Tuesday, January 26, 2010; 6:50 PM
Retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor said last week's Supreme Court decision striking down restrictions on corporate spending in elections will energize an "arms race" in judicial elections and be a "problem for maintaining an independent judiciary."
Since leaving the court in 2006, O'Connor has campaigned against the election of state and local judges, and she said Tuesday that "increasingly expensive and negative campaigns for judicial office erode both the impartiality of the judiciary and the public perception of them."
O'Connor lent her voice to the reverberations from the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned two of the court's precedents and swept away decades of restrictions on how corporations and other special interest groups could spend their general treasuries on behalf of candidates.
President Obama and congressional Democrats have lambasted the decision, and tried to turn what could be a disastrous political problem for them into a rallying cry for their supporters. Activists and experts on both sides of the issue continue to debate its potential for change. And critics of the sweeping decision have used it to denounce what they say is an "activist" conservative majority on the court, with a particular emphasis on Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who they say betrayed his promise of narrow decisions that avoid constitutional confrontations.
O'Connor confined her remarks about the decision to the affect it will have on the overwhelming number of states and localities that elect judges. Federal judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
"In invalidating some of the existing checks on campaign spending, the majority in Citizens United has signaled that the problem of campaign contributions in judicial elections might get considerably worse and quite soon," O'Connor said at a symposium at Georgetown Law Center. She noted that each election cycle brings new spending records, especially in state supreme court races that have become special-interest battlegrounds.
O'Connor declined to directly criticize the decision, although she pointed out that one of the abandoned precedents was the court's 2003 decision in McConnell v. FEC, which upheld the constitutionality of the restrictions in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act of 2002.
"Since I was one of several authors of that opinion," she said, "if you want my legal opinion, you can go read it."
It was the replacement of O'Connor by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. that moved the court from a 5 to 4 majority approving the restrictions to a 5 to 4 majority striking them as unconstitutional.
She joked at the beginning of her speech: "Gosh, I step away for a couple of years and there's no telling what's going to happen." ...
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