Supreme Court's Judge-For-Sale Case Is Just The Tip of a Larger Iceberg

from HuffPost:



Ian Millhiser
Attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center, blogger at OverruledBlog.com
Posted March 3, 2009 | 02:32 PM (EST)

Supreme Court's Judge-For-Sale Case Is Just The Tip of a Larger Iceberg



When a jury ordered Don Blankenship's company to pay $50 million to one of its competitors, Blankenship had a plan; rather than pay the money, Blankenship decided to buy a judge. An unknown lawyer named Brent Benjamin was in the midst of a quisical election campaign against incumbent West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. With no name-recognition, and only $25,000 in the bank, Benjamin's campaign was going nowhere.

That is, of course, until Don Blankenship showed up.

Seeing an opportunity to shape the judges who would decide his appeal, Blankenship spent $3 million dollars in contributions, independent ads and other expenditures intended to place Brent Benjamin on the bench. One ad, funded entirely by a front-organization created by Blankenship, accused incumbent Justice McGraw of voting to free an free an incarcerated child rapist, and of allowing that rapist to work in a public school. Armed with Blankeship's millions, Brent Benjamin became Justice Benjamin, and he soon cast the deciding vote in a case overturning the verdict against Blankenship's company. Blankenship paid $3 million to buy a judge, and saved $50 million for his company---a 1667% return on his investment.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case which could reverse Justice Benjamin's decision and require similarly bought-and-paid-for judges to recuse themselves from cases involving their sugar daddies. But the Blankenship/Benjamin incident is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Indeed, thousands of Americans who depend on the courts for impartial justice are left in the cold by an increasingly pro-corporate judiciary.

Like Don Blankenship, the business interests who supported George W. Bush's two campaigns for President were rewarded with judges who are overwhelmingly sympathetic to their concerns. The federal judiciary is more conservative now than it has been since the Great Depression, and corporate interests have reaped the rewards. A University of Houston study found that President Bush's judges side with civil-rights plaintiffs, workers, consumers and other similarly disadvantaged parties only 33% of the time, three percent less often than even Ronald Reagan's appointees to the bench. Another study, published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review, determined that federal appeals courts are almost five times more likely to side with employers than with employees in discrimination cases, now that President Bush has stacked the bench with judicial conservatives. Such pro-employer bias explains the Supreme Court's now-infamous decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, which held that employers are immune to accountability for paycheck discrimination, so long as they keep their decision to discriminate secret for six months. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-millhiser/supreme-courts-judge-for_b_171498.html

to the judge put on the bench specifically to overturn the conviction of the traitor Oliver North, the same just who later removed the independent prosecutor in the Whitewater fiasco and replaced him with Ken Starr.

:kick:

The Chamber got involved in the game in 2000 and has been using front groups and attack ads to remake the nation's judicial system ever since.

But it really goes back to Texas in the 1990's, when Karl Rove realized that business interests would pay generously to elect pro-business GOP candidates and became the middleman to bring it all together. That's where all those horror stories you used to hear about "activist judges," greedy trial lawyers and outrageous judgments for little old ladies who got burned by the coffee at McDonalds came from -- it was Karl Rove and a lot of Karl Rove wannabes convincing the people to vote against their own best interests.