biz council of ala
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/karl-rove-william-canary-and-the-siegelman-case/">https://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/karl-rove-william-canary-and-the-siegelman-case/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;"> trio of reporters at <em>Raw Story</em> has just published <a href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/The_Permanent_Republican_Majority_Part_III_1216.html" style="border: 0px; color: rgb(0, 51, 187); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">further details</a> relating to the involvement of Karl Rove in the campaign of Alabama Governor Bob Riley and in the effort to eliminate his chief rival, former Governor Don E. Siegelman, through a criminal prosecution. The story traces Rove’s involvement, largely via his long-time friend William Canary, in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial race. Canary had initially advised the campaign of Lieutenant Governor Steve Windom, and only after his primary defeat turned to the Riley campaign. <em>Raw Story</em> reports:</p><blockquote style="quotes: none; font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(52, 52, 52); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 16px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 60px 15px; line-height: 22px;"><p style="border: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; line-height: 22px;">According to the Alabama RNC source, Rove met regularly with operatives for the Riley campaign. The source’s allegations are confirmed in part by campaign disclosure forms, which show that Windom paid Canary as a consultant between 1999 and early 2001 and later received large contributions from Canary’s business partner, a pattern that is duplicated with Riley and Canary.</p><p style="border: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; line-height: 22px;">According to public records, Windom paid Canary’s firm $38,022 for consulting and polling between 1999 and 2001. At the same time, PACs associated with Canary’s business partner, Patrick McWhorter, donated heavily to Windom’s campaign, contributing $149,000 in 2001 and another $75,000 in 2002.</p><p style="border: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; line-height: 22px;">After Windom lost the primary, PACs associated with McWhorter and Canary switched their donations to Bob Riley, giving him $85,000 in the days immediately preceding the November election. After the election victory, Windom emerged immediately as a close confidant of Riley’s, advising him on the appointment of a new Insurance Commissioner, Walter A. Bell, and other matters. Canary also emerged as a key Riley advisor.</p><p style="border: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; line-height: 22px;">Public records also show that at the same time Canary was consulting for Bob Riley’s campaign, his lobbying group, the Business Council for Alabama, donated $678,000 to the campaign of his client. This was the third largest donation the campaign received, exceeded only by those from the Republican National State Elections Committee, for $2,475,000, and from Bob Riley himself, who contributed $1,070,000 to his own campaign.</p></blockquote><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">Rove’s linkage to this campaign has been reported before and belongs to the insider’s account of Alabama politics—but <em>Raw Story</em> brings in considerable additional detail. The Rove involvement is unfolded with a flow chart showing the complex relationships. As Dan Abrams noted on his MSNBC report recently, Rove’s extensive campaign dealings in Alabama involve a large team, and the central figure in the process is certainly William Canary, the husband of the U.S. Attorney who brought the Siegelman prosecution. Rove and Canary go way back, certainly to Canary’s days on the Republican National Committee. Canary’s move down to Alabama seems to have been one of the factors that led Karl Rove to become much more deeply engaged in Alabama politics.</p><img class="size-full wp-image-1940" src="http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/rovecanary.gif" alt="rovecanary" title="rovecanary" width="" style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 15px 15px 0px; margin: 0px; vertical-align: top; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; font-size: 18px;"><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">A great deal of this article lines up with what I have learned in six months of research on the Siegelman matter. For instance, two well-known Alabama Republicans described to me Rove’s involvement in the campaign to elect Perry Hooper to a judgeship. One of them detailed to me a meeting at which Hooper and Rove were present along with several Alabama G.O.P. operatives, including Mark Fuller (later to become the Siegelman judge), at which some very aggressive campaign tactics were discussed . . . but I’ll be reporting more on this later. Rove’s mastery of the Alabama political landscape was described as comprehensive and detailed. And a large part of Rove’s work consisted of advising his clients how to approach out-of-state funders. He believed that tort reform was the pivotal issue and that manufacturers’ associations would bring in the needed cash to fuel elections. On this as on so many electoral issues, Karl Rove was spot-on. His strategy worked, and the current Alabama Supreme Court, with 8 Republicans and 1 Democrat is proof of that. The <em>Raw Story</em> article also opens up the floorboards on some of this operation, especially as it unfolded into the time of the 2002 gubernatorial election, but this is a complex story yet to be fully unraveled. One thing certainly emerges both from this account and from the Senate probe headed by Senator McCain: Jack Abramoff and former Riley advisor Michael Scanlon, both now convicted felons, and both figures with ample connections to Rove, are right in the middle of it.