HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — Central Pennsylvania state Sen. Greg Rothman, the newly elected state Republican Party chairman, will face his first big challenge this year with the control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on the ballot.
Rothman, who won the party chairmanship with overwhelming support in a 248-120 vote last month, will look to fill three state Supreme Court seats with three Democratic justices up for retention elections.
The judicial elections are for 10-year terms. On the ballot is a yes-or-no for a position that has an oversized impact on the average person. Despite their power, these elections are often decided with very low turnout.
Case in point, the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court stepped over the line in 2018 by redrawing the entire state’s congressional map, putting a finger on the scale in a role it never held.
Just over 16 months after being sworn into the majority, Democrats suddenly redrew the entire congressional map, which had been in place for seven years. This threw the state into mass confusion — people were drawn out of the seats they held, and voters had no idea what congressional districts they were in.
Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer told me at the time that he was concerned about how much disruption the ruling has caused. “All of a sudden, current members of Congress have to figure out where they run or if they run, with challengers facing the same issue,” he said. “This could have been held off for a couple of years when the Democrats stood a fairly good chance of drawing a more favorable map without having the courts involved.”
The move was pure politics: costly and heavy handed. The Democrats in the majority exercised their muscles to help Democrats win seats they normally would not have.
That November, the Pennsylvania congressional delegation went from a solid Republican majority to an even split.
Source: The Daily Review