Tennis, Anyone?
April 28, 2010
Q: What’s the first question Connecticut’s Judicial Selection Commission asks prospective judges?
A: How’s your backhand?
Once a month, 12 grandees, mostly from Connecticut’s legal establishment, but also a few with high-placed political friends, gather at the New Haven Lawn Club’s “stately Georgian mansion” to screen judicial candidates before serving up a list of approved choices from which the governor must choose.
If you thought a “lawn club” was a place to buy weed spray and fertilizer for your grass, don’t bother to apply. You’re thinking of Sam’s Club. No, the New Haven Lawn Club, according to its website, is “a prestigious establishment” founded back in the late 1800s to “cater” to Connecticut’s “elite class” and the “upper crust of New Haven.” Today’s members enjoy tennis, swimming and squash, along with a monthly bridge night.
So what’s it like to spend an afternoon mixing with New Haven’s “upper crust?” “It’s a grueling day,” a former commissioner/legislator/lobbyist told reporter Mark Pazniokas, formerly with the Hartford Courant and New York Times, now with the Connecticut Mirror. I’ll bet. Read more
Same Old Tune in Pennsylvania
April 27, 2010
Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell made state headlines with yet another plea for the state legislature to pass “merit” selection legislation. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rendell has been lobbying for “merit” selection of judges for “two decades” to no avail. Despite Rendell’s stunning ineffectiveness, all of the state’s pro-”merit” forces were downright delighted to have the good governor crank up the music one more time.
Joining in on the chorus, for instance, was none other than Shira Goodman who “applaud[ed] the governor’s commitment and support of this cause.” She knows this tune by heart, after all. Her group, Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, has been singing the “merit” song for more than 20 years and still has nothing to show for it. Read more
The Ugly Tactics of “Merit” Selection Goon Squads
April 26, 2010
Missouri’s “merit” selection system is always promoted as a nonpartisan way to ensure judges remain independent and impartial. But if anyone doubts that raw politics rather than good government lies at the heart of the Missouri Plan, just take a look at the tactics of the goon squads hired by a lawyer-funded group fighting against a ballot initiative that would take the power to pick judges away from lawyers and return it to the citizens. Read more
The Return of the Goon Squads in Missouri
April 20, 2010
Last week I posted on the temporary restraining order issued by a Missouri court. The TRO was against a lawyer-funded group that has hired goon squads to harass and intimidate Missouri voters signing petitions aimed at restoring their right to vote for Supreme Court justices. In a farcical about face, the judge dissolved the order within about 24 hours. Read more
Legal Elites Try to Bully People of Missouri
April 16, 2010
Recently in Missouri we’ve seen the disturbing lengths to which powerful lawyers’ groups will go to preserve “merit” selection and maintain their chokehold on judicial appointments. A group called ShowMe Better Courts has launched a petition drive to restore the right of Missourians to select their judges in democratic elections. In response, a lawyer-funded group – run by former Missouri Supreme Court justice Chip Robertson – hired a goon squad to harass and intimidate citizens interested in signing the petition and getting the measure on the ballot. Read more
“Murky” Mutterings in Missouri
April 15, 2010
“Large amounts of money, some with murky origins, are pouring into a campaign aimed at changing the way judges are selected in Missouri,” ominously intones the Kansas City Star. What exactly are the “murky” backers of this campaign trying to achieve? Are they trying to sidestep the people by giving powerful special interest groups the right to control the judicial selection process? Do they want to keep the public in the dark by making judicial choices in secret, behind closed doors, with no accountability to the people? Are they aiming to game the system so that all judicial candidates come from the same political party?
Actually, that’s the system Missouri already has. Read more
Nutty Professor
April 15, 2010
In case you missed it…
Out of prison and once again free to roam the earth, ex-con Bill Lerach has found his new calling: Professor of Law. It’s true - the former felon, one-time uber trial lawyer, and shakedown artist extraordinaire will be molding the minds of future lawyers.