</p><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">Today a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/17/visitor.logs/" style="border: 0px; color: rgb(0, 51, 187); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">federal judge directed that White House visitors’ logs</a> were public records and could be turned-over. The White House is certain to challenge this ruling. Public access to visitors’ records has been a hotly contested issue for a number of reasons, and one of them is that Jack Abramoff claims to have paid hundreds of visits to the White House. President Bush has had a failure of memory with respect to Abramoff visits, but <em>Time</em> magazine says it has viewed a portfolio of portrait-style photographs with Abramoff and the President. Others in the White House have confirmed that Abramoff was a regular visitor. In law-enforcement interviews, Abramoff is said to have confirmed that he frequently met with Karl Rove outside of the White House so as to avoid being recorded in the visitors’ log. The <em>Raw Story</em> account details other meetings that Rove arranged outside the White House so as to avoid detection. <fn>Sources I have interviewed in studying the Siegelman story also place meetings with Rove in the offices of the Federalist Group and on street corners.</fn></p><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">The <em>Raw Story</em> piece provides further detail of Rove’s involvement in the Riley campaign, as one of its chief strategists. One key element of that campaign was the use of a bogus federal criminal prosecution, undertaken by Leura Canary—the wife of Rove’s key connection, William Canary—and timed perfectly to match the election cycle. Republican operatives have now linked Rove directly to arrangements for that prosecution.</p><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">Still open to question: the details of Karl Rove’s dealings with prosecutors and Justice Department officials to arrange the political prosecution of Don Siegelman. Does anyone at this point seriously question why the White House and the Justice Department are pursuing a scorched-earth policy to block Congress’s requests for documents relating to this case and to records showing Karl Rove’s communications? They would almost certainly provide further evidence of what the external facts demonstrate.</p><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;">But there is substantial additional evidence which will be shortly presented which will help to show why this prosecution was a complete farce from the beginning. Stay tuned, as the truth continues to seep out.</p><p style="font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; border: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px;"><strong>Update</strong>
Mark Crispin Miller has just put up a <a href="http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2007/12/siegelman-speaks-ex-gov-calls-02.html" style="border: 0px; color: rgb(0, 51, 187); background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; font-size: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">fascinating interview with Governor Siegelman</a>in which he explains his grudge match with Karl Rove, the involvement of Karl Rove’s client, William Pryor in the theft of the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election and how the Republicans launched a criminal prosecution to block him from seeking re-election.</p></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnxgraphic/info</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/judicial-elections-citizens-united-karl-rove/">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/judicial-elections-citizens-united-karl-rove/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Is Your Judge for Sale?</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, judicial elections have been overtaken by secretive interest groups, nasty ads, and the constant hustle for campaign cash.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div>ANDY KROLLNOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE</div><div>
</div><div>The 30-second TV spot is stark and brutal. First it shows the bespectacled face of candidate Louis Butler, then a grainy mug shot of an ex-con. “Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street,” the narrator warns, “like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities.” After Mitchell’s release from prison, the narrator continues, he raped again. “Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler?”</div><div>
</div><div>This attack ad wasn’t from a bitterly fought congressional race. It was from a 2008 campaign for state Supreme Court justice—a position that until recently was considered above the fray of partisan politics.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b>Butler, the first African American Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin history, </b>was defending his seat against a trial court judge whose campaign tactic recalled the GOP’s infamous Willie Horton hit job on Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Long before ascending to his state’s highest court, Butler had been assigned as Reuben Lee Mitchell’s public defender—he wasn’t the judge in the case, as the nasty ad implied.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Butler’s opponent, Michael Gableman, had been showered with campaign donations from business leaders, who were keenly aware of Butler’s role in two decisions. One was a 4-3 ruling to strike down a $350,000 limit on so-called pain-and-suffering damages in malpractice suits. The other held that if an individual harmed by lead paint exposure couldn’t identify the producer, then multiple paint companies could be held liable under a legal theory known as “risk contribution.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Read our graphical explainer on how dark money is taking over judicial elections.</div><div>
