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</div><div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><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 style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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>