Impartial state supreme courts need impartial funding
August 1, 2001
Special-interest money is tainting the judicial system.
Although we like to think of our courts as fair and impartial, we can’t ignore the fact that it now costs $1 million or more to win a supreme-court seat in many states.
In Michigan, the cost of winning a supreme-court seat has increased by a factor of five from 1994. In Pennsylvania, it went up by a factor of four from 1987 to 1995.
This money generally comes from business executives, lawyers and lobbyists, and it could make even the most unbiased judges vulnerable to the perception that those who funded their elections are calling the tune.
A study released May 15 by the independent National Institute on Money and State Politics found that donors to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were involved in at least 75 percent of the cases handled by the Court between 1989 and 1999. While the study found no apparent wrongdoing, the results reinforce the public’s loss of faith in the court’s impartiality.
In response to these trends, leading voices in the legal profession and public-interest organizations are demanding that we break the link between those writing the big checks and those interpreting our laws.
On July 23, the American Bar Association (ABA) called for full public funding of state supreme court elections. ABA president-elect Alfred P. Carlton Jr. said public funding of state supreme court elections is the only way to restore public confidence in our court systems.
"It can reverse the corrosion that taints all our courts when judicial candidates must turn for campaign resources to the very individuals and organizations that have an interest in the outcomes of cases those candidates may decide as judges," he said.
The ABA wants a voluntary system in which candidates could choose a new option of relying entirely on public funding, or continue to raise money the old-fashioned way — from a tiny circle of big, special-interest donors. If some candidates raised more from private sources, public grants would be increased to level the playing field.
The curse of many worthy reform proposals is that they are released and then promptly forgotten, doomed to become one more dusty report sitting on lawmakers’ shelves.
Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen this time.
State legislators need to take the ABA’s recommendations and turn them into reality. We need a campaign-finance system that replaces special-interest money with public-interest money. That’s the only way supreme-court candidates can be truly independent and freed of any taint of improper influence.
To have impartial justice, we must ensure that supreme-court justices have impartial funding.
Roger Bybee is the communications director of Wisconsin Citizen Action (www.wi-citizenaction.org), which is based in Milwaukee. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org. or winterbybee@gmail.com
I'm teaching in Labor Studies at Penn State and the University of Illinois in on-line classes. I've been continuing with my work as freelance writer, with my immediate aim to complete a book on corporate media coverage of globalization (tentatively titled The Giant Sucking Sound: How Corporate Media Swallowed the Myth of Free Trade.) I write frequently for Z, The Progressive Magazine's on-line site, The Progressive Populist, Madison's Isthmus alternative weekly, and a variety of publications including Yes!, The Progressive, Foreign Policy in Focus, and several websites. I've been writing a blog on labor issues for workinginthesetimes.com, turning out over 300 pieces in the past four years.My work specializes in corporate globalization, labor, and healthcare reform... I've been a progressive activist since the age of about 17, when I became deeply affected by the anti-war and civil rights movements. I entered college at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee just days after watching the Chicago police brutalize anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic Convention of 1968. I was active in a variety of "student power" and anti-war activities, highlighted by the May, 1970 strike after the Nixon's invastion of Cambodia and the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State. My senior year was capped by Nixon's bombing of Haiphong Harbor and the occupation of a university building, all in the same week I needed to finish 5-6 term papers to graduate, which I managed somehow. My wife Carolyn Winter, whom I met in the Wisconsin Alliance, and I have been together since 1975, getting officially married 10/11/81. Carolyn, a native New Yorker, has also been active for social justice since her youth (she attended the famous 1963 Civil Rights march where Dr. King gave his "I have a dream speech"). We have two grown children, Lane (with wife Elaine and 11-year-old grandson Zachary, who introduced poker to his classmates during recess) living in Chicago and Rachel (who with her husband Michael have the amazing Talia Ruth,5, who can define "surreptitious" for you) living in Asbury Park, NJ. My sister Francie lives down the block from me. I'm a native of the once-heavily unionized industrial city of Racine, Wis. (which right-wingers sneeringly labeled "Little Moscow" during the upheavals of the 1930's), and both my grandfathers were industrial workers and Socialists. On my father's side, my grandfather was fired three times for Socialist or union activity. His family lost their home at one point during the Depression. My mom's father was a long-time member of UAW Local 72 at American Motors, where he worked for more than 30 years. Coming from impoverished families, my parents met through a very low-cost form of recreation: Racine's Hiking Club.
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