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Kemp's judicial election cancellation heads to Georgia appeals court

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp

A judge ruled this week that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has the authority to appoint someone to fill a judicial vacancy that does not yet exist.

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

The two politicians who want to be candidates for the next opening on Georgia's highest court are appealing a judge's ruling that there doesn't have to be an election.

Their trips to the courthouse Wednesday and Thursday are the latest moves in what has rapidly become a flashpoint in the world of good governance: Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's declaration that he, not the voters, will decide how to fill a not-yet-empty seat on the state Supreme Court.

The law seems to have provisions supporting him as well as those desiring the special election the governor has called off. But the reality is that Kemp's motives are under heightened suspicion since he narrowly won the governorship in 2018 amid evidence that, as secretary of state, he was complicit in an array of voter suppression efforts.


Justice Keith Blackwell, whose six-year term ends in December, told Kemp last month that he was dropping his re-election bid and would resign six weeks early, on Nov. 18. Kemp's office then told the new secretary of state, fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, that Kemp would fill the seat by appointment so the position should be dropped from the May 19 judicial election ballots. Raffensperger complied.

A former Democratic congressman from Athens, John Barrow, and a former Republican state legislator from Atlanta, Beth Beskin, then sued in state court to get the election back on the ballot on the grounds it had been illegally canceled. They asked a judge to order Raffensperger to put it back on the calendar and allow candidates to qualify.

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The two candidates lost the first round on Monday, when Judge Emily Richardson ruled that state law and the Georgia Constitution dictate the seat became vacant Feb. 26, when Kemp signed a letter accepting the justice's resignation.

Even though the effective date of Blackwell's resignation is six months after the election, the judge said, Kemp has the authority under the state Constitution to name his successor.

Barrow's request for the Georgia Court of Appeals to reverse that ruling says the judge is flat wrong. "The Constitution clearly requires a vacancy as a condition precedent to the Governor's power to appoint," his petition says, and the state Supreme Court itself has ruled "a vacancy occurs when the office is unoccupied and when there is no incumbent lawfully qualified to exercise the powers of the office."

Blackwell, 44, says he's returning to private practice to make his family finances cushier before his children go to college — abandoning a rapid rise in conservative judicial circles that put him on the state's highest court when he was 36 and on the list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees Donald Trump produced during the 2016 campaign.

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Joe Biden being interviewed by Lester Holt

The day after calling on people to “lower the temperature in our politics,” President Biden resort to traditionally divisive language in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt.

YouTube screenshot

One day and 28 minutes

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

One day.

One single day. That’s how long it took for President Joe Biden to abandon his call to “lower the temperature in our politics” following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate,” he implored. Not messages tinged with violent language and caustic oratory. Peaceful, dignified, respectful language.

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Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

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Donald Trump on stage at the Republican National Convention

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 18.

J. Conrad Williams Jr.

Why Trump assassination attempt theories show lies never end

By: Michele Weldon: Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is “The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.”

Diamonds are forever, or at least that was the title of the 1971 James Bond movie and an even earlier 1947 advertising campaign for DeBeers jewelry. Tattoos, belief systems, truth and relationships are also supposed to last forever — that is, until they are removed, disproven, ended or disintegrate.

Lately we have questioned whether Covid really will last forever and, with it, the parallel pandemic of misinformation it spawned. The new rash of conspiracy theories and unproven proclamations about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump signals that the plague of lies may last forever, too.

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Painting of people voting

"The County Election" by George Caleb Bingham

Sister democracies share an inherited flaw

Myers is executive director of the ProRep Coalition. Nickerson is executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a campaign for proportional representations (not affiliated with the U.S. reform organization FairVote.)

Among all advanced democracies, perhaps no two countries have a closer relationship — or more in common — than the United States and Canada. Our strong connection is partly due to geography: we share the longest border between any two countries and have a free trade agreement that’s made our economies reliant on one another. But our ties run much deeper than just that of friendly neighbors. As former British colonies, we’re siblings sharing a parent. And like actual siblings, whether we like it or not, we’ve inherited some of our parent’s flaws.

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Constitutional Convention

It's up to us to improve on what the framers gave us at the Constitutional Convention.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

It’s our turn to form a more perfect union

Sturner is the author of “Fairness Matters,” and managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.

This is the third entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.

The Preamble to the Constitution reads:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

What troubles me deeply about the politics industry today is that it feels like we have lost our grasp on those immortal words.

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