The chamber has long played a role in judicial races. According to PAC Man, a memoir by the chamber’s former legal counsel, Bob LaBrant, the chamber’s PAC made its first contribution to a judicial candidate in 1980 “because of the importance of the court on redistricting.” The state was set to redraw its lines in 1981, leading to a legal fight that played out before the Michigan Supreme Court in 1982.

LaBrant is still involved. He’s personally spoken out against the Voters Not Politicians proposal, and provided volunteer services to the chamber-linked group trying to block it in court.

Don’t buck the party

Citizens for Protecting Michigan’s Constitution filed its challenge to the Voters Not Politicians proposal in the Court of Appeals on April 25. After Thursday’s setback, the group says it plans to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. If history is any guide, things could get tense, and the state’s political parties will be watching closely.

Joseph Swallow, a former Republican state lawmaker and retired Alpena County Circuit judge, said judges backed by political parties can feel pressure to not upset their party’s wishes in redistricting cases.

“Kavanagh did it,” he said, “and you see what happened to him.”

The Kavanagh he was referring to was a former Democratic-nominated justice from the 1970s, Thomas Giles Kavanagh. He was also known as “Thomas The Good,” according to the book, Michigan Supreme Court Historical Reference Guide, researched by Jill K. Moore.

In 1972, Kavanagh on the high court during a different era of redistricting. At the time, the state had a redistricting commission. That commission included an even number of Republicans and Democrats and tended to deadlock on picking a map. The deadlocks left the Supreme Court to select one of the maps proposed by members of the commission.

In the 1972 case, Kavanagh refused to side with majority Democrats. Instead, he dissented.

“To decide this case as presented to us and to select any of their plans is to make a political decision,” Kavanagh wrote. “In this setting, the parties do not come to this court asking for justice — they ask for a campaign issue.”

He continued, “It is difficult to conceive of anything better calculated to undermine public confidence in this court and destroy our credibility.”

Four years later, Michigan Democrats didn’t renominate Kavanagh for the Supreme Court.

Swallow, then a GOP lawmaker, said Democratic legislative colleagues told him in advance Kavanagh wouldn’t be re-nominated. Swallow went on to be the Republican nominee for Kavanagh’s seat in 1976. He ran against a Democratic nominee and Kavanagh, who ran as incumbent but without the nomination of a major party.

Kavanagh won re-election, anyway, but the message sent by his party was clear.

“To my knowledge, the Kavanagh episode did have the chilling effect of silencing any further serious opposition by a sitting justice against their political patrons,” Swallow wrote in 2015.

An endless battle

The 1972 case is just one in a line of major Michigan court cases over redistricting.

In the 1960s, there were multiple legal battles over whether Michigan could continue to base its legislative districts on both population and geographic area, meaning some districts had many more people in them than others.

According to the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Reference Guide by David. G. Chardavoyne and Paul Moreno, a majority of state voters approved a referendum in 1952 to allow state Senate districts to be based on geographical area instead of just population.

At the time, 12 Democratic state senators had been elected by 46,000 more votes than the 22 elected Republicans senators, the book’s authors wrote. Gus Scholle, then-president of the AFL-CIO, led a legal challenge to how state Senate districts were drawn.

Eventually, the Michigan Supreme Court, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr, ruled in 1962 that the state’s process for drawing Senate districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and should be drawn based on population.

In the majority opinion, Justice Thomas M. Kavanagh ‒ known as “Thomas the Mighty,” and not related to “Thomas the Good” ‒ wrote, “Each unmanageable member of the court faces an arrogant and amply headlined threat of impeachment ‘if the senate districts are declared illegal.’ This threat should neither hasten nor slow the judicial process.”