Friday, October 31, 2025
Guest column: Vote No on Donohue, Dougherty and Wecht
In a recent news story, the deputy director of the Judiciary Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice explained that donations to state Supreme Court justices typically come from “in-state business interests and trial lawyers — groups who look at the court as being important to their economic bottom lines.”
The director got part of it right.
The reality is that in 2015, trial lawyers and union special interests — not business interests — were the deep-pocketed spenders in Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court elections, doling out millions of dollars to elect state Supreme Court Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht to the bench. These special interests gave big because they expected these justices to help their economic bottom lines.
That’s exactly what’s happened.
Take government unions, for example. In 2018, Justices Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht ruled that former Gov. Tom Wolf could forcibly unionize 20,000 home care workers, which could lead to millions of additional dollars per year flowing into union coffers.
Think about it for a minute. Oftentimes, home care workers are family members caring for ailing loved ones. But SEIU and AFSCME — two major government unions with huge lobbying and political pocketbooks — saw a chance to forcibly expand their base of union members, not to mention their bank accounts of union dues.
Wolf, a top recipient of union donations, was all too eager to oblige and issued an executive order forcing unionization on these home care workers.
The Commonwealth Court invalidated Wolf’s order, but Supreme Court Justices Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht—each of whom received campaign contributions from both SEIU and AFSCME during the 2015 election season, per campaign finance reports—came to the unions’ rescue.
They ruled in favor of the unions at the expense of thousands of Pennsylvania home care workers, overturning the lower Commonwealth Court.
As the non-profit public interest law firm that argued against Wolf’s order explained, the court’s ruling “unionizes parents against their disabled children, sons and daughters against their elderly parents, and … friends against friends.”
The only winners in this case were the unions that fought to increase their bottom lines by electing Justices Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht.
Unions aren’t the only special interest that contributed big in anticipation of big returns. Trial lawyers also gave millions of dollars to these three justices in 2015.
And in 2022, the Supreme Court handed trial lawyers a huge gift.
That year, the court said that trial lawyers could file cases in plaintiff-friendly Philadelphia, even if the alleged offense happened elsewhere. This so-called “venue shopping” delivered a financial windfall for trial lawyers even as it hurt healthcare access for everyday Pennsylvanians.
We’ve all seen news of hospitals in Pennsylvania closing their doors. We also all know that health care access remains not simply a priority but, in some areas, a crisis. Amid all this, the court’s allowance of venue shopping has made Pennsylvania one of the hardest states in which to run a hospital.
These rulings don’t even begin to touch on these justices’ terrible rulings on mail-in ballots that ignored the law at Democrats’ request or the justices’ 2018 court-imposed gerrymandering of congressional districts.
Those arguing Justices Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht should be retained for another 10 years on the court pretend to be impartial actors who care only about fairness and independence. Their record of pushing justices to ignore or rewrite the law proves they are anything but.
Our justices should do one thing: Interpret the law as written. Not rewrite it to achieve a particular outcome.
That’s why on November 4, I urge Pennsylvanians to vote no on retaining Justice Christine Donohue, no on retaining Justice Kevin Dougherty, and no on retaining Justice David Wecht.
It’s time to term-limit these justices and give voters the chance to elect new, impartial justices to our state Supreme Court.
Matthew J. Brouillette is president and CEO of Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs, an independent, nonpartisan 501(c)(6) membership organization dedicated to improving the economic environment and educational opportunities in Pennsylvania.
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Former Governor Tom Corbett and former U.S. District Court Judge Robert Cindrich recently appeared at a forum where they maintained that criticism of the judiciary, including threats of impeachment, constitutes a “constitutional crisis.”
Unspecified violence against the judiciary was the impetus for their remarks. To be clear, violence is never acceptable. Neither are threats of violence, such as those perpetrated against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Cavanaugh, acceptable.
Corbett and Cindrich are to be lauded for their stand against violence, but their linkage of violent acts to policy disagreements with court rulings is an effort to perpetuate the aura of superiority with which the judiciary has historically cloaked itself.
Far from being in a constitutional crisis, the American public is finally seeing the judiciary for what it is: as subject to political bias as are the legislative and executive branches of government. As this becomes more readily apparent, judicial apologists are scrambling to protect their image of somehow being above the fray.
We have seen a surge in judicial activism at both the federal and state levels. The number of federal judges injecting themselves into the policy actions of the Trump Administration has spiked far above those which constrained previous administrations.
Those who disagree with the Trump Administration judge shop for a venue that will be sympathetic to their cause. Media reports dutifully detail which president appointed the judge. More often than not, that presages the ruling that will be handed down from the bench.
Gov. Corbett maintains that impeaching judges because politicians disagree with their rulings is wrong. However, federal judges are appointed for life. When they stray into overt judicial activism, we the people have no other recourse.
Here in Pennsylvania, judges and justices serve 10-year terms. In theory, this is intended to enable them to issue rulings based on the Constitution and statutory law. That, however, is not always the case. Judges and justices then benefit from another procedure, which is not accorded to the other two branches of government, by standing for a yes or no retention vote rather than for re-election.
Clearly, our supposedly co-equal branches of government are not co-equal.
If a governor or state legislator takes actions of which the voters disagree, we get the opportunity every two or four years to vote them out of office. Not so when it comes to judges and justices. We often must wait years to express our will at the ballot box — and then face a yes or no retention system that has only ever seen one justice denied a new ten-year term.
Case in point is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. During the COVID-19 pandemic then then-Gov. Tom Wolf took actions that clearly exceeded his constitutional powers. At every opportunity, the high court ruled in his favor. Their actions were so egregious that voters overwhelmingly approved amendments to the state constitution to ensure our freedoms would not be so violated in the future.
But voters had no immediate recourse against the justices who had infringed upon our rights. Those justices then further trampled the state constitution by stealing from the state legislature the process of drawing congressional district lines, hiring a Left-wing college professor from California to do the job, and then instituting the district lines by judicial fiat.
Again, voters had no immediate recourse.
But next month, three of those justices must stand for retention. The retention elections are getting more attention than usual because of the wayward behavior of the justices. But voters are still not allowed to choose between them and other candidates.
If any of the justices are denied retention, their seats on the court will temporarily be filled by gubernatorial appointment with confirmation by the state Senate. Voters won’t get the opportunity to hear from and vote for candidates until the 2027 elections.
Contrary to the assertions of Corbett and Cindrich, criticism of and debate over the rulings of judges and justices is not only not a problem, it is a long-overdue spotlight being placed on a branch of government that has thus far wielded unchecked autocratic power over us.
And the inability to hold judges and justices accountable is an actual threat to democracy.
Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal and American Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.
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