The Outlaw Dirty Money constitutional amendment won’t be on the ballot this November, but the judges who rubber-stamped the dirty tricks against it will be. Clint Bolick and John Pelander are up for confirmation as Arizona Supreme Court justices this November, and here’s why we should spread the word to kick them off the court.
ODM circulators worked their tails off to gather over 285,000 signatures from Arizona voters, a fair margin of safety over the 225,963 required to get on the ballot. So when the dark money interests saw that this was likely to become law and shine some light on their real names, they pulled out all the stops. Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch brothers, filed a lawsuit. They exploited a law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that invalidates all the signatures gathered by a petition circulator if that circulator fails to show up when subpoenaed for questioning.
But what about the voters who signed the petition in good faith and wanted their signatures to count? The constitution of Arizona guarantees the right of citizens to petition the government. ODM argued that our Republican legislature “has passed rules that have created unnecessary and insurmountable barriers into the petition process that clearly infringe on that right.”
The justices rejected this argument with not even a nod to the constitutional rights of the voters.