There were a great many unusual statewide candidates on ballots last year, but Michigan’s Kristina Karamo stood out as … special. As regular readers might recall, Karamo raised eyebrows, for example, by talking publicly about her concerns regarding “demonic possession,” which she said can spread from person to person through intimate relationships.
Karamo also spread Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, rejected vaccines, derided transgender women, condemned evolutionary biology, suggested cohabitation before marriage opens the door to normalizing pedophilia, and expressed great certainty that the 2020 election results were illegitimate.
She was nevertheless the Michigan Republican Party’s nominee for secretary of state, though she ended up losing by 14 points. Soon after, the party thought the smart move would be to make Karamo the new chair of the Michigan GOP. (She received backing from Donald Trump, who called her “a powerful and fearless Election Denier.”)
That hasn’t turned out especially well. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Karamo has struggled to raise money; party insiders deemed insufficiently right-wing are being pushed out; and much of the party apparatus appears to be at war with itself.
It was against this backdrop that The Detroit News reported this week on the state GOP chair’s latest problem.
A Wayne County judge has imposed $58,459 in sanctions on Michigan Republican Party chairwoman Kristina Karamo, the state party’s lawyer and others because of a lawsuit they filed last year that claimed, without evidence, there was wrongdoing in Detroit’s election. In an order signed Monday, Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny described the Oct. 26 suit … as “rife with speculation, an absence of facts and a lack of understanding of Michigan election statutes and Detroit absentee ballot procedures.”
Interestingly enough, the judge in this case recently retired, but he returned to the bench to hear the request from the Detroit City Clerk’s office seeking sanctions against those who claimed without evidence that there was election wrongdoing in the city.
Karamo wasn’t the only one responsible for filing the misguided case, but she was the lead plaintiff.
Though it probably won’t help the Michigan GOP Party chair feel any better, she’s not the only Republican who’s faced court-imposed sanctions recently. Arizona’s Mark Finchem, another failed right-wing secretary of state candidate, has been sanctioned twice for filing frivolous election-related cases. Also in Arizona, Kari Lake’s lawyers were ordered to pay sanctions for making “unequivocally false” election claims in court. Trump himself has also been sanctioned for filing frivolous litigation.
Given the relevant details, this is encouraging. Courts should certainly exercise great caution before discouraging worthwhile litigation, but there’s also value in punishing those who clog the courts with cases that never should’ve been filed.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, American courtrooms are not supposed to be abused by politicians filing frivolous cases in pursuit of partisan theatrics. The judiciary is not a toy. There is a reasonable expectation that all litigation, even if ultimately unsuccessful, has at least some merit.
When political actors file performative cases in pursuit of scoring points, it’s also reasonable to expect them to pay a price.
