If you want to understand modern politics, start looking at state supreme courts, especially what a chief justice can do with process. The real question isn’t whether judges lean left or right. It’s whether we’ve built a system where a few controllable levers can produce decisive outcomes even in closely divided states.

Here’s the testable claim: “court capture” often works as a repeatable mechanism, moneyed, partisan judicial elections create leadership control over procedure and oversight, which enables fast reversals that reshape election rules. This isn’t about “all conservative judges are corrupt” or “every controversial ruling is illegitimate.” It’s about institutional design that lets outcomes hinge on controllable levers. If the goal is impartial courts and stable democratic rules, we should focus on how judges get elected and what they can do with internal process, not whether they’re “activist” or “restrained.“

North Carolina offers a clean case study. ProPublica reports that after the state supreme court’s partisan balance flipped to 5–2 conservative, GOP lawmakers asked for a rehearing in the gerrymandering case, something the court had granted only 2 of 214 times since 1993. Instead of the typical in-person debate, the draft order was circulated with instructions to vote by email, giving justices just over 24 hours with “no debate.” The conservatives approved the rehearing order within about an hour. Chief Justice Newby then wrote the opinion declaring partisan gerrymandering legal in North Carolina.

This isn’t just a North Carolina story. It’s part of a national pattern: money, institutions, and procedure shaping state courts. ProPublica describes Newby as boosted by the Christian right early in his career, and that lane has orgs built to scale legal strategy. In Newby’s 2012 race, about $2 million in dark money arrived late, much of it tied to groups connected to the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a national GOP group focused on winning state-level power, and conservative legal movement fundraiser Leonard Leo (longtime Federalist Society leader). The Federalist Society also runs a state-court lane (e.g., State Court Docket Watch) as part of its State Courts Project, which is one way arguments and personnel networks get replicated. Nationally, the Brennan Center for Justice reports $100.8 million spent on state supreme court elections in 2021–22, with outside groups accounting for a record 45.3%. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal advocacy group, uses an attorney-network model that helps repeat litigation strategies and legal talent scale across states.

The obvious pushback is that courts sometimes do need to correct errors, even through unusual procedures. Fair enough. But when rare rehearings, compressed timelines, and leadership control cluster around partisan flips, the pattern, not anyone’s inner motive, deserves scrutiny. To falsify this claim, you’ll need to show that these procedural shortcuts happen routinely across party changes, or that oversight and transparency meaningfully constrain leadership behavior.

If the goal is legitimacy, what matters more, who wins the next headline case, or whether we’ve built a system where leadership can flip doctrine fast, with low transparency, after money-soaked judicial elections?