{"id":191908,"date":"2009-06-08T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T22:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/08\/the-conservative-wing-of-the-supreme-court-supports-bribery\/"},"modified":"2009-06-08T17:22:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T22:22:00","slug":"the-conservative-wing-of-the-supreme-court-supports-bribery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/08\/the-conservative-wing-of-the-supreme-court-supports-bribery\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conservative Wing of the Supreme Court Supports Bribery"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a 5-4 decision, with Justice Kennedy being the swing vote, the Supreme Court ruled that state and local judges receiving huge campaign donations from political interest groups must recuse themselves<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Judges must disqualify themselves in some cases involving their top campaign contributors, the U.S. Supreme Court said, ruling for the first time that judicial elections can create a risk of bias that violates the Constitution. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The case, Caperton v. Massey, involves a fraud case against Massey Energy, in which a jury awarded $50 million to the small coal companies that they drove out of business.<\/p>\n

Massey’s CEO, Don L. Blankenship then spent $3 million to defeat a state supreme court justice<\/span>, and replace him with a more pliable fellow, one Brent Benjamin, who then refused to recuse himself.<\/p>\n

Of interest here is that Blankenship only donated $1000 to Benjamin’s campaign, the rest he independently<\/span> spent on ads against the incumbent, Warren McGraw, so this does not just apply to campaign donations, but independent expenditures too, at least in a case where the donations are “extraordinary” and “extreme”.<\/p>\n

In this case, the donations were so outrageous that John Grisham made a novel out of them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course $3 million for a state supreme court justice in West Virginia fits that bill, it probably would in California too, but for a local Justice of the Peace position, that number would be much lower, probably sub 6 figures, and the courts now have to hash that out.<\/p>\n

Of course the simple solution for any is recusal, which would be done when there is the mere appearance of impropriety.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas came out in favor of corruption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a 5-4 decision, with Justice Kennedy being the swing vote, the Supreme Court ruled that state and local judges receiving huge campaign donations from political interest groups must recuse themselves: Judges must disqualify themselves in some cases involving their top campaign contributors, the U.S. Supreme Court said, ruling for the first time that judicial …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191908"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}