In my previous post, detailing my frustration over the Supreme Court decision on election finance, I related my diminishing trust of the Court's decisions, and provided two examples to explain my "adjusted" attitude. In contrast, though, I have trusted many of Justice O'Connor's insights, generated,at least partially by her early experience as an Arizona legislator. I suggested, however, that she must have been on vacation with the decision over the Bush/Gore election fiasco in Florida.
However, O'Connor is not on vacation when it comes to the latest ruling on election finances. In a brief article, tucked away on page 17 of today's NYTimes, Adam Liptak says that she did not sound at all happy about the big campaign finance decision last week. It repudiated a major part of a ruling she'd helped write prior to retirement, and complicated her campaign to do away with judicial elections.
"Gosh," she said, "I step away for a couple of years and there's no telling what's going to happen." In a Georgetown conference on law, she put the issue directly, adding that the ruling might create an "increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary."
She sketched out potential scenarios from the election finance ruling:
We can anticipate that labor unions and trial lawyers, for instance, might have the financial means to win one particular state judicial election. . . . And maybe tobacco firms and energy companies have enough to win the next one. And if both sides unleash their campaign spending monies without restrictions, then I think mutually-assured destruction is the most likely outcome.
Although E. J. Dionne's remarks in the Washington Post were expected, they are so pointed and colorful that I decided to share them with you:
The only proper response to this distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt. It would be a revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition. The most vibrant reform alliances in our history have involved coalitions between populists (who stand up for the interests and values of average citizens) and progressives (who fight against corruption in government and for institutional changes to improve the workings of our democracy). It's time for a new populist-progressive alliance.
This is a messy, messy issue that's going to take a long time to resolve. At this point in time, I'm not yet too philosophical about the issue. And though a number of my Libertarian friends suggest that my views are over-stated, only time will tell. Sunday's Times had an interesting piece of "research-based advocacy" supporting the ruling, but I'm still skeptical. In other words, I hope that I'm wrong about the consequences of the ruling, but I doubt it.