"Makes Me Want to Puke"
Cross posted from ICPR's blog, The Race is On:
A pair of articles in today’s New York Times takes a hard look at how campaign donations are changing the dynamics of state high court races, and court rulings, too. The focus of the first is on Ohio , where judges of both political parties vote with their donors over 70% of the time. A sidebar looks at West Virginia and Illinois , where the paper also draws lines between large donations to winning candidates and subsequent rulings in favor of those donors. Justice Larry V. Starcher of the West Virginia Supreme Court sums it up thusly: “It makes me want to puke to see massive amounts of out-of-state money come in and buy a seat on our court.”
Giving by litigants and their representatives has be a growing practice in judicial races. As long as Illinois allows unlimited giving to candidates for the bench, donors will be tempted to use judicial elections as just another way to achieve their policy goals. And it doesn’t matter if the donations sway the thinking of individual jurists or merely wins victories for lawyers who already think the way that donors want, the end result is the same: court rulings that favor donors on the winning side.
There’s another casualty when litigants try to buy results: public confidence in the courts is eroded. A recent survey sponsored by ICPR and the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU found that 85% of Illinoisans believe that court rulings are influenced by campaign contributions. As a result, Illinoisans are more likely to think that jurists are “political” (70.4%) than “fair and impartial” (51.6%) or “honest and trustworthy” (53.6%). Even highly qualified jurists are splattered by the mud thrown up by the campaigns that get them on the bench.
ICPR believes that the solution is in ending the arms race and allowing candidates to opt into a clean money program. Legislation has twice passed the Senate with bipartisan support (though, to be clear, it has never been assigned to a House Committee) that would address this problem at the Supreme Court level. This year, there are no Supreme Court seats on the ballot, though we’ll be watching the two contested Appellate Court seats to see if those races aren’t facing the same issues. The Third Branch of government deserves protection from the kind of beating campaign contributors are delivering.
3 comments:
What makes me want to puke is the control the trial lawyers have had over the judicial funding. Their greed created the "judicial hellhole" in southern Illinois with doctors and health providers fleeing the area to cross the river into Missouri. They are responsible for driving up med mal rates. Finally, when the business interests get organized and people finally understand the consequences leading to a Karmeier victory, suddenly funding for judicial races becomes a "problem". ICPR is just another liberal special interest group with a pretty badge pretending to care while really just advancing their own agenda. From where does the ICPR funding come? Follow the money.
Greetings, Anonymous! I appreciate your comments, even as you won't disclose your name. Your chronology is wrong. ICPR has supported public financing for Supreme Court candidates since 2001. We first got interested in the issue after the 2000 election, when Democrat Tom Kilbride beat Republican Karl Hawkinson with what at the time looked like an awful lot of money from the personal injury plaintiff's bar and the Democratic Party of Illinois. We continued to support the idea, and continued to garner bipartisan support for the bill, after Republican Rita Garman beat Democrat Sue Myerscough in 2002. We haven't changed.
Of course, the 2004 race really set things off. Some groups believe that the solution to large giving by personal injury plaintiffs is large giving by personal injury defendants. That may be a satisfactory solution for personal injury defendants, but from our perspective, that looks more like an arms race than a permanent resolution.
Too, personal injury cases account for only a small part of the high court's docket. I can't say why criminal and family and real estate and other kinds of lawyers don't give, but the fact is that now, if you want to run for the high court, it doesn't matter how qualified you are, if you're a Democrat and you're not supported by personal injury plaintiffs, or if you're a Republican and not supported by personal injury defendants, you're not going to get the resources to mount a credible campaign. Why should those narrow political interests continue as the main funding source for the state's highest court?
As for our own funding source, ICPR files a 990 every year showing our funding. We rely mostly on foundations, including the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Piper Fund, along with other, smaller donors. Like most people in Illinois, we don't have a horse in the personal injury tort race.
The point of this post is not to argue the merits of medical malpractice reform, so I'll ignore that aspect of the comment. Whatever your feelings on that issue, I think most people agree that it's not the only issue Illinois calls upon its courts to resolve, and it should not be the only issue driving funding of judicial candidates.
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