There continues to be disagreement between liberals and conservatives on the topic of buying judges with huge campaign donations. Is there any kind of reform both sides would favor?
The question arises in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Caperton vs. AT Massey Coal Co. The court rebuked West Virginia Justice Brent Benjamin for not recusing himself in a case involving a coal company whose chief executive spent a stunning $3 million to get Benjamin elected to that state’s high court. Benjamin blithely voted in favor of the coal company. The Supremes ruled the West Virginia high court must re-decide the case with Benjamin recusing himself.
In a less egregious but parallel situation, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette K. Ziegler wrote a 4-3 decision last year favoring a position by the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which spent $2 million to get her elected. The situation screamed out a conflict of interest, undermined the credibility of our highest court and left citizens to wonder if justice is for sale to the highest bidder.
Nationally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent some $120 million between 2003 and 2007 to get business-friendly judges elected, as a March 2007 story in Governing Magazine reported. Liberal groups have also played the game: the Greater Wisconsin Committee spent an estimated $465,000 to re-elect Wisconsin’s Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign has noted.
Some have argued that the solution to the problem is public financing of judicial elections. But that would only limit spending by the candidates, not the increasingly massive campaigns by third-party groups. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has proposed that the Supreme Court write a rule requiring recusal of judges in cases when any party or attorney involved in the case has donated at least $1,000 to a particular judge. But how much impact does $1,000 have if $3 million was spent to get a candidate elected? A more reasonable approach might be to set a number and percentage: say, anything greater than $10,000 or 1 percent of all donations to that judge requires recusal. Or $20,000 and 2 percent.
Of course, to make this rule stick, you’d need full disclosure of who donated to those shadowy third-party groups’ campaign funds. But surely the voters have a right to know who is paying for ads meant to shape their views. The more disclosure, the more democratic the elections. Ultimately, this would require legislation that considered all aspects of such a change; it would make more sense for the legislature, rather than the justices themselves, to oversee how the courts operate in such cases.
One certain opponent of any such change is Madison attorney Mike Wittenwyler, who complained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the “chilling effect” on big donors if they know a judge will recuse because of their donations. Wittenwyler sees this as an abridgement of free speech, as expressed through campaign ads. A more likely result is more speech: Someone wanting a particular kind of judge will have to find more people to donate to create those overblown ads attacking or praising a candidate. So more people will then exercise their wallets – sorry, make that their right to free speech. All good, right?
Learnfare Silliness
Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed – horrors – that we eliminate Learnfare, the program that supposedly withholds welfare payments to families whose kids don’t attend school. State Sens. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) are among the Republicans who’ve criticized the proposal. “This tells me the state doesn’t really care if these kids go to school or not,” Olsen declared.
Actually, the state stopped caring back when Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was in power.
Yes, Thompson was the chief architect and promoter of the program, which began in 1988. The idea was to track attendance of students whose parent(s) received welfare and reduce the payment if they missed so many days. It sounded great on paper, but a study of the program by the UW-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute found it actually resulted in worse attendance by students. A later study by the Legislative Audit Bureau found the program “had no detectable effect on school participation.”
Enthusiasm for the program waned. With the advent of W-2, there was no longer much less reason to monitor Learnfare: Since most W-2 recipients were in the program an average of three months, it simply wasn’t a long enough period to track attendance, sanction a family and then see any results.
In 1999, Republicans further watered down the program. Instead of the more expensive task of tracking daily attendance of students, welfare workers were instructed to check a student’s “enrollment”; once enrolled, the students could miss any number of school days with no impact on welfare payments.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau says there was a grand total of $11,617 in monetary sanctions on 121 participants between September 1999 and the end of 2002. Learnfare had become a micro-dot on the W-2 program, and under Doyle, the sanctions basically stopped, with none in 2003 and 2004. Yet at least one agency was paid $75,000 last year to administer Learnfare (tracking the enrollment of teen parents), according to Erica Monroe-Kane, communications director for the state Department of Children and Families.
Why spend anything on a program that never worked? Why keep up the pretense? There’s enough to argue about as to what does or doesn’t work in the W-2 program. Doyle is simply and sensibly dropping a relic from the pre-W-2 days that has been a failure for 20 years.
The Buzz
–Mark Katches, the Journal Sentinel’s editor of special projects and enterprise editor, is leaving. Milwaukee Magazine Pressroom columnist Erik Gunn has the details on his fine Pressroom blog on Facebook. Katches will truly be missed: The paper did terrific work under his watch.
-Just two Democrats voted against the Assembly budget bill. One was Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer from Manitowoc, who’s probably more fiscally conservative than most Republicans. More surprising was Milwaukee Rep. Peggy Krusick, whose district includes the city’s southwest side and Greenfield. It’s a swing district and voters there have “very strong feelings” about taxes, Krusick says. Her constituents voted against the referendum to increase Milwaukee’s sales tax by 1 percent to pay for parks and transit. This will be fertile ground for Scott Walker in his bid for governor.
-I have argued before that there’s something wrong with a police force like the one in Milwaukee, which is among the nation’s top cities for both cops per-capita and police overtime. If you have so many officers, you shouldn’t need all that overtime. Witness the job being done by Milwaukee Chief Ed Flynn: Overtime has fallen 39 percent this year, as the JS reported.
-Conservative James Wigderson offers a thoughtful take on the questionable justification for recalling state Rep. Jim Sullivan.
-And the Sports Nut wonders why ESPN (gasp!) dared to not report on their absolute favorite guy, Mr. Brett Favre.