</div><div>While Butler’s and Gableman’s campaigns spent a combined total of $1.2 million on the race, outside groups aligned with the US Chamber of Commerce and the state’s labor unions spent $3.6 million, funding 89 percent of all the TV ads. Butler was the first sitting justice to get booted from the court in 40 years.</div><div>
</div><div>By 2011, with Wisconsin reeling from political battles over Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda, the next Supreme Court race was equally ugly. This time it was <b>conservative Justice David Prosser </b>defending his seat; a misleading ad from a partisan group backing his opponent claimed that Prosser, as a district attorney in 1978, had helped cover up sexual abuse of two young boys at the hands of a Catholic priest. (The abuse had only emerged years later; the victims called the ad “offensive, inaccurate, and out of context.”)</div><div>
</div><div>Although Prosser successfully defended his seat, he says that the election—which saw nearly<b> $5 million in total campaign spending</b>—poisoned relationships on the court. The tension boiled over weeks later, when Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal justice, engaged in an argument that got physical as four of their fellow justices looked on. Bradley claimed Prosser choked her, while Prosser said he raised his hands in self-defense as Bradley charged at him. In police interviews, two conservative justices sided with Prosser, and two liberal justices with Bradley. Investigations by the county sheriff, the local DA, and a special independent prosecutor all cleared Prosser of any wrongdoing, but the controversy still festers. When I spoke with Prosser in September, written in chalk on the sidewalk outside the state Capitol was an invitation to visit him for “free chokes.”</div><div>
</div><div>“They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that,” says former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Marsha Ternus.</div><div>Bitter, costly judicial elections are by no means unique to Wisconsin. These days, as more candidates for the bench face rough contests—buffeted increasingly by outside money, thanks to the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United—state judges around the country often raise six- and seven-figure sums, mount statewide campaigns, and fend off attack ads from groups that don’t disclose their donors. This trend has escalated over the last decade and a half as partisan groups realize that donating to judges can get them more influence, for less money, than bankrolling legislative campaigns.<b> After all, the donors often end up with business before the very judges they are helping elect.</b></div><div>
</div><div>These are also the judges that most citizens who interact with the system have to face. Can Americans still trust in getting their fair day in court?</div><div>
</div><div>Court cases that make big news are usually in the federal system, where most judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yet the vast majority of justice is done at the state level, where more than 100 million cases are filed annually (versus about 400,000 in federal courts). The nation’s approximately 30,000 state court judges vastly outnumber their federal counterparts, and 85 percent of them will stand in at least one election during their career.</div><div>
</div><div>No two states pick their judges exactly the same way. Some hold partisan judicial elections, others have nonpartisan elections, and still others use merit selection—that’s when legal experts select a short list of qualified candidates, the governor appoints one to the bench, and that judge later stands in a retention election.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The system has its roots in the Panic of 1837, a mini-depression fueled by rampant cronyism and massive overspending by corrupt governors and legislatures. Partisan elections replaced the tradition of elected officials appointing their friends to the bench, but for decades connections and loyalty still mattered most, with party bosses determining who won. Eventually states embraced nonpartisan elections and merit selection, and for most of the 20th century, judicial elections were a little-noticed corner of American politics.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Still, on occasion a contentious race attracted national attention. In <b>1977, Rose Bird </b>became the first woman appointed to the California Supreme Court and its first female chief justice. An avowed foe of capital punishment, she voted to vacate all 61 death penalty verdicts that came before her, prompting Republican Gov. George Deukmejian to label her a “soft-on-crime liberal.” With Bird up for retention in 1986, oil and agribusiness companies, which generally saw Bird’s liberal views as a threat to their interests, poured more than $5.6 million into a campaign that would unseat her. It was an early glimpse of a reliable strategy for big business: Using the soft-on-crime theme to oust judges considered unfriendly to corporations.</div><div>
