Tennessee Ushers In Era Of For-Rent Politicians With New Campaign Finance Law
During the 2010 election season, we heard Republican candidates from coast to coast run on creating jobs. In the 2011 Tennessee legislative session, the Republican majority forgot that message and went after teachers and teacher unions. Any other year this would have been enough to make the staunchest conservative proud, but in a session where Republican legislators presented bills by non-citizens with corporate interests, according to the Tennessean, the measure of success was also to include rewriting existing campaign laws to lift the ban on corporate donations. The ban was lifted late Wednesday when Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law SB 1915, which allows direct corporate donations to candidates.
SB 1915 changes existing law T.C.A. § 2-10-131 which did read: “No corporation may use any funds, moneys or credits of the corporation to make contributions to candidates. This means corporations are prohibited from making contributions to any PAC that supports the election or defeat of any candidate.” This has been nullified and allows for direct contributions without penalty.
For the first time in Tennessee history, direct corporate contributions to candidates and political parties will be allowed.
“This basically would just level the playing field, because unions are allowed to do this by statute now,” said Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, according to the Nashville City Paper. Ketron was in the spotlight earlier this year, along with House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, for introducing and sponsoring legislation they introduced without reading.
The argument for passing such legislation to allow the influx of corporate money into Tennessee politics was based on fairness. Republicans were quick to point to unions and their political action committees as justification of needing this change, implying that P.A.C. money was unfairly going to the Democrats. This was not the case.
When we examine the numbers, we find that it is the Republicans who are benefiting from PAC money by a margin of $3-$1, reports Knox News. SB 1915 was written to become law as soon as the governor affixed his signature to the bill. So corporate America, Tennessee is now open for business: You are free to directly contribute to any candidate you wish.
The 107th Tennessee General Assembly’s 2011 session was one filled with controversy and fundamental changes to our state’s political structure. While the majority worked to silence one voice in government, they simultaneously opened the door to another. Republican supporters of SB1915 contend that they are complying with the Citizens United ruling that extends First Amendment rights to corporations and lifts prior bans on corporate independent expenditures. Critics of the bill contend that it will lead to a decline in good government and pit legislators against each other for corporate donations.
In a time when citizens are getting more impatient with their representatives, how does allowing corporate influence increase accountability? The financial summary of SB1915 shows that it will actually cost taxpayers money to implement. Not only do the taxpayers get silenced by corporate interests, they get to pick up the tab of implementing the changes. Gov. Haslam has signed the bill and it is now law in Tennessee. Let the era of rental legislators begin. May the highest bidder win.
By: Chris Robison, Associated Content, June 2, 2011
Judicial Elections: You Get The Judges You Pay For
Legal elites must come to terms with a reality driven by the grass-roots electorate: judicial elections are here to stay. Given this reality, we should focus on balancing important First Amendment rights to financially support campaigns with due process concerns about fair trials.
An ugly, expensive campaign for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is but the latest example of what is now common in judicial elections: millions of dollars in misleading television ads, subsidized by lobbies that have cases before the bench.
In 39 states, at least some judges are elected. Voters rarely know much, if anything, about the candidates, making illusory the democratic benefits of such elections. Ideally, judges should decide cases based on the law, not to please the voters. But, as Justice Otto Kaus of the California Supreme Court once remarked about the effect of politics on judges’ decisions: “You cannot forget the fact that you have a crocodile in your bathtub. You keep wondering whether you’re letting yourself be influenced, and you do not know.”
The need to run multimillion-dollar campaigns to win election to the court in much of the country renders the crocodile ever more menacing.
For more than a quarter of a century, voters have rejected efforts to move from an elective to an appointive bench. Last year, despite a campaign led by Sandra Day O’Connor, Nevada voters became the latest to reject such a change.
Scholars, judges and advocates who find intellectual comfort in seeking to eliminate judicial elections are indulging a luxury that America’s courts can no longer afford. Instead they should focus on incremental changes to what Justice O’Connor bluntly calls the “wrong” of “cash in the courtroom.”
More than 7 in 10 Americans believe campaign cash influences judicial decisions. Nearly half of state court judges agree. Never before has there been so much cash in the courts. Measured only by direct contributions to candidates for state high courts, campaign fund-raising more than doubled in a decade.
