Hillsdale — Andrew Fink didn’t even have time to put mustard on a hot dog.

Between hours of nonstop conversation at the Michigan GOP convention with some of the 2,000 Republican delegates who could nominate him for a seat on the state Supreme Court, the 39-year-old Republican lawmaker could hardly stop for a drink of water.

The case for Fink’s opponent, Court of Appeals Judge Mark Boonstra, took only 10 seconds. Boonstra already had 12 years of experience on the bench and is the only candidate at the convention endorsed by former president Donald Trump.

Fink’s argument took longer. He had only two terms in the Michigan House and no time on the bench. But the 67-year-old Boonstra couldn’t run again after serving an eight-year term due to the court’s age limit of 70 years. Fink is young, and, since sitting justices rarely lose re-election, he could keep the seat for decades.

“If we had the opportunity to talk to someone one-on-one, we felt very confident that we could get that person to understand why my candidacy made more sense than my opponent’s did,” Fink said in an interview the next day.

In a nail-biting 1,051-to-986 vote at the Dort Financial Center on Aug. 24, Fink defeated Boonstra and won the Republican nomination for one of two state Supreme Court seats on the ballot in November.

Control over the state’s high court is at stake. Republicans could flip the Michigan Supreme Court, where Democrats currently hold a 4-3 majority, if they win both seats this fall.

Incumbency is a major advantage in Michigan’s judicial elections, since ballots display the incumbent’s title and no party affiliations for challengers. But Fink is running to fill a seat left vacant by retiring Justice David Viviano, a Republican appointee. The other Republican nominee, Patrick O’Grady, has a more difficult challenge. He’s running to unseat Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed to the bench two years ago.

With less than two months until Election Day, the two Republican nominees face an uphill battle. A double victory for Democrats could—with the help of incumbency—cement a 6-3 majority for years.

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Fink was born near Ypsilanti into a family of the law. His father was a police officer and his grandfather, Robert V. Fink, was a district court judge in Washtenaw County.

“This sounds strange,” Fink said, “But I enjoy talking to lawyers. I enjoy hearing about cases.”

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Fink wanted to join the military but was only 16 years old. Instead, he earned a politics degree at Hillsdale College and attended law school at the University of Michigan.

But as the war progressed through 2007, the military needed more people. A Marines Corps recruiter told Fink he had a “mission for lawyers.”

“The needs finally met my availability,” Fink said.

Already in debt from two years of law school, Fink attended Officer Candidate School in the summer before his final year. From 2011 to 2014, he worked as a Judge Advocate in the Marines.

After joining his family’s law practice in Ann Arbor, Fink returned to Hillsdale in 2017, where he set up a satellite office for the firm. During those years, he watched a contrast of visions begin to define American politics. One view, he said, believed America should “always improve and develop but stay in touch with the ideas of the founding, those who fought in the Civil War, and those who pioneered and settled this incredible nation.” The other “suggested America needed to be fully rebooted.”

“I thought if I wanted America to still be recognizable as itself, I would regret not getting involved,” he said.

In fall 2019, he announced his run for state representative. A few months later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a slew of restrictions based on the spread of Covid-19 in the state. One order prevented healthcare providers from performing nonessential procedures. 

“It essentially replaced lawmaking powers on the governor’s read on an ongoing, indefinite basis of simple emergency powers,” Fink said. “And the logic of that struck me as obviously unsound.”

The Michigan Supreme Court agreed. After three healthcare centers sued, the court ruled she had no authority to issue the order—this was a job for the legislature.

In August 2020, Fink won a contested GOP primary—winning 38% of the vote among four candidates—after incumbent Eric Leutheuser reached his term limit. He won easily in 2022. But Fink said he always thought his temperament was better suited for the bench. This election season, he is pitching himself as the “rule of law” candidate.

“The Michigan Supreme Court has been, even fairly recently, a court where the majority of the justices focused on the text of the law and tried to read it in the way that it was understood by the people who wrote it,” Fink said. “I don’t think that’s where our Supreme Court finds its true north right now.”

Candidates for the bench cannot make commitments about how they would rule on particular cases, but Fink pointed to one case about the state minimum wage that illustrates the “politicization” he said is taking over the court.

When a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage was set for November 2018, a Republican-led legislature passed the proposal and amended it after the election, preventing the wage hike. The “adopt-and-amend” strategy made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, which last month struck down the amendments and set wage hikes and leave mandates for February.

“The reasoning that the court employed is difficult to justify by the text of the constitution,” Fink said. “It essentially read into the state constitution a prohibition on the legislature amending a law that is not there.”

While in office, Fink repeatedly voted for pro-life legislation. But he said his policy views on abortion would not affect his legal judgment.

“If you’re committed to an interpretive method that is ‘Read the law and apply it in a way that comports to the text,’ then the topic of the law is not what is most important,” Fink said.

Fink’s opponent, Democratic nominee Kimberly Ann Thomas, was appointed by Whitmer to the Michigan Task Force on Juvenile Justice Reform in 2021. Before joining the faculty, she worked as a trial attorney in Philadelphia and currently directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Michigan Law.

Thomas has help from outside groups. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan last week committed more than $2 million to the state Supreme Court races.

Its ad buys can’t advocate for a particular candidate, but the ACLU said the campaign is about “educating voters about the candidates,” such as their positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues.

“Michigan voters made it abundantly clear that protecting reproductive rights, including abortion, is a priority,” said Merissa Kovach, ACLU of Michigan political director. “Our aim is to ensure the gains we have made in Michigan stay won.”

Never before has the group intervened in contests for the state’s high court. But Fink views this as a sign that he could pull off a November victory in a state where the top-ticket competitors remain close in the polls.

“I don’t think people are putting millions of dollars against me because they think I’m going to be easy to beat,” Fink said.

Thomas McKenna is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.