Liberal Talk Radio

In a pre-taping discussion this Sunday, the Prof and I talked a bit about the supreme court races in Washington State. they’ve garnered a lot of attention because the BIAW (among others) has dumped tons of cash into the elections as a way of (I believe) pre-empting the pro-developer I-933 initiative. 933 is going to be a legal nightmare, and so the Building Industry wants favorable judges in place to help land decisions in its favor. At least that’s my theory.

Anyway, my big brilliant solution to all this is public financing of judicial elections. The case for publicly financing judicial elections is much stronger than the case for congressional or presidential elections for two reasons:

One, judges aren’t supposed to have a natural constituency, besides the law. A Senator who represents Washington State also represents Boeing (and its employees), so it makes at least a little sense that said Senator would take money from Boeing. But a judge isn’t your representative on the court. That’s why they’re an entirely separate branch of government.

Two, and more importantly, judges can’t speak about upcoming cases. Which means that if they take money from an interest group, a reporter can’t ask them how they might rule on any issue important to that interest group, because the case might come before them. For example, a judge could take gobs of money from an anti-abortion group, but couldn’t be asked about how they’d vote on any abortion cases. That’s a problem. Especially because the interest groups they’re most likely to get money from are the exact same interest groups on whom they’re likely to have cases about.

All of this is by way of saying that Danny Westneat comes to basically the same conclusion in Sunday’s Seattle Times, but provides some useful facts: North Carolina, for example, already has publicly-financed judicial elections.

P.S., Josh Feit think this subject is all very boring. After slogging through my arguments here, you may agree.