What’s the Best Way to Educate Voters?
April 7, 2010
“The root of the problem,” former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently told a group of Pomona College students, “is ignorance about the role of the judiciary. The long-term solution to that problem is education….And in order to do this we need to bring real and meaningful civics education back into our classrooms…” (Audio of speech available here).
Hey, I’m all for teaching “meaningful civics education” in our schools, rather than the drivel that too often passes for history (excuse me, Social Studies) in today’s classrooms. But there is another very powerful tool our democracy’s Founders devised to overcome voter “ignorance” – to use Justice O’Connor’s harsh phrase. That tool is called an election.
Elections educate voters about the ideas that animate our public servants. They help us discern what character traits our public officials bring to their high offices. They ensure that every interested voter has access to the information he/she needs to make informed choices.
Unfortunately, Justice O’Connor opposes elections – at least when it comes to choosing who controls our state judiciaries. Instead, she supports a system where a tiny handful of elites, rather than millions of voters, meet in secret to determine who is worthy to hold some of the most powerful jobs in government. This group of elites is unelected and unaccountable, with no obligation to explain its reasoning to ordinary citizens, but instead simply emerges from its Mt. Sinai with tablets inscribed with the list of names of our judges, leaving the rest of us to gawk and wonder at their magnificence.
Can anyone seriously believe that this so-called “merit” selection system is a better way to educate voters than democratic elections?
Judicial Selection: What Does it Mean to have Judges “Answerable to the Law”?
April 6, 2010
Adam Skaggs of the Brennan Center has an article in The New Republic bemoaning the influence of campaign cash in judicial races and predicting a post-Citizens United arms race of special interest spending.
Skaggs rehashes the usual poll numbers about public concern over the perception that campaign contributions influence judicial decisions. He fails to mention, however, that despite these concerns, 75% of Americans believe state Supreme Court justices should be elected, according to a 2008 poll by the American Justice Partnership Foundation (full disclosure: I’m president of the AJP). He also ignored a recent letter by William Weisenberg of the American Bar Association, who took sharp issue with the notion that widespread judicial elections mean that justice is “for sale” in the U.S., condemning this notion as “impugning the integrity of our court system and the thousands of men and women who daily don their robes and administer justice in a fair and impartial manner.”
Between 2000 and 2008 (the latest year for which data is available), the Brennan Center raked in more than $10 million from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, so it’s no surprise the group recycles the typical Justice at Stake boilerplate. But at the very end of the piece, Skaggs dips his toe into what I believe should become a really interesting debate – namely, exactly to whom are judges really accountable?
For those of us on the side of democratic judicial elections, the answer is quite easy: Judges, like every other public servant in America’s democracy, must ultimately be accountable to the people. Skaggs believes this is wrong:
“Unlike legislators and executive officials, who are expected to act in accordance with the interests of their constituents, judges don’t ‘represent’ anyone; they are answerable to the law, not to special interests that can cut the biggest campaign checks.”
Forget that last straw man – no thinking person believes judges should be accountable to the writers of the “biggest campaign checks.” The interesting thing here is the notion that judges “are answerable to the law.” A retired judge made the same point, which I blogged on last month, arguing that judges are “accountable to the Constitution and the rule of law.”
Both Skaggs and the judge seemed to believe this settles the question, but really it doesn’t. How exactly can “the law” hold judges accountable? If a judge exceeds her authority (as judges routinely do these days), how can “the law” force her to retreat to her proper role? If a judge makes a series of arbitrary, capricious decisions, how can “the law” replace that judge? How can “the law” decide whether a judge has fulfilled his oath?
Every top government official swears a duty to uphold “the law,” but someone has to determine whether they have fulfilled that responsibility. As I’ve written before, in a democracy, that someone is the voters. Saying judges should not be accountable to the people, but only to what their own conscience suggests “the law” demands is the same as saying they are accountable to no one.
Secretary of State Project: Campaign Overviews
April 5, 2010
Today’s Redstate blog provides a valuable resource: a backgrounder on the Secretary of State Project and a brief overview and analysis of nine key Secretaries of State candidates that the Project is backing in the 2010 elections.
As I’ve written previously (e.g., here and here), the SOS Project is funded by liberal luminary George Soros. It’s a partisan power-play to unfairly tilt elections to one political party.
Jerry Brown as Sgt. Schultz: “I know nothing, I see nothing, I say nothing!”
April 2, 2010
Democrat candidate for governor and current California Attorney General Jerry Brown has ended his investigation into ACORN. Yesterday he announced…wait for it….that he would not bring charges against the group.
Last fall, Gov. Schwarzenneger asked Brown to investigate ACORN’s activites in the Golden State after an undercover video showed ACORN employees helpfully advising a pimp on how to avoid paying taxes on a bordello.
ACORN employees in San Diego were then tipped off that an investigation was coming and were caught tossing out piles of records into a public dumpster.
