I thought I had written about this before but I hadn’t, so here it is.
Texas’ Supreme Court has taken center stage in interpreting the state’s abortion laws in cases that have garnered national attention. And a new Democratic political effort targets three justices who they say “fucked around” — and will “find out.”
Gina Ortiz Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate and former under-secretary in the U.S. Air Force, launched the Find Out PAC to target Republican Justices Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine and Jane Bland, who are up for reelection in November.
Jones launched the PAC after the Texas Supreme Court’s high-profile ruling in December in the case of Kate Cox, the first adult in decades to petition a court to obtain an abortion. The Supreme Court blocked Cox, a Dallas-area mother of two, from getting an abortion in the state after her fetus was diagnosed with full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that is almost always fatal before birth or soon after. The pregnancy also posed severe risks to Cox’s health.
“The Kate Cox factor could change everything,” Jones said.
[…]
The Find Out PAC’s goal, Jones said, is to direct voter anger over the state’s abortion bans to the state Supreme Court, whose nine justices are all Republicans.
“These justices, who we’re calling Jimmy, John and Jane, are deeply embedded in this far-right movement to strip rights from Texans and Americans,” said Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, a supporter of the effort. “They’re starting with reproductive rights, but they’re not going to stop there.”
The Find Out PAC and its supporters, which include multiple state and federal office holders, aim to elevate the public’s consciousness about the court, whose justices are elected to six-year terms and run under the banners of political parties.
“So much of this is opaque. So much of this is deliberately confusing to try to prevent folks from participating in the political process,” Talarico said. “And so our goal here is to educate and empower voters across our state to take back their freedoms.”
Jones doesn’t shy away from provocative and profane language in promoting her message.
“We’re going to talk about this issue in a way some people are not comfortable with,” Jones said. “It’s a big opportunity for us.”
You can see their launch video here. I’ve seen my share of PACs and other organizations come and go, with varying levels of success. I have hope for this one – Gina Ortiz Jones raised a bunch of money when she ran for Congress, and there’s just so much to run on in this environment – but in the end it’s the result that matters. I’ll be looking for their finance report in July as a starting point.
I certainly hope to see a coherent attack on the Republicans’ extreme positions on abortion and IVF, for which they currently have no good answer, but that’s not something I’m used to seeing. It’s usually every candidate for themselves. A PAC like this can at least provide some consistency to a message as well as a platform for launching attacks, if they can raise the money for it. The Supreme Court put themselves in this position thanks to the Cox case, and the best response is to make them all fear for their electoral future, starting with the three Justices on this year’s ballot. We know what the recent history of statewide Democratic campaigns is. There’s still no other way forward.
And while this PAC targets all three of the Justices on the ballot, it’s clear that one of them is worse than the others.
Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine is facing new questions about his impartiality after a clip went viral this week in which he implied that Democrats plan to cheat against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
“Do you really think the Democrats are going to roll over and let Trump be president again?” Devine asked in a keynote speech at the Texas Tea Party Republican Women’s 2023 Christmas event. “You think they’re just going to go away, all of a sudden find Jesus and [there will] be an honest election? I don’t think so.”
Devine is a former anti-abortion activist who claims that church-state separation is a myth and, as a state district judge in Harris County in the 1990s, fought to have a copy of the Ten Commandments posted in his courtroom. In his successful 2012 campaign for the Texas Supreme Court, he claimed to have been arrested 37 times at anti-abortion protests in the 1980s, and has since been a reliable ally of conservative, Christian voters in the state. Devine narrowly survived a GOP primary challenge last month that centered around his ethics, and now faces state district court Judge Christine Vinh Weems, a Democrat, in the November general election.
Devine’s comments on the 2024 election were heavily criticized by users on X, formerly Twitter, after a Texas Tribune reporter shared an excerpt of his speech on Thursday. Many users took issue with Devine’s comments, which they said raised doubts about whether he could neutrally rule on an issue that might appear before the Texas Supreme Court in the coming months or years.
Devine is an ethical quagmire in addition to being a complete nutjob. It’s a matter of making sure enough people know about him and recognize the need to boot him from the bench. Raising some money to inform them would help.
IIRC, Devine once had a statement on his website touting the courage of his convictions in choosing to go through with a high risk pregnancy, something he bravely scrubbed when the awful situation of Kate Cox grabbed the headlines. I do hope that someone got a screen shot of that, because Devine’s nose needs to get rubbed into this hypocrisy nonstop. Now I fully support the rights of Mr. and Mrs. Devine to gamble on bad odds and not terminate a medically compromised pregnancy. I personally think it’s foolish and irresponsible if you already have young children, but that’s their business, not mine. But I also support the right of Kate Cox to look at similar grim odds and decide that it’s not in the best interests of her family to roll those loaded dice. Same for all the other women suing the state over an extremely bad and cruel law. When does SCOTX rule on that one?