It's All About the Money, Honey!

Reporter James Nash at the Columbus Dispatch brings us up to date on one or the most notorious junctures of money and judging, the political money spent on Ohio High Court Races (check Adam Liptak's New York Times blawg for the background on this Supreme Court and "campaign cash.")  Nash's Dispatch update follows:

"Candidates for the Ohio Supreme Court have spent nearly $30 million on their campaigns during the past decade, the second-highest total in the country, authors of a national study concluded.

Spending on Ohio Supreme Court races from 2000 to 2009 was second only to Alabama, according to three groups that studied campaign contributions to state supreme court candidates for a report released today.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, the Justice at Stake Campaign and the National Institute on Money in State Politics are critical of the role of money in state court campaigns, saying it undermines public confidence in the impartiality of court rulings.  'For more than a decade, partisans and special interests of all stripes have been growing more organized in their efforts to use elections to tilt the scales of justice their way,'  their report stated. 'Many Americans have come to fear that justice is for sale.'

Ohio led the way in 2000, when a group affiliated with the U.S. and Ohio chambers of commerce spent $4.4million on television ads attacking then-Justice Alice Robie Resnick. The Democrat was re-elected anyway.

Since then, chamber-affiliated groups have continued to spend millions of dollars on Ohio Supreme Court races, with trial lawyers contributing a smaller share, the study found. All told, candidates for the court spent $21.2 million between 2000 and 2009, and outside groups - chiefly the chamber - spent $8.6million, according to the report. The torrid pace of spending on Ohio Supreme Court races slowed toward the end of the decade. The state ranked 10th in the country in expenditures during the 2008 election cycle, the three groups concluded.

Adam Skaggs, a lawyer at the Brennan Center and co-author of the report, said in an interview that other states have begun to catch up to Ohio. 'What happened in Ohio at the beginning of the decade is now the norm across the country,' he said.

Resnick's re-election in 2000 was the last time a Democrat won an election to the state's highest court. One Democrat, Chief Justice Eric Brown, currently holds a seat, but he was appointed by Gov. Ted Strickland. Brown is up for election in November. Trial lawyers have signaled a more active role this year in trying to get Brown and fellow Democrat Mary Jane Trapp, an appeals judge, elected to the court.

'In Ohio, the court is an absolute reflection of the corporate dollars that have gone into funding the campaigns,' said Dennis P. Mulvihill, president of the Ohio Association for Justice, a trade group of trial lawyers.

Ohio Chamber of Commerce President Andrew E. Doehrel said business groups jumped into court races in 2000 to counter the influence of activist judges, whose rulings he said create an unpredictable business climate.  'We've done a good job of educating voters and raising awareness of Supreme Court races,' Doehrel said."
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That "unpredictable business climate,"  that's what the Chamber calls being held accountable to pay for the individual and environmental damage corporations and businesses wreck on the citizens.  This is all about buying outcomes, and it works.  This is what Massey Energy and Don Blankenship did in West Virginia, and what Justice Gableman's election in Wisconsin was all about.

Supreme Sensibilities

I don't know if where you live you have come across the reports of Chief Justice John Roberts' reaction to the State of the Union Speech.  This is the speech where President Obama expressed his disapproval of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC which is interpreted here and in the dissent by Associate Justice Stevens as enshrining the First Amendment rights of corporations to the detriment of you and me.  Chief Justice Roberts had described President Obama's expression of an opinion on the decision in the State of the Union speech as "very troubling."  Oh, sweet irony!

In the Citizens United case the Supremes greenlighted unfettered purchase of our democracy, and courts by corporate bullies and robber barons. But sitting through a Constitutionally mandated presidential speech is "troubling," when God forbid you get criticized, at lest for Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts.  What part of democratic government does Chief Justice Roberts like?   That part where he wears the robe and tells the ligtigants that time is up, I guess.  From the street level-view of the Bad Lawyer, this Roberts/Alito/State of the Union episode perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with our democracy:  we really are incapable of telling the truth or hearing the truth on a granular level.  We require a level of bullshit even among the adults who are elected and selected to run our government, including the Supreme Court.

The Suprmes have given us such interesting developments: especially the idea that corporations are "persons."  Corporations have "free" speech rights.  Corporations now spend billions of dollars buying up your local, state, and federal govenrments including your judiciary in effect taking away our "free speech" rights, think I'm exaggerating, look at Carperton vs. Massey Coal or the campaign cash/rulings chart for the Ohio Supreme Court at Adam Liptak's Sidebar blawg at the NYT.   Look at the distortions money has on the Minnesota and Michigan Supreme Courts. 

The federal bench is populated for the most part, by very brilliant, scholastic and legal stars.  The federal judiciary are chosen from academic and professional high achievers nominated by politically powerful elites in a complicated but nearly invisible, to us, process.  Sometimes, the curtain slips and the horse trading and wrangling comes into view--but, usually not.  Still strikingly smart and capable people make it to the federal bench.   Generally speaking thow who make it he Supreme Court are chosen from the cream of these elites Judges (with the current exceptio of Justice Sotomayor) who have even served at a trial level.  That Supeme Court Justices like Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito don't get the whole hoi polloi thing; and, that the experience of democracy might be discomfitting in that raucous echo-chamber, the Congress, isn't terribly surprising.   I understand this, but I'm disappointed--when these Justices grant personhood on corporations and allow corporations to snap up our government, like so much merger and acquisition maybe it's a good and palliative thing that they should have to hear a loud and uncomfortable dissent that they can't gavel down.

NYT On Campaign Cash and the Ohio Supreme Court

At it's website the New York Times has republished its fascinating, deeply-researched look at the "purchase" of the Ohio Supreme Court by corporate and monied interests.  One of the Justices featured in the story is Terrence O'Donnell, (pic) a former Cuyahoga County Common Pleas and Court of Appeals judge.  One of the more intriquing stories about Judge O'Donnell was omitted from the NYT article.

According to sources in Cleveland, the media there reported a number of years ago that Justice O'Donnell was parked outside of a saloon in the Cleveland party bar area called the "Flats" when more than ten-thousand dollars cash was stolen out of his car.  At the time Judge O'Donnell had already migrated from the Cuyahoga bench to the Ohio Supreme Court.  Cleveland laywers long speculated on how or why (1. a Justice of hte Ohio Supreme Court got +$10,000; and (2. why this amount of cash would be left in a dark parking lot outside of a bar? 

Justice O'Donnell is according to the NYT, a reliable vote contra to consumer and plaintiffs interests.  No surprise, you get the Judges you deserve in Ohio, or pay for--well, that seems to be the lesson.  The Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts article in the Times is much more than a collection of anecdotes, the report looks at the decisions of the Ohio Supremes which consistently breakdown along predictable lines based on corporate campaign receipts, reminiscent of the Caperton v. AT Massey Coal Company decision discussed here at Bad Lawyer in December.  I am told that Ohio lawyers are not surprised at the what the Times has discovered about their Supreme Court, what Ohio lawyers are surprised at is the failure of Ohio voters to make the same discovery.  But, isn't that the point of money?

Money is free speech, right?