</div><div>Around that time, a political consultant by the name of Karl Rove was plotting his own assault on the Texas Supreme Court. Rove had helped launch the “tort wars” in response to what some Republicans saw as a court system too cozy with trial lawyers and too eager to slam corporations with hefty judgments that Rove had dubbed “junk lawsuits.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Running on the slogan “Clean Slate ’88,” conservative candidates backed by Rove’s operation won five of the six open seats on the Texas Supreme Court. Not long after, Rove teamed up with the <b>Business Council of Alabama</b> to engineer a similar Republican takeover in that state.</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Direct spending on supreme court races, 2000-14</div><div>
</div><div><b>Two years later, the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> US Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of an aggressive new president named Tom Donohue, picked up on Rove’s strategy.</span>Pledging to “play hardball” against “frivolous” lawsuits, the Chamber spent $10 million on judicial races in 2000 alone. It pumped $4.4 million into Ohio’s Supreme Court election—the largest expenditure from a single source on a court race in US history.</b> In the following years, the Chamber injected tens of millions into races in <b>Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin</b>. Corporate America had grasped the potential to install friendly judges who could crack down on costly class actions and neutralize the efforts of consumer advocates. “We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat,” as Donohue put it, “and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Unions spent millions on these races as well—particularly across the Upper Midwest, as labor leaders recognized they could get a great return on investment by backing justices sympathetic to workers’ rights.</b> As an official with the Ohio AFL-CIO once said: “We figured out a long time ago that it’s easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A major showdown came in 2004, in West Virginia’s Supreme Court election.<b> Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy</b>, donated $3 million to Republican candidate Brent Benjamin. Meanwhile, a nonprofit funded primarily by Massey Energy ran TV ads accusing incumbent Justice Warren McGraw of getting a child rapist out of prison and into a job at a high school. After Benjamin won, the investment paid off big time: He later cast the deciding vote to overturn a lower court’s $50 million verdict against Massey Energy. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin should have recused himself. It overturned the decision and sent the case back to West Virginia. (Massey Energy ultimately prevailed in state court.)</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the <b>2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm</b> and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm’s appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was “obscene,” won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.</div><div>
</div><div>Up to this point, the big spenders were mostly targeting contested judicial elections—ones in which a candidate challenged a sitting justice. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Then came the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien, in which the seven justices unanimously ruled that the state’s ban on <b>same-sex marriage</b> violated the state constitution. Social-conservative groups leapt into action, targeting three of the seven justices who were up for retention election—ones where voters only check “yes” or “no</span>.” The National Organization for Marriage and its allies spent nearly $1 million and defeated all three. “They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that so they wouldn’t do it either,” former Justice Marsha Ternus told me.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The strategy of turning sleepy retention elections into political showdowns has been spreading. In Florida’s 2012 retention elections, the<b> Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity </b>and the Republican Party of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat three sitting justices. A group called Defend Justice From Politics spent $3.1 million on the justices’ behalf, helping them prevail. In Michigan in 2012, two anonymously funded nonprofits, the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Job Security, poured $2.1 million into attack ads against five judges on Michigan’s 6th Circuit Court, though the judges won out. And earlier this year,<b> Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, took it upon himself to spearhead an effort to unseat three sitting state Supreme Court justices—and, along with them, the attorney general, who is appointed by the court. Ramsey’s PAC pumped $425,000 into a group running negative ads that blasted the three justices as “liberal on crime”</b>and for “<b>helping advance Obamacare.” </b>Funds were also contributed by Americans for Prosperity and the GOP’s State Government Leadership Foundation, which said it planned to spend an additional $5 million in 2014 on judicial races in North Carolina, Tennessee, and elsewhere.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Though the three Tennessee justices prevailed in the end, one of them, Connie Clark, told me she’s concerned about the precedent set by the fight. “As long as there are no limits on outside money,” she says, “then this will become the new normal.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>The transformation of judicial campaigns has alarmed another veteran of the court system. “Judicial elections pose a serious threat,” former US Supreme Court Justice <b>Sandra Day O’Connor</b> told Mother Jones. “If judicial decisions are in fact not fair and impartial—or even if they are perceived as being biased—the basis of support for our courts crumbles.”</div><div>
