Andy Kroll talking:
what we’ve seen is that judicial elections have become another playground for the same kind of business interests and huge spenders and anonymous donors that we’re seeing in presidential races and congressional races up and down the ticket. And our judicial elections used to be a more sleepy corner of American politics, and obviously the dynamic is different, if we’re electing the arbiters of the law. But times have changed, and Citizens United has really begun to change the landscape in this place.
there’s a lot at stake, obviously. I mean, these Supreme Court justices and other state-level justices decide judgments against business interests. They have a role in social issues like marriage equality. And as large forces from corporate America, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, have gotten more involved, they have tried to tilt the courts in a way that are more pro-business to try to avoid these multi-hundred-million-dollar or billion-dollar judgments that can be handed down against businesses around the country.
Karl Rove is, you know, really one of the pioneers, if you will, when it comes to judicial elections in Texas. In the late ’80s and ’90s, Rove helped flip the Texas Supreme Court from being a traditionally Democratic bench to a fervently Republican one. Rove was also sort of the mind behind the so-called tort reform effort, this effort saying that plaintiffs were sort of out of control, the hot-coffee incident, which has become more of a myth, really, than reality. Rove helped create that model, show how business interests could flip a Supreme Court in Texas. It was exported to Alabama some years later and then has since become a playbook around the country.
One example in 2004 in Illinois that sticks out, the insurance company State Farm is hit with a more than a billion-dollar judgment. And then, in the years that follow, the company and its allies, its tort reform, again, allies, you know, allegedly—it appeared to have vetted, picked out a candidate for a Illinois Supreme Court race, and funded to the tune of millions of dollars this candidate, got him elected. And then, when State Farm’s appeal of this billion-dollar judgment gets to the Supreme Court, this justice casts the vote overturning that incredibly big judgment.
Another finding that really stood out was how we are seeing—potentially seeing the use of soft-on-crime attack ads in judicial races, I mean, and how—I mean, this is a common bludgeon against candidates in races, even when the business interests are the main players—soft on crime, weak on the death penalty. And what we’ve seen, and what Justice—Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has written about, is that this is perhaps having an effect on judges in states around the country who are more inclined to, say, overturn jury ruling, like in a state like Alabama, and approve the death penalty, and less inclined to overturn a death penalty judgment. So judges being—thinking about, you know, “They’re going to be weak on crime, so I’m going to be tougher with death penalty.”
— source democracynow.org
Andy Kroll, senior reporter for Mother Jones magazine. His latest investigation is “Is Your Judge for Sale?”