Here’s the WSJ editorial commenting on the news - and an excerpt:
“As for legal ethics, Lerach said before his sentencing that he ‘pleaded guilty in this case because I was guilty.’ Now he maintains that if he had it all to do over again, ‘I would not have done anything differently.’ There’s a lesson for the kids.”
Bringing ACORN-Style Elections to Colorado
April 13, 2010
Colorado Secretary of State Bernie Buescher and Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll have cooked up a scheme that could bring ACORN-style election fraud to the Centennial State, reports the Colorado Statesman. A draft bill would allow same-day voter registration and liberalize the rules for mail-in ballots – two loopholes groups like ACORN have used to commit voter fraud in many states.
Speaker Carroll claimed the bill was drafted “at the behest of county clerks” who are charged with administering the state’s elections. But Karen Long, president of the clerk’s association disavowed any involvement, writing in an email that clerks have “not been at the drafting table on this bill.” Both Carroll and Secretary of State Buescher refused to identify even one clerk involved with the bill’s drafting. One clerk willing to speak up called the bill “horrible” and claimed clerks were being pressured to support same-day voter registration to get changes in mail-in ballots they desire.
In the 2008 elections, ACORN was accused of voter fraud in 12 states; in Nevada alone, ACORN employees were indicted on 26 charges of voter fraud. Is this really a list Colorado wants to join?
The National Journal Discovers the Earth is Round
April 12, 2010
The National Journal today reprinted a Justice at Stake press release — oops, I mean, had a very thoughtful piece — about how the Citizens United decision has unleashed a flood of corporate money on state judicial races. The gravamen of the piece is an oft-cited statistic from a still-forthcoming Justice at Stake report which suggests spending on state judicial campaigns more than doubled in the decade from 2000 to 2009 compared to the decade between 1990 and 1999.
As I’ve argued before – Big Deal.
The somewhat boring, less sensational truth is, spending on judicial races merely tracks the overall rise in contributions to other campaigns. In one four-year election cycle alone — never mind a decade — total spending by presidential candidates nearly doubled, from $717 million in 2004 to $1.3 billion in 2008. Barack Obama all by himself spent about $50 million more to win the presidency in 2008 than George W. Bush and John Kerry combined spent in 2004. In 2008, the average winner of a House seat spent $1.37 million — more than double the amount of the average winner a decade ago ($650,000 in 1998).
Actually, Citizens United will probably not alter corporate spending on campaigns all that dramatically. Corporations have always been able to donate. The only difference now is these donations can be used to expressly advocate for a particular candidate, rather than going right up to the edge with issue ads. Any increase in corporate political spending is likely to be dwarfed by the trial bar and trade unions – two groups whose future prosperity is so dependent on their ability to pull the levers of government power.
No “Merit” for Minnesota
April 8, 2010
Mark Cohen has a hand-wringer on Minnesota Lawyer blog (h/t GavelGrab) fretting over the “unfettered discretion” the state’s governor has for appointing judges to the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court:
“Minnesota’s only check on the governor’s appointment power is to give voters the chance to vote for someone else in the next election.”
Actually, that sounds like a pretty robust check to me, but Cohen ignores another check. If the voters of Minnesota don’t like a governor’s judicial appointments, they can not only throw the judge out of office, but the governor, too. Because they know voters will be watching, many candidates for governor explicitly campaign on the type of judges they would appoint to the bench.
Contrast that level of public accountability with proposals for replacing Minnesota’s appointment/election hybrid system with so-called “merit” selection, which Cohen seems agnostic about. Under most “merit” selection systems, an unelected committee of elite lawyers meets behind closed doors to select judges, providing a list of acceptable names from which the governor is required to pick. (I realize that Minnesota’s “merit” panel for District Court judges cannot force a governor to choose from its list, but this is highly unusual; in most states the governor is bound by the “merit” commission’s slate.)
Cohen concedes that the current judicial selection system in Minnesota has produced good judges and the state Supreme Court “has maintained its excellent, nonpartisan reputation.” If it ain’t broke, why fix it – especially when the fix would diminish the accountability of judges to the public they serve?