Ever since the Supreme Court issued its January ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), lifting the ban on corporate spending on elections, most of the attention has been directed towards how this would effect things like presidential and congressional races. And while there now will certainly be the opportunity for big corporations to openly campaign for candidates friendly to their points of view, the executive and legislative branches are not the only ones who run elections. Much less talked about is how Citizens United has opened up vast swaths of the judicial system to corporate purchase.
In an article at The New Republic,Adam Skaggs delves into this issue and explains how state judicial elections have changed over the past ten years from quite little affairs to huge contests flush with corporate players. Skaggs writes, “As an Ohio AFL-CIO official put it, ‘We figured out a long time ago that it’s easier to elect seven judges than to elect one hundred and thirty-two legislators.'” I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen more outcry over this issue, but I guess there’s only so many things people can get worked up about in a given stretch. This issue, I think, differs from the fear that corporations can buy legislators, mostly because people expect politicians to have agendas and represent a particular segment of society. Judges, on the other hand, are supposed to be impartial, and guided only by the law — or maybe I’m hopelessly naive (that was rhetorical, btw).
And in case you think judges are not swayed by the origin of their funding:
The obvious question here is whether special-interest spending sways judges once they’re presiding over cases. Three in every four Americans believe the answer is yes, according to a 2001 poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. More importantly, even judges believe there is a connection: Of over 2,000 state judges polled in a 2002 Greenberg Quinlan survey, nearly half said campaign contributions influence judges’ decision-making.
The TNR article cites several instances that make it hard not to think that judicial decisions were bought outright by interested companies. Obviously, Citizens United is not creating the situation whereby big companies can buy favorable court decisions, it’s only making it easier. In my mind, this all brings up two important points. First, it seems obvious that there should be provisions in place to ensure that elected judges are made to step aside from any cases involving campaign contributors. Secondly, as I’ve asked many times before, why are judges elected in the first place? As a voter, I have no way to appraise the competency of judges. I don’t think judges should be elected at all. To me, it makes more sense to have them appointed internally via an internal merit-based system. At the minimum, if judges have to be elected, there should be public financing systems adopted, as four states have already done. The alternative, as Skaggs writes, is, “If, in the Citizens United era, states don’t adopt public financing and strong disclosure and disqualification rules, the judiciary’s credibility will dissolve—and quickly.”