The following editorial appeared in the August 2014 print edition of Carolina Journal:
As the November election draws closer, be prepared for wails and moans from the Left and good-government types about the corrupting influence of campaign money in judicial elections.
In recent weeks, news stories, commentary articles, and even an editorial cartoon or two have expressed outrage that this fall’s judicial races will be “tainted” by the stain of big money from ideologues trying to buy the courts. Earlier elections were clean because they were funded in part by the public. Candidates for judicial posts will be forced to beg for money on their own, compromised by fat cats on the Right and the Left. The horror!
The charges are laughable and noteworthy for their ignorance. In fact, if liberals want to blame anyone for the expanding role of money in judicial races, they should start by looking in the mirror.
More than a decade ago, the General Assembly began removing partisan affiliations from candidates on judicial ballots. The process started in 1998 at the Superior Court level and over several years moved through the trial and appellate courts. By 2002, all judicial elections in North Carolina became nonpartisan.
Democrats, who championed the changes, said they wanted judicial races to become less politicized, but in fact, party labels were stripped from candidates because Republicans were gaining seats on the state bench. Republican judicial candidates were perceived to be more conservative than Democrats. To voters, that suggested Republican judges were more inclined than Democrats to issue rulings that respected the law, the Constitution, and legal precedent; to be tougher in criminal sentencing; to defend property rights and oppose overreaching regulations; and to resist the temptation to make policies by judicial fiat rather than letting the legislative and executive branches of government do their duty.
Without party labels, judicial candidates needed to rely more on advertising and promotion to spread their message. Those who could not finance their own campaigns had to approach donors, and that’s fine — and consistent with the First Amendment’s encouragement of political speech.
This hasn’t sat well with Democrats or the Left, who tried to offset the effects of privately financed political messages by setting up the N.C. Public Campaign Fund. This decade-old program offered taxpayer subsidies to judicial candidates who agreed to campaign contribution limits and gave them more money if their opponents didn’t take public funding after they reached certain spending thresholds.
Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a similar “rescue scheme” in Arizona unconstitutional, saying it was an unjustifiable burden on free speech. As part of the 2013 budget debate, our General Assembly did away with the Public Campaign Fund, bringing the state in line with the Constitution but sending the Left off the rails.
Liberals have called for a return of the Public Campaign Fund or something much like it. This means they’re happy to impose unconstitutional restrictions on political speech. As a result, voters would know less about judicial candidates than they should. Some bargain.