify for the ballot. The court had subpoenaed 332 petition circulators to appear as witnesses. However, they were not properly served because the subpoenas were dumped outside an empty building. As a result, many circulators didn’t appear, and the signatures they collected were struck.

In a follow-up ruling on March 31, 2021, Bolick picked nits about the wording of the initiative’s 93-word synopsis that used the word “insurers” instead of saying “certain insurers.” So, he declared the initiative misleading and confusing.

Bolick used the same underhanded tactic to kick the 2018 Invest in Ed ballot initiative off the ballot. The measure would have raised $1 billion in taxes to fund Arizona schools. However, on October 26, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the proposal was confusing because it failed to address the initiative’s impact on income tax “indexing.”

Educators and supporters of the initiative were furious that the court had undermined voters. Supporters again submitted the Invest in Ed initiative on the 2020 ballot, and it passed overwhelmingly with 1.7 million Arizonans voting in favor. The measure became law.

But then Bolick and the Supreme Court ruled on August 19, 2021, that it was unconstitutional based on a new technicality. It said the tax funding method was not a “grant,” and it exceeded funding limits on public education.

State House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding (D-Phoenix) called the lawsuit against Prop. 208 is just one example of Republican animosity toward public education.

“Running to the courts to overrule the majority of voters on a disputed legal technicality should be nothing to celebrate. But the hostility that Arizona’s governor and the anti-public education right-wing have shown for public school families, students and educators has been relentless,” he said.     

Groups team up to oust Bolick

The nonprofit Progress Arizona launched a campaign in April 2024 to deny new terms to both Bolick and fellow Justice Kathryn King on the November ballot. Both of them voted to restore the 1864 abortion ban.

“Removing judges who serve ideology over the people is not just a constitutional right, it is a civic duty,” said Progress Arizona’s Abigail Jackson. “It’s up to voters to preserve the integrity and balance of the judicial system.”

In a joint venture, the National Democratic Redistricting Commission and Planned Parenthood Votes have announced they will spend at least $5 million on Supreme Court races across the country, including Arizona. They said those courts are crucial to determining whether abortion rights stay in place after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“We are in the fight of our lives to protect and restore our fundamental freedoms,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement. “And our courts are the front lines.”

It’s time for voters to stand up for citizen initiatives, union rights, public schools, and renewable energy and vote “no” to Bolick’s retention on the state Supreme Court. Arizona can’t afford Bolick’s corrosive influence on the state’s top court and must vote to eject him before he causes more damage to the public good.