Gavel Grab

Veteran newsman and commentator Bill Moyers has offered a profoundly  troubling concern about “Justice for Sale” in courtrooms across America in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United ruling.

Ten years ago, the potentially corrupting impact of campaign spending in judicial elections was apparent, he said in a broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal. Now, after the high court decision that may unleash a flood of special-interest spending on politics, Moyers said citizens can look to their courthouses for a grim new reality:

“There’s now a crooked sign hanging on every courthouse in America reading ‘Justice for Sale.’”

Moyers explained:

“If you want to know just how corrosive this flood of money may turn out to be, look to the decision’s potential impact on our court system, where as you know, integrity, independence and fair play count the most when it comes to preserving faith in our system. In 39 states, judges have to run for election. That’s more than eighty percent of the state judges in the country.”

“The Citizens United decision means those elected judges are even more susceptible to the corrupting influence of cash, because many of their decisions in civil cases directly affect corporate America, and a significant amount of the money judges raise for their campaigns comes from lobbyists and lawyers.

Moyers condemned the Supreme Court as having “carried cynicism to new heights” with its sweeping opinion that “greatly expands corporate power over our politics.” How much was it expanded? “With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,” he lamented, “that corporate muscle just got a big hypodermic full of steroids.”

Author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told Moyers that judicial elections “are really the untold story of Citizens United, the untold implication.”  Corporations have a tremendous interest in state supreme courts and lower courts and will pump their money into those elections, where they’ll see “better bang for their buck” than at the presidential level, he said.

Toobin commended the use of merit selection to select state Supreme Court justices. “When you have bipartisan groups of people, screenings, or even governors alone picking judges,” he said, “it almost invariably produces a better, fairer, more qualified, less partisan judiciary than when voters do it.”

Moyers did an investigative report a decade ago on “Justice for Sale.” He concluded his more recent report by saying that over a career covering money in politics, he’d hoped the situation would improve, but it’s only gotten uglier:

“Nothing in this country seems to be working to anyone’s satisfaction except the wealth machine that rewards those who game the system. Unless we break their grip on our political institution, their power to buy the agenda they want no matter the cost to everyone else, we’re finished as a functioning democracy.”

Moyers decried Citizens United as “so preposterous and ominous,” and he elaborated:

“Five radical judges have taken a giant step toward legitimating the corporate takeover of democracy. ‘One person, one vote’ — stop kidding yourself. As I once heard a very rich oilman tell congress after he paid $300,000 to the democratic party to get a moment of President Clinton’s ear, ‘Money is a bit more than a vote.’ The huge sums of money that already flood our elections will now be multiplied many times over, most likely in secret.”

Discussing the likelihood of increased corporate political spending in secret, he concluded:”We’ll never know what hit us, and like the Titanic, we’ll go down, but with even fewer lifeboats.”

You can learn more about Citizens United by clicking here for Gavel Grab, and about merit selection by visiting Justice at Stake’s issues page on the topic. In Justice at Stake’s amicus brief in Citizens United, a warning similar to Moyers’ was sounded:

“Special interest spending on judicial elections—by corporations, labor unions, and other groups—poses an unprecedented threat to public trust in the courts and to the rights of litigants. As other groups felt pressure to match this corporate treasury spending, these issues would only snowball.”