What happened at this week’s surprise special session in the General Assembly

Monday afternoon, we learned that we were being brought back for a special session — to start in less than 24 hours — regarding the ballot language for the six proposed constitutional amendments.

In short, the legislative leadership wants you to transfer more power to them by passing these amendments, and it wants to make sure the ballot language doesn’t tip you off that that’s what is really happening. (This primarily concerns the amendments regarding judicial vacancies and the state board of elections, for which the ballot language will now be incredibly misleading.)

It’s petty and self-serving, but at least we had some notice that it was going to happen.

Then we got a surprise.

Tuesday afternoon — while we were in recess and waiting to vote on the ballot language bill — leadership suddenly filed a bill to retroactively change election law to help the GOP win a state Supreme Court election.

Why?

Because earlier this year, the same GOP leadership had proudly set a trap by eliminating the judicial primaries, hoping lots of Democrats would run against one Republican for Supreme Court, splitting the vote for Democrats and helping the Republican win. A Republican group even sent mail to Democratic attorneys across the state encouraging them to run for Supreme Court.

But it backfired: One Democrat and *two* Republicans filed to run, with one of those Republicans having recently switched parties. Having set the trap, GOP leadership had apparently snared themselves.

So this week they decided to go back and change the law after-the-fact to spring themselves loose.

Their bill retroactively changes the rules in a way that would result in one of the Republicans (the non-incumbent) no longer being listed as a Republican on the ballot, in order to consolidate support for their preferred nominee.

The problem is, there are fundamental rule of law issues with changing the rules to benefit one candidate once the election process has already begun.

Candidates have filed. They’ve started campaigning. And they’ve done so in reliance on the rules as they were at the start.

(Coincidentally, every Republican senator in a highly competitive race either voted no or was not present.)

If this bill survives a veto and becomes law, I would put the odds of a court challenge at 90%. Given that the election process has already begun, it seems there are likely due process issues with ex post facto laws that are designed to hinder a particular candidate.