Gavel Grab

It’s rare, but it’s happened again: Another Republican justice on Alabama’s Supreme Court has donated campaign cash to a Democratic candidate for that bench.

Justice Champ Lyons gave $1,000 to Circuit Judge Mac Parsons, who is challenging Justice Tom Parker, a Republican, according to a Gadsden Times article. Justice Lyons also gave $1,000 to Democrat Rhonda Chambers, running for another Supreme Court seat. Justice Tom Woodall, another Republican, earlier gave $5,000 to Judge Parsons’ campaign (see Gavel Grab).

Is Indiana-based lawyer James Bopp Jr. backing away from his published remarks early this year about a grand plan to “dismantle” campaign finance law?

If an article from the Open Secrets blog of the Center for Responsive Politics is an indication, Bopp has at least lowered his volume. The Open Secrets post looks at efforts undertaken by campaign finance reform foes, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, to push harder with challenges to existing laws. Here are excerpts from the post:

“Bopp…told OpenSecrets Blog that he is not undertaking a major effort to overturn campaign finance law — he just represents many clients who frequently run up against laws that prevent them from speaking about public policy decisions.

” ‘It’s just naturally part of my practice that these controversies would arise because of the nature of the clients that I have,’ he said.”

In addition, Bopp told the publication, “We always seek to apply the current state of the law to any challenges of campaign finance law that we make.”

Readers may compare those remarks with what he told the New York Times in January (see Gavel Grab), shortly after Bopp won what some called “his biggest victory” with the Citizens United decision:

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down…And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

Scholar Richard Hasen, who writes the Election Law blog, told Open Secrets regarding the opponents of campaign finance laws:

“There’s no mystery to what’s going on.

“These groups have seen Citizens United as an opening to challenge a variety of campaign finance laws to try to push the courts in a deregulatory direction.”

The first military commissions trial to be launched during the Obama administration has been interrupted, but that has not halted disturbing new questions about the prosecution.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Obama administration officials are alarmed by the first case to go to trial under revamped rules.” It is the trial at Guantanamo Bay of accused terror suspect Omar Khadr (see Gavel Grab), who was captured at age 15.

Not only was the former child soldier implicitly threatened by a U.S. interrogator with subjection to gang rape, but American officials fear the efforts they have made to reform military commission trials are undermined by the Khadr prosecution.

A grave question has subsequently been raised. In Huffington Post, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First asks in a commentary, “Is the Obama Administration Guilty of a War Crime?” Read more

The first-ever analysis of judicial election spending over the past decade not only keeps getting headlines but also is providing a popular news media tool for looking at this year’s state contests in a broader context.

When the Associated Press, for example, recently reported on the political climate heating up in Michigan–especially over elections that will determine the majority on the state Supreme Court–its article quickly turned to the judicial elections report for background.

The Michigan Supreme Court race is getting heightened attention in part due to the recent abrupt resignation of one justice (see Gavel Grab) and also due to the influential role the court could take in redrawing state political boundaries.

Candidate-sponsored TV ads are expected to fill the airwaves in Supreme Court campaigning, as well as “issue” ads  from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and state political parties, the AP said.

It relied on the recent report by the Justice at Stake Campaign and two other groups to point out that the state chamber pumped almost $3 million on TV ads into state judicial races in the past decade, while the state Democratic and Republican parties each spent about $2.6 million.

Citing the report, the AP noted that Michigan ranked sixth nationally in candidate fundraising, at $12.8 million, and third  in money spent on TV ads for high court races. Co-authoring the report were the Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics and Hofstra University law professor James Sample.

The report is entitled “The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2000-2009: Decade of Change.” It has captured attention in both national news media  and regional publications. Read more

A Texas appeals court has tossed out a lower court’s ruling that two men who were married in Massachusetts, and who moved to Texas, could get divorced there.

The 5th District Court of Appeals said state District Judge Tena Callahan (see Gavel Grab) had incorrectly ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriages violated the equal protection right under the 14th Amendment. In addition, Texas district courts do not have the right to hear a same-sex marriage divorce case, the appeals court said.

“A person does not and cannot seek a divorce without simultaneously asserting the existence and validity of a lawful marriage,” Justice Kerry P. Fitzgerald wrote on behalf of three Republican appeals court justices, according to an Associated Press article.

“Texas law, as embodied in our constitution and statutes, requires that a valid marriage must be a union of one man and one woman, and only when a union comprises one man and one woman can there be a divorce under Texas law.”

Courts in some states where same-sex marriage is barred have rejected granting divorces for same-sex couples who were married elsewhere, and courts in some other states have permitted the divorces. Read more

No doubt that activist lawyer James Bopp Jr. of Terre Haute, Indiana gets around. One of the latest lawsuits that he’s filed challenges a new campaign finance law in Hawaii.

According to a Honolulu Star Advertiser article, the lawsuit in federal court seeks to throw out a ban on political contributions by state and county contractors. It also questions state law that sets reporting requirements for political advertising; attribution and disclaimer provisions for political advertising; a $1,000 ceiling on donations by political action committees; and state law guiding corporations to register as PACs before they make a political donation.

While Bopp contends that the laws at issue violate Free Speech protections, he has numerous critics. Bopp and his team “seem eager to let moneyed interests out-shout the voices of ordinary Americans,” said Barbara Polk, legislative chairwoman of Americans for Democratic Action/Hawaii. Some critics contend Bopp is trying to dismantle campaign finance regulations around the country.

To keep up with lawsuits that Bopp is handling in numerous states, check out Gavel Grab.

Gender barriers on some high courts keep falling. Justices seated on the Virginia Supreme Court have elected their first female chief justice, Cynthia D. Kinser, and she will assume the role in February, according to a Washington Post article.

A recent article in the ABA Journal reported that 20 women were serving as chief justices on state Supreme Courts; you can learn more from Gavel Grab.

A website created by several incumbent Maryland judges to spotlight the raunchy sayings of a judicial hopeful is only one of several sizzling judicial election dispatches from around the country at August’s end.

The website http://www.scottbeckmantherealstory.com highlights candidate T. Scott Beckman, running for Circuit Court judge in Baltimore County, and features such Beckman remarks as his pledge to “hire the hottest clerks,” according to a Baltimore Sun article. Others can not be printed in a family-oriented blog.

Beckman labeled the website “a hit job” and a “smear campaign,” and he insisted those and other remarks were not a part of his campaign,  an article at explorebaltimorecounty.com reported.

In other dispatches:

• Circuit Judge Mac Parsons launched his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court by attacking Republican incumbent Tom Parker as lazy, according to an Associated Press report. Justice Parker fired back that the challenger is “a liberal Democratic judge” who views the court system as a paperwork factory. (Meanwhile, Republican Justice Thomas Woodall gave a $5,000 political donation to Parsons’ campaign, the Gadsden Times said.)
• A justice sitting on the Illinois Supreme Court, where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority, faces a retention vote in what “could be the state’s most vicious of the 2010 election season,” the Progress Illinois website reported. If Democratic Justice Thomas Kilbride is unseated, it would be the first such removal of a state justice by the electorate.

Two groups representing Social Security and immigration judges have asked the U.S. government to take new steps to protect them from the threat of violence.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, offered some of the worst horror stories at a session in Washington, according to an NPR report:

“One colleague reports that the brake lines to her car were cut while in the parking lot at work.”

“Another colleague reported that there was gang graffiti in her courtroom. During the anthrax scare, an immigration judge received a letter containing white powder. Another judge was grabbed by the robe by an irate respondent. Another judge experienced someone attempting suicide, right there, in the courtroom.” Read more