All of this has some Californians scratching their heads. In the words of Jarrod Agen, a spokesman for State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who is running as a GOP candidate for governor:
“I’m no lawyer, but videotapes of ACORN assisting a proposed prostitution ring seems pretty illegal to me. We’re not surprised that at the end of the day, Jerry Brown turns a blind eye to these wrongdoings.”
No surprise here either — the fix has been in on the Brown investigation from the start.
In fact, just to make his true colors plain for all to see, Brown didn’t waste any breath scolding ACORN. Instead Brown trained his fire on the filmmakers who originally delivered the goods on ACORN:
“‘The evidence illustrates,’ Brown said, ’that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.’”
Candidate Brown missed his calling, he should have been in show business. Not even Hogan’s Heroes’ Sargeant Schultz could have delivered that line with a straight face.
ACORN: Disbanded…or Rebranded?
April 2, 2010
To borrow from Mark Twain - the report of ACORN’s death has been grossly exaggerated.
Jonathan Strong, a reporter for Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel’s online news outet, The Daily Caller, reports that ACORN hasn’t disbanded afterall. Rather, it has simply rebranded itself and is conducting business as usual in communities across the country.
Citing a new report from California Congressman Darryl Issa, Strong writes:
“In California, ACORN transferred all its assets to Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE); Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut chapters have consolidated under the banner New England United for Justice – and so on. In each case, a group with the same assets and staff is operating at the same address with the same mission as the ACORN branch that once operated there.”
Issa’s report points out that by renaming its organization, ACORN will once again be free to start collecting tax-exempt contributions:
“‘Rebranding is an important legal strategy for ACORN to survive. By changing the names of its state and local affiliates, ACORN can rebuild its tax-exempt contributions under the guise of its superficially new and separate corporations as well as its public image,’ Issa’s report said.”
Strong’s article provides this new list of groups formerly-known-as ACORN:
- In California, ACORN is now the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (“ACCE”)
- In Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, ACORN is New England United for Justice.
- In New York, ACORN is New York Communities for Change.
- In Arkansas, ACORN has become Arkansas Community Organizations (“ACO”).
- In Louisiana, ACORN is “A Community Voice”.
- In Missouri, ACORN is Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (“MORE”).
- In Washington state, ACORN is Organization United for Reform (“OUR”) Washington.
- In Minnesota, ACORN is Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change.
- In Pennsylvania, ACORN has become the Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change (“PCOC”) and Pennsylvania Neighborhoods for Social Justice, Inc.
- In Texas, ACORN is now the Texas Organizing Project.
- ACORN Housing Corporation (“AHC”) has renamed itself Affordable Housing Centers of America, Inc.
Trial Lawyers Seek Bigger Payout, Push MD Legislators to Boost Auto Insurance Mandates
April 1, 2010
Baltimore Sun blogger Jay Hancock has an interesting item on the trial bar’s activities in Maryland. According to reports, the trial lawyers are promoting legislation that would force Maryland’s car owners to carry a higher amount of insurance in the case of accident. Why? Trial lawyers want “a pay raise,” Hancock argues.
“Lawyers typically take home 30 percent of a settlement, and auto cases are often settled to the limit of the insurance coverage. That would be an incentive to lobby for higher limits even if other factors stayed equal. But they haven’t. Thanks to the recession, campaigns against drunk driving and safer cars, auto injuries and deaths have plummeted…No wonder the trial bar wants a raise. So many lawyers, so few crashes. A basic business rule is that, when you have fixed overhead and your volume goes down, you try to raise prices.”
The bill enjoys the support of Democrat Governor Martin O’Malley, has already passed Maryland’s House of Delegates and is headed to the Senate.
Obama’s Medical Liability “Reforms” May Be Worse Than Nothing
April 1, 2010
Throughout the national health care debate, I wrote several items regarding President Obama’s bold pledge to work with Republicans on medical liability reform. Well, for those of you who wanted to believe in the audacity of such hopes, the Washington Times editorial page pounds the final nail in the coffin:
“President Obama made a big show about being open to sonme Republican reform ideas to rein in lawsuit abuse. Those pledges - which Mr. Obama made twice in public forums - were worthless. The final version of Obamacare, as signed into law, is a dream come true for big-money plaintiffs’ lawyers.”
The new health care law does contain a provision for enacting state medical liability reform demonstration projects, but these projects contain an opt-clause for plaintiffs to use whenever they want. As the Washington Times editorial makes clear, such projects may be worse than no reforms at all.
“…[N]ow plaintiffs effectively get even more power because they can pick and choose whicever system they think is most likely to get them the most cash. The demonstration projects — for ideas such as specialized “health courts,” where expert panels replace random juries — therefore become not a real alternative that levels the playing field, but instead just one more tool in the lawyers’ arsenal.”
Full editorial is here.