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South again leads nation in nasty, expensive judicial races

November 3, 2008 — Karl Rove, the granddaddy of big-money state judicial races, has moved on to a career as a media consultant, and there’s too much drama higher up the ballot for these races to receive as much attention as they have in the past two or three election cycles. But that doesn’t mean the trend toward nastier and more expensive races for judgeships has abated.

“If you’d asked me a money ago, I would have said we were having the quietest races we’ve had in a decade. But things have heated up in the past month,” said Charles Hall, a spokesman for the Justice At Stake Project, which opposes the influence of special interest money in judicial campaign and keeps an eye on elections around the country. Gavel Grab, their very informative blog, is here.

Of the six races around the nation which Hall rates as “heavily contested, with lots of money in the game,” four are in the South, including races in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Louisiana has also had an active judicial election season, culminating in a runoff for a supreme court seat between two Republican state appeals court judges, Greg Guidry and Jimmy Kuhn.

Once again, Alabama has the nation’s most race, between Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur and Republican Greg Shaw. Campaign disclosure statements filed last week showed more than $5.1 million has been spent on this race, including $1.3 million spent by a Virginia group, the Center for Individual Freedom, which supports Shaw. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University calculated that during the week of Oct. 11-17, 41 percent of all the money being spent on advertising in supreme court races in the entire country was spent on this race.

What’s different from previous years is that Paseur, the Democrat, has raised nearly as much money as Shaw, the Republican, and has aired more ads going into the final week than her opponent. Two years ago, Democrat Sue Bell Cobb unseated Chief Justice Drayton Nabers even though she was heavily outspent.

If Paseur, fighting on a more level playing field, defeats Shaw, this race will likely be seen as a bellwether on the issue of tort reform, the issue which has driven most of the rising costs of judicial races.

Alabama’s justly famous for the nastiness of its judicial races, also. But this year Mississippi takes a back seat to no one. Check out challenger Jim Kitchens’ ad attacking incumbent Chief Justice Jim Smith. In another supreme court race, incumbent Chuck Easley has accused his opponent, David Chandler, of being a “dead-beat dad,” and Chandler has accused him of having a record of “sleazy” politics.

Then there’s the race between Justice Oliver Diaz Jr., who has become a hero of Democrats outraged by the Bush Justice Department, and his challenger Randy “Bubba” Pierce. Twice indicted and acquitted on bribery charges, Diaz makes one of the most unusual appeals likely to be heard in a judge’s race in one ad.

“Having to fight false charges against me has strengthened my resolve for fairness. Having my innocence confirmed by juries has strengthened my faith,” says Diaz, who claims he has been targeted by tobacco and insurance interests.

In Texas, Democrats have been especially aggressive in their push-back against years in which Republicans and pro-tort reform business