Judicial candidates, welcome to the new political reality.
Once upon a time, judicial campaigns were run as sleepy little affairs with a limited few putting their hats in the ring, having a treasurer and committee solicit and manage funds, and rely on yard signs, big signs, nail files, cards, brochures, endorsements, grips and grins at functions, and television ads and radio at the end. It was a polite affair, and above the partisan politics of the Commonwealth.
The Judicial Candidates would push their titles (if already a judge), their names (if easily recognizable or established by themselves or others with the same last name), their record of public service, their education, their qualifications, their family ties, and their endorsements.
The political parties and pundits pretty much left them alone as an aside and graciously permitted the judges-to-be to deposit campaign literature at their headquarters (for ease of distribution) and to speak at the republican and democratic clubs throughout the city and state.
Things have changed.
In the last few years, we now have the Internet, bloggers, and MP3 audios and videos to web stream into the public's homes. The candidates will post, the bloggers will post, the political action groups will post, and the postings will continue and the comments will flow.
We now have more open campaign speech a la' the U.S. Supreme Court which is being countered by the political groups wanting more information as a condition to an endorsement. Polite and diplomatic declinations to completing the questionnaires may no longer suffice as one group has already pursued the matter through the courts compelling the Kentucky Supreme Court to recognize a need to redraft the campaign speech rules. People want to know, and have the right to know something about the content of the character and qualifications of those asking for their votes.
We have a Judicial Campaign Conduct Committee which will be an additional ingredient in the mix, and whose presence will have an impact in an unknown manner. The committee's membership consists of lawyers and citizens, some of whom have given to candidates in the past and who may support the candidates in the present. The reporting of a putative violation to the committee will constitute new information to be digested and made news by someone, somewhere.
We have campaign donations, supporters, and hosts whose activities are now scrutinized. None of these actions are illegal per se, but when it comes to a candidate's qualifications and ability to be fair, impartial, and independent, then questions are being posed by both the pundits. What was once a potential ground for a judge in recusing him/herself from hearing a case is now a question as to their qualifications to serve in the first place. Failure to recuse is now fodder for the media and raises concerns.
More and more 'political' issues are now coming before the courts, from who determines the real candidate in a legislative race (Seum/Stepenson v. Woodward), the testing requirements of some candidates for PVA, and most recently a motion before the Kentucky Supreme Court to have a justice step down from the case based upon donations from the attorneys (the attorneys who are members of the firm on the receiving end of a legal negligence claim and the attorney representing the firm) to his current campaign.
And, if the above is not bad enough, cheap name-calling is now surfacing in some blogger's commentary from the citizenry.
Imagine this scenario. A judicial candidate is speaking at a seminar discussing the law, or speaking at an informal function (club meeting), or wherever there is a person in the audience with an MP3 recorder or cell phone or other digital device turned on, and you now have instant news. The digital recording is downloaded to the computer and uploaded to a web site to a mass audience.
It is a new world judicial order, and no campaign conduct committee is going to stem the tide of these changes. The public and the partisan parties are sensing control and influence over the elections and the news-worthiness of the events. The composition of our court, activist judges, and the right to put his justice on the bench was a recent issue in Presidential Politics in this Country.
Recent Supreme Court nomination procedures may have set up a climate where the public would accept a similar procedure of judicial selection within the Commonwealth rather than judicial elections. Judicial nominations by the Governor with an approval process by the legislature with recall elections is sounding better and better. Would we have had all these news items if such had been the procedure before?
With every judicial office but two in the state up for election, this year's ballot may resemble the weekend edition of the New York Times and be equally incomprehensible.
Judicial selection and not judicial elections needs another look, now.
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