Participants in Tennessee's judicial elections on Thursday rejected a malodorous effort to oust three capable sitting state Supreme Court justices: Chief Justice Gary Wade and Justices Cornelia Clark and Sharon Lee.
Conservative Republican groups, including the Republican State Leadership Committee and Americans for Prosperity — part of Charles and David Koch's big-dollar political operation — underwrote a campaign against the judges. For weeks before Thursday's election, they bombarded Tennessee with ads depicting them as "soft on crime," hostile to business interests and supporters of "the Obama agenda" and "Obamacare." But this was all nonsense: In fact the judges never ruled on a case involving the health care law.
Tennessee voters apparently saw through the lies, a victory not only for the three judges but for elected judges everywhere. The outcome of the election is a sign that judges can sign on to controversial decisions without losing their jobs — despite attack ads.
The downside of the judges' success is that, to achieve it, they raised more than $1 million, much of it from lawyers who may appear before them. The judges' next challenge is to be diligent about avoiding the appearance and reality of improper conflicts-of-interest by recusing themselves from cases involving significant financial backers.
"People can smell court tampering and tend to get their backs up," says Bert Brandenburg of Justice at State, a group that advocates for the preservation of fair and impartial courts. But he warned that if judges take away from it the need to go out and raise lots more money, courts and ultimately justice will lose.
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