On November 4, Pennsylvania voters will be able to decide if three state Supreme Court justices will remain in office. These three justices have already been elected to serve for a 10-year term, but must face a retention election every year. In Pennsylvania, justices are normally retained until their term is up. In fact, in the history of Pennsylvania, only one justice has failed to be retained. But this year, MAGA billionaires are flooding the zone with misleading advertisements to trick Democrats into voting “NO.”
Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Eugene DePasquale joins Jen to discuss why this state Supreme Court election is so important, how MAGA is attempting to discredit and deteriorate election process that preserve the rights of voters, and how Pennsylvania Democrats plan on maintaining power.
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Eugene DePasquale is the Chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. Formerly, he was the Auditor General of Pennsylvania. He exposed wasted tax dollars and unanswered child abuse hotline calls, reduced the backlog in untested rape kits, and revealed problems with Pennsylvania’s Charter School Law. Prior to his tenure as Auditor General, Mr. DePasquale was a three-term member of the state General Assembly, representing the 95th state house district.
The transcript below has been edited slightly for clarity.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to have with us, for the first time, Eugene DePasquale. He is the head of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania. He’s also the former state auditor. Welcome, Eugene! Lovely to have you.
Eugene DePasquale
Jen, thanks for having me. Really appreciate you giving me the time.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. You know, there’s a lot of talk about New Jersey and Virginia, they’re having gubernatorial races, but 3 of your Supreme Court justices are up for election in Pennsylvania as, many of our viewers from Pennsylvania know all too well. Voters have to vote to retain them for another 10 years. And if they don’t, they can be replaced temporarily, but then there would be new elections. Why is this election so important? Why should people in Pennsylvania and people outside Pennsylvania be concerned about it?
Eugene DePasquale
So, first of all, you’re correct. This is, in 2015, these three Democrats were elected, and in Pennsylvania, you have a yes-no every 10 years, and they’re mostly very apolitical, but a MAGA billionaire has decided to throw tens of millions of dollars into this thing to try to defeat these three Supreme Court justices. Look, and in Pennsylvania, the reasons are important. Reproductive freedom, abortion rights have been defended.
They stood up for fair education funding, they stood up for a clean environment, labor rights. But for a national perspective, one of the… and voting rights is obviously critical. I’m gonna get to the national perspective on that, too. For people that are outside of Pennsylvania, why this matters is this Supreme Court threw out a gerrymandered map, said it violated equal protection in the state. That led to a very balanced map, where sometimes the Democrats have more seats in Congress and the state, sometimes Republicans, but the voters get the pick.
What they want to do is go back to their old gerrymandered map. That’s one of the reasons why this MAGA billionaire is doing this, so that the Democrats then cannot win control of Congress next year. The second one is, look, Donald Trump has said he wants to throw out basically all mail ballots. Well, more Democrats vote by mail than Republicans in Pennsylvania. This Supreme Court has stood up that whether you vote by mail or in person, if you legally cast that vote. Your vote should be counted. This MAGA billionaire doesn’t want that to happen either.
Jen Rubin
The points, I think, are very important. One, this is not some crazy left-wing court, and these three justices don’t always agree with one another. That this is really a rather balanced court, the kind of court you really want that’s going to be serious about this. And secondly, we came very close in 2020, with issues going up to the state Supreme Courts that Donald Trump was trying to steal back that election, and it didn’t work for him. Talk to us a little bit about these justices and what an important role they play nationally on issues like the presidential elections.
Eugene DePasquale
First of all, Jen, you’re absolutely right. Look, I’m an attorney, so that may kill my approval rating on this podcast, but I am an attorney as well, and there’s times I disagree with them, and there’s, you know, even though it’s a 5-2 Democratic majority, not all of these decisions are 5-2. They are doing what a court should do. Sometimes it’s 4-3, sometimes two Democrats side with the two Republicans on issues of interpreting the Constitution, because as you know, a lot of these are very close calls. So, this is… they’re doing what they should be doing as a court, which is interpreting the state constitution. But in a more broader sense for people nationally, why do I care about Pennsylvania rights?
In 2020, our lower court, because we have, you know, all of these judge of elections all over the state, were making all these different interpretations as to which vote-by-mail votes were actually going to be counted. And this Supreme Court held, in a way that actually backed up the law that all of these vote-by-mails were going to be counted, because the critical part was, you know, and this is getting into the weeds, but you had to date your ballot, and you had to sign your ballot, when you voted by mail, and that was a different interpretation all over the state. This Supreme Court codified it that they had one interpretation of that, thus making sure that all of these votes that were legally cast were counted, thus handing a state to Joe Biden. I want to be clear about this, because some people out there may be Republican, maybe Trump supporters. They use the exact same interpretation in 2024 when Trump won. Their job was to make sure that these votes, that the state constitution and state laws were held, and then letting the voters pick, not the other way around.
Jen Rubin
Now, I think people are slowly becoming aware, because our Supreme Court is so radical, the U.S. Supreme Court is so radical, it’s really been taken over by, partisans, quite frankly. The role of the state court supreme courts, are… has really become much more important because, of course, you have a state constitution as well. How important in voting rights, in reproductive rights, other important rights is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?
Eugene DePasquale
Tragically, you know, I think particularly for my daughter, this Supreme Court, the current United States Supreme Court, has done something that had never been done in the history of the United States, and that is we’re going backwards on freedom and rights. And I think about that particularly with my young daughter, who’s a recent Temple graduate, Temple University in Philadelphia. So we have to rely now on our states for these freedoms. And as we’ve seen, once Roe was overturned, I think it’s 19, 20 states have banned abortion. So, in states, and Pennsylvania Supreme Court, you know, as we know, the federal constitution gives us a 4, but the states can give us even more freedom. And Pennsylvania, when it comes to equal protection, has a very robust equal protections, and even environmental protections, so this Supreme Court has made sure that we protect those freedoms, particularly when it comes to reproductive freedoms and voting rights, that we’re not gonna… we basically cannot count on our United States Supreme Court to do that anymore.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, this shouldn’t be that controversial an issue. In the entire history of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, I could only find one election in which the judge, the justice was not retained.
