It's campaign season and palms are outstretched.
I’ve never felt so popular in my life.
For weeks now, I’ve received invitations to assorted parties promising to populated by the movers and shakers of Nevada legal society. Alas, it is not my shining personality that draws these invites, but my bank account
The invitations are, of course, for judicial campaign fundraisers.
The campaigns waste their stamps and nicely engraved invitations on me. In fact, there appear to be very unrealistic ideas of what my salary is. I’m not sure, but I think that if I ponied up the “suggested donation” from every request I’ve received so far, I would not have enough left in my paycheck to buy the gasoline to drive to these swank event.
And why the great need for funds? To pay for advertising, of course. Let’s just hope the ads these donations buy don’t turn as nasty as those used in some recent judicial elections.
For example, consider the recent race, where the first sitting Wisconsin Supreme Court justice to be defeated in an election in more than 40 years, Justice Louis Butler, was defeated by Mike Gableman. Gableman’s campaign attack ads have been decried as racist and misleading.
The distortion of Butler’s judicial record included such tactics as flashing images of Butler, an African-American justice, next to those of an African-American child molester. The ad implied that as a justice, Butler was responsible for freeing the child molester, who subsequently offended again. The ironic truth, however, is that while serving as the man’s public defender, Butler failed to gain his release. The subsequent offense occurred after the man had served his sentence and been released on parole. Click here for Newsweek’s analysis of the ad campaign.
The fight was nasty enough that more than fifty Wisconsin judges criticized Gableman’s tactics.
Many proponents of judicial elections like to think that these political races aren’t really all that political. After all, judges, and aspiring judges, are surely too dignified to engage in down and dirty mudslinging or dirty tricks, right? Well, it only takes a look at what happened in Wisconsin to implode those utopian fantasies.
