(A forgotten post, a little late.)
The mission to make judges the plaything of the masses continued unabated this election season, as Christie Thompson of The Marshall Project reports:
Outside groups spent more money on campaigns for seats on top state courts nationwide than ever before, an analysis by The Brennan Center for Justice shows. At least one seat was at stake in 27 states on Election Day.
Special interest organizations — most of which don’t have to disclose their donors under campaign finance laws — put a record $19.4 million into TV ads for judicial candidates, over half of all TV spending in these races. The Republican State Leadership Committee spent the most of any group, putting $4 million into eight different races as part of its stated effort to elect more conservative justices.
The spending largely failed to unseat the judges it targeted. In Kansas, Washington and Mississippi, for example, justices held onto their jobs despite costly efforts to remove them.
But spending by outside groups isn’t expected to drop off. As some experts pointed out, many judges were able to win re-election because they had plenty of money in their corner, too. “I think it can be misleading to just look at money going to challengers who lose and then concluding the money had no impact,” said Alicia Bannon, who closely follows judicial elections as senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “I fear the lesson is that money is important and may encourage more spending.”
And the idea that judges need money to remain judges is a very poor proxy for quality judicial results. In the Kansas retention battle, previously mentioned on this thread, Christie has some numbers for us:
The four justices targeted by the ads won their retention election with support from roughly 56 percent of voters. But Justice Caleb Stegall, who was not targeted in the ads, won with 71 percent.
Ya know, the whole idea of appointed judges, unaffected by the latest opinion polls, is a profoundly conservative, and I think good, idea – but if we trace the money, we find it’s conservative PACs and individuals who tend to throw money into these elections, and who appear to agitate for elected judges. Of course, the signal outrage are claims of “legislating from the bench”, and, according to Wikipedia, this goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, if under different phraseology. But sometimes decisions that go against you are simply decisions that go against you. Continuing to fight a legal battle by changing how the referees are picked, to be honest, smacks of sore losers who are stubborn because that’s how they were brought up, not to respect justice and the law.