Republicans have decided to make this a very politicized issue in the same way they did in Wisconsin earlier in the year when they tried to, you know, really put a Republican partisan on the court. How do you think the people of New Jersey, New Jersey, excuse me, how do you think the people… I’m from New Jersey, folks, but, you know, Pennsylvania was next door.
How do you think the people of Pennsylvania, are reacting to this, really, effort to politicize the whole thing and to buy this election? This smacks of, really, what, Elon Musk tried to do in Wisconsin.
Eugene DePasquale
It’s almost the exact same playbook, only in that race, there was a Democrat versus a Republican, so you at least had this… In Pennsylvania, so to, again, take a step back, only one justice in the history of Pennsylvania has ever not been retained. Now, there’s been maybe some lower courts and some magistrates, but only one Supreme Court justice, and that was over a very controversial middle-of-the-night pay raise. It was never over actual judicial decisions, and they’re mostly, like, 70-30, 65-35, whether it’s, again, a Democrat or Republican.
I took over as state party chair in September. That’s when I was elected state party chair. And at that moment, there was really an onslaught of ads and mailers and all this other stuff, and what they’re trying to do, and I give them credit for cleverness and shamelessness at the exact same time, which was they were sending mailers to Democrats, support term limits, vote no. Defend democracy, vote no. And it was clearly an effort to try to trick Democrats, and so we had to get on our game fast, raise the money, start communicating with our voters, letting them know what the judges actually cannot do by judicial ethics, which is they are Democrats. Let them know how they’ve been deciding cases, because, again, they’re not traditional candidates—they can’t go out there and say, oh, in my next term, I promise to give you better healthcare or something. That would violate their judicial ethics. They basically have to say, I’m going to interpret the law. That’s all they can basically say, so we have to go out and do the fighting for them. I believe we’re in a much better place now than we were around Labor Day, but we gotta keep our foot on the gas.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. People have to be aware of it and have to understand what the importance is. Let me take a step back. You’re the head of the state party now. The… it seems, though, that the country has really, figured out that Donald Trump is not delivering what he promised. Food prices are not going up. It’s chaos every day. He’s not going after the worst of the worst of, illegal, undocumented persons in the United States.
But Democrats still have to make the case, and still have to seal the deal. You have a very outspoken governor, you have a great set of representatives. How well do you think the Pennsylvania delegation and your statewide officers are doing in making a case that Democrats can do this better, that they can address those issues?
Eugene DePasquale
When I took over as state party chair, I said two things had to happen for us to get back into power, and I mean particularly the White House, not mayors and, you know, members of Congress, although flipping Congress matters. But we had to do two things, or two things had to happen. One was Trump had to basically do what we knew he was gonna do, which was fail. He has delivered chaos, higher prices, he has gone way too far when it comes to immigration, and even now, this monstrosity of tearing down part of the White House to build this stupid ballroom. I mean, showing you where his actual priorities are, which are not with working families and people that are struggling in the United States. So pulling back Medicaid protections. So this is the actual Trump agenda, which is looking out for his rich friends and having a ballroom for himself, which I don’t even know what he wants to do with it. But that was part one. Part two was, we also have to have an alternate agenda. We can’t just say Trump is bad. So, I think in Pennsylvania with Governor Shapiro, even, like, members of Congress like Chris Deluzio, we are outlining that, which is, if we’re going to have a tariff policy, make sure it’s… you know, combined with an appropriate tax policy and a manufacturing policy so that we can restart manufacturing. You know, anybody that opens a manufacturing plant will tell you they’ve got to have consistency over years. It can’t just be the tariffs are on one day and off the other day because Trump got mad at some you know, somebody on Twitter or something like that, which is basically how we’re governed these days, which is he gets mad at somebody and decides to slap on a tariff without Congress.
We also have a governor here that is actually cutting taxes for seniors. We need… and what that does, and again, maybe you don’t do that on the national level because, you know, we don’t have property taxes at a national level, but it shows us we have a governor that’s actually fighting to make people’s everyday lives more affordable. So as Democrats, what we need to do is recognize healthcare costs are too high, and what the Democrats are fighting for right now with the Trump administration is lowering these premiums on the, Affordable Care Act exchange. That’s critical to showing that we get that costs are too high. We’ve got to make sure that we’re trying to lower prices, break up corporate price gouging, and try to return more sanity back to our federal government. So, we cannot just say Trump is bad. Yes, he is, but we’ve also got to put an alternate agenda on there, and I hope in Pennsylvania we’re helping lead the way with that.
Jen Rubin
Well, there’s no state more important than Pennsylvania, the ultimate swing state, the ultimate purple state. So best of luck in the election, and if people want more information, or they want to donate, to the campaign, what do they do?
Eugene DePasquale
So you go to PADems.org is the website, you can contribute, you can get involved through the judicial retention there, or if you just want to say, I want to help the Democratic Party more… build an infrastructure long-term, you can do it that way as well. And if people want to follow me, it is at DeepasquallyPA on Twitter, I still don’t really call it the other name, and so, you know, those are ways that you can stay involved with the State Democratic Party.
Jen Rubin
Great. Well, there you have it, contrarians. You know what to do. Thanks so much, Eugene. We’ll look forward to having you back, real soon. Take care.
Eugene DePasquale
Look forward to it, Jen. Thank you