</div><div>Initially, the 2011-12 election season—the first full cycle since Citizens United—saw a modest dip in overall reported spending on state judicial races, compared to four years earlier. But that is likely because much of the new spending does not have to be disclosed or tracked. This year, for example, <b>Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee</b>announced a “major new effort” to educate the public about the “liberal records” of the three justices—and not a penny of that spending was reported to the state. The outside spending on judicial races that we do know about rose to a record-high $24.9 million—a nearly sevenfold increase since 2000, and now accounting for 40 percent of the total spending on these campaigns.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Direct vs. outside judicial spending (in 2014 dollars)</div><div>
</div><div>Recent research suggests this flood of political money could be influencing judges’ decisions. Emory University analyzed 2,345 state supreme court decisions from all 50 states between 2010 and 2012 and concluded that the more campaign money justices received from business interests, the more likely they were to vote in favor of businesses appearing before them. (Interestingly, the study found a stronger tie between business donations and Democratic justices’ decisions. Republican justices, it speculated, were already more favorably inclined toward business interests, so the campaign money didn’t make as much of a difference.) Another analysis, by the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, suggested that as more money was spent on soft-on-crime attack ads in campaigns, justices were increasingly siding with the prosecution.</div><div>
</div><div>The public may be starting to catch on: A 2013 poll by Justice at Stake, a nonprofit group focused on reforming the system, found that 87 percent of Americans believe that campaign donations could influence court rulings. “You can’t expect judges to act like Huey Long on the campaign trail and expect them to be Solomon in the courtroom,” says Bert Brandenburg, the group’s executive director.</div><div>
</div><div>A case pending before the US Supreme Court could inject even more politics into judicial races. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. the Florida Bar, a county-level judge wants the nation’s high court to strike down laws in 30 states blocking judges from personally asking donors for campaign cash. In those states, treasurers and fundraising consultants typically make the ask on behalf of a judicial candidate. Only nine states currently allow judges to solicit donations directly for their campaigns, but in those states, “the road to victory begins with the solicitation of money,” Wallace Jefferson, the former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, has written. “The ‘ask’ is undignified, and the ‘give’ is fairly compelled.” For those fighting to insulate judges from electoral politics, the elimination of the fundraising ban would be yet another step in the wrong direction.</div><div>
</div><div>Some researchers dispute the notion that rough-and-tumble judicial elections are a problem. One recent Michigan State University study of supreme court races concluded that attack ads did not hurt incumbents in partisan elections. Other studies found that nonpartisan elections are less likely to draw a challenger, are less competitive even when there is a challenger, and attract fewer voters than partisan elections do.</div><div>
</div><div>The debate boils down to a fundamental notion: whether the judicial branch of government is unique from the other two and should be insulated from politics. With court integrity hanging in the balance, should judges be chosen the same way we pick presidents and members of Congress?</div><div>
</div><div>Randy Shepard, who served as the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court for 25 years, retired from the court in 2012 as the longest-serving state chief justice in American history. A lifelong Republican in a red state, Shepard has gone through the merit selection process and run in multiple elections. “What’s at stake in these big-money elections is the promise of due process and an impartial court,” he told me. “Do I as a citizen walk into that courtroom standing on a relatively level playing field?”</div><div>
</div><div>He offered up a hypothetical from a law review article he wrote that, he proudly noted, was cited by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy in the Massey Energy case—the one where the high court ruled that a judge who’d received massive campaign contributions connected to a company had to recuse himself from a case involving that company. “Say you’re going before a trial judge making a decision about the custody of your grandchildren, and your evil son-in-law or daughter-in-law had made a very large contribution to the judge. How would you feel about that? You wouldn’t feel very optimistic, would you?”</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">==</font></div></div>