Fani Willis Escalates Feud With Republicans Over Law She Denounces as ‘Racist, Sexist, and Clearly Unconstitutional’

A new lawsuit filed last week and backed by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, argues that Republicans in Georgia are engaged in an unlawful effort to weaken the political power of elected Democrats.The suit, filed by the district attorney of DeKalb County, Sherry Boston, seeks to block a new Peach State law — known as “HB 369”— which would strip party labels from several local races in five metro Atlanta counties. The statute would make races for district attorney, county commission, tax commissioner, and other county offices nonpartisan.The law covers Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties. The first three of those counties are deeply Democratic, while Fulton and Gwinnett have trended blue in recent years. Ms. Willis won reelection in Fulton County last November —as a Democrat — with some 70 percent of the vote. Under the new law, she and her competitors would not be able to identify by party.Ms. Boston’s suit alleges that the law signed by the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, violates the promises of “equal protection under the law” enshrined in both Georgia’s constitution as well as the national parchment. The suit contends that the “Georgia Constitution requires that laws work the same way throughout the state.” Georgia is divided into 159 counties, of which only five come under the new statute.The Uniformity Clause in Georgia’s constitution ordains that “laws of a general nature shall have uniform operation throughout this state and no local or special law shall be enacted in any case for which provision has been made by an existing general law.” Ms. Willis and the district attorneys from the other four counties targeted by the law are all black women as well as Democrats.Ms. Willis declared in a statement that the “targeting of five African-American women Democrats who were chosen by the voters of their counties to serve as District Attorney is racist, sexist, and clearly unconstitutional.” Ms. Boston adds in her own statement that the “vote by the Georgia Senate to force five district attorneys — all black, Democratic women in metro Atlanta — into nonpartisan elections is a blatant attack by Republicans to undermine the will of voters.”One senator who supported the bill, John Albers, calls it “common sense legislation. Any reference to a single position is not factual, as this impacts county commissioners, tax commissioners, solicitors, DAs, and surveyors. City elections are nonpartisan and I don’t see complaints about that.” The bill is constructed so as to demand nonpartisan races “in any county that uses a medical examiner instead of a coroner.” The suit, noting that the five counties at issue are the only ones that feature a medical examiner, calls that a “pretext.” Ms. Boston has warned that the litigation to fight the bill could cost taxpayers “hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.” She is seeking an “injunction” preventing the “enforcement and implementation” of the law, which arbitrarily singles out candidates for certain elections. The suit contends the law possesses “no rational basis why they should have to play by different rules than candidates in other counties.”The lawsuit also contends that the law it seeks to block was passed via a legally defective process. The complaint notes that “when a bill is voted down by the Senate or House, the Georgia Constitution requires two thirds of the rejecting body to give consent before that same proposal can be reconsidered and passed during the same legislative session.” HB 369 was not passed by a two-thirds margin. The state has 30 days to respond to the lawsuit.This is not the first time that Ms. Willis has accused her foes of racial bias. When the effort to disqualify her from her criminal racketeering prosecution against President Trump and 18 others first gained steam, she accused her critics of “playing the race card” and argued that the credentials of the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, whom she hired for the case were “impeccable.” She and Mr. Wade were at one point romantically involved. That relationship eventually led to the case’s dismissal. To this day, Mr. Wade has never prosecuted a felony at trial. Ms. Willis’s defense of Mr. Wade was delivered in 2024 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at a significant site — Big Bethel AME Church at Atlanta. Mr. Trump’s legal team reckoned that she “inappropriately injected race into the case and stoked racial animus” and that the “self-serving comments came with the added, sought after, benefit of garnering racially based sympathy for her self-inflicted quagmire.”After the failure of her case Ms. Willis told Georgia lawmakers, “I know you want to take me back to 1948, where an African American prosecutor can only prosecute certain types of people, but I prosecute and stand up for all victims that come into my circuit.”

Fani Willis Escalates Feud With Republicans Over Law She Denounces as ‘Racist, Sexist, and Clearly Unconstitutional’

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