Is The Right To Vote Less Important Than The 1st Amendment?
December 17, 2008
Our gavel grabbing friends over at Justice at Stake have a post on a report issued at FactCheck.org that “dissects judicial mudslinging” in the recent Michigan Supreme Court race, among others. Viveca Novak of the Annenberg Political Fact Check found the ads on both sides uncivil, misleading, inaccurate and unproven.
Justice at Stake is absolutely right: State judicial races have become too partisan, too expensive and too negative. The question is, what should we do about it? If Justice at Stake proposed that a committee of lawyers be appointed to select which ads should be permitted to go on the air, without any public explanation for its decisions, editorial boards across the country would recoil in horror at this breach of the First Amendment. But when the group suggests a committee of lawyers be appointed to select which judges should be permitted to sit on the bench, without any public explanation for its decisions, many organs of elite opinion cheer them on. Go figure.