But this is only part of the financial story. Nationally, in 2008, for the first time, noncandidate groups outspent the candidates on the ballot.
Perhaps most tellingly, a study of 29 campaigns in the 10 costliest judicial election states over the last decade revealed the extraordinary comparative power of “super spenders” in court races. The top five spenders in each of the elections laid out an average of $473,000.
In 2009, the United States Supreme Court dealt with this issue, holding that due process is violated when a judge participates in a case involving a party that spent a great deal of money on the judge’s election effort. The case before the court involved a West Virginia Supreme Court decision overturning a jury verdict that awarded a $50 million judgment against Massey Coal Company.
One of the justices in the majority of that 3 to 2 decision, Brent D. Benjamin, had been elected after Massey Coal’s chief executive spent $3 million on his campaign. The United States Supreme Court held, 5 to 4, that due process was violated because of the lack of an impartial decision-maker. The court made clear, however, that campaign spending requires the disqualification of a judge only rarely.
A year later, the high court held, in the Citizens United case, that corporations and unions have the First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money in election campaigns. In light of these two decisions, corporate and union officials must engage in a perverse guessing game: they want to spend enough to get their candidate for the bench elected, but not so much as to require the judge’s disqualification if the campaign is successful.
Rigorous recusal rules are an important step, but merely disqualifying a judge on occasion is insufficient. The most obvious solution is to limit spending in judicial races. States with elected judges should restrict how much can be contributed to a candidate for judicial office or even spent to get someone elected.
That solution has long been assumed to be off the table, though, because the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that while the government can limit the amount that a person gives directly to a candidate, it cannot restrict how much a person spends on his or her own to get the candidate elected. Nevertheless, large expenditures to get a candidate elected to the bench undermine both the appearance and reality of impartial justice.
The Supreme Court’s 2009 decision properly focused on the $3 million in campaign expenditures, not the $1,000 that was directly contributed. In the legislative and executive offices, it is accepted that special-interest lobbying and campaign spending can influence votes; but that is anathema to our most basic notions of fair judging.
Thus, the Supreme Court should hold that the compelling interest in ensuring impartial judges is sufficient to permit restrictions on campaign spending that would be unconstitutional for nonjudicial elections.
States should restrict contributions and expenditures in judicial races to preserve impartiality. Such restrictions are the only way to balance the right to spend to get candidates elected, and the due process right to fair trials.
By: Erwin Chemerinsky and James J. Sample, The New York Times, April 17, 2011
Without the Campaign Donors, This Wouldn’t Be Possible
Even by Washington’s low standards, the House’s Republican freshmen are turning pandering into a high art. At a recent transportation hearing in his home district, Representative James Lankford of Oklahoma heaped praise on a panel of private sector witnesses. Three of the four executives so publicly favored were later discovered to be donors to Mr. Lankford’s campaign.
Nothing illegal in that, nor in the enthusiasms of another freshman, Mike Pompeo of Kansas, dubbed the Congressman from Koch for championing the conservative agenda of the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David. They contributed handsomely — $80,000 worth — to Mr. Pompeo’s campaign kitty. Once elected, Mr. Pompeo hired a former Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff.
Mr. Pompeo said he ran for Congress because as a businessman (whose business included some Koch investment money) he saw “how government can crush entrepreneurism.” His contributions to the House Republicans’ budget-slashing legislation included two top priorities of Koch Industries: killing off funds for the Obama administration’s new database for consumer complaints about unsafe products and for a registry of greenhouse gas polluters at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The congressman said he was concerned that the database would encourage false accusations about good products and that the registry would increase the E.P.A.’s power and cost jobs. Those arguments are nonsense, but Mr. Pompeo represents an early warning of the shape of things to come when the Supreme Court’s misguided decision to legalize unfettered corporate campaign donations fully kicks in next year.
The Koch brothers are planning to spend tens of millions in the 2012 campaign, as are Democratic power brokers and unions. Ordinary voters may be making a show of demanding real political change, but they are being increasingly outbid at the big money table where American politics happens.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, March 30, 2011
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