RALEIGH – Here’s what should be the least-surprising news of the 2011 legislative session: the new Republican majority is seeking to reverse the efforts of previous Democratic legislatures to hurt Republican judicial candidates.
Several years ago, when Democratic legislators yanked party labels off the ballot and set up a system to pilfer money from taxpayers to fund judicial campaigns, they pretended it was all about judicial independence. Few were fooled – unless they wanted to be.
The real “problem” Democratic leaders saw was that GOP candidates were winning too many judicial races. The appellate courts, once the exclusive province of the Democratic legal and political establishment, was moving to the right. The state supreme court already had a Republican majority. The court of appeals seemed headed in a similar direction.
Couldn’t have that. So the Democrats decided to take away both information and freedom from voters in a plan to recover or expand their majorities on the courts.
By stripping the party labels, they didn’t really make judicial races nonpartisan. Both parties have always and will always recruit candidates for the court and try to elect them. But by removing the labels, they increased the cost of informing voters about which judges are likely to be more conservative – voters apparently prefer conservatives over liberals when picking judges – and assumed that increasing the cost of informing voters would on balance help the Democrats, traditionally the better-funded party in North Carolina politics.
To increase their advantage future, they embraced taxpayer funding of judicial candidates. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly a stretch. Most Democratic leaders favor coercive politics, anyway, on ideological grounds.
But if you run the better-funded state party, and expect more support from independent-expenditure groups on judicial elections, then imposing fundraising and expenditure limits on judicial candidates seems an attractive prospect.
It hasn’t worked out quite the way the Democrats intended. For one thing, in 2008 the lack of party labels on the ballot probably worked to their disadvantage, because lots of new Democratic voters showed up at the polls to support Barack Obama and may well have added to the vote totals of Democratic judicial candidates through straight-ticket voting if the option were available.
As for the campaign-funding piece, Democrats apparently didn’t anticipate how unpopular it would be to force North Carolinians to fund political campaigns – and how serious the legal challenge to the system would be. A key element of the North Carolina plan that punishes judicial candidates who try to stay outside the system was arguably unconstitutional at the time of passage and is about to be declared explicitly unconstitutional.
Now that Republicans run the General Assembly, they are going to move bills to restore party labels and end taxpayer funding of judicial elections. They have both philosophical and partisan reasons to do so.
The real question is whether Gov. Beverly Perdue will use her veto pen again. Swing voters may not care much about the issue of party labels. But they detest being forced to fund the campaigns of politicians with whom they may disagree. If Perdue defends taxpayer funding of campaigns at the same time she’s raising taxes or cutting education spending, she’ll essentially be writing the copy for attack ads against her in the 2012 election.
Such attack ads would be not only effective but entirely justified. These policies began in bad faith, yielded bad results, and continue to be bad politics.
Their demise would be good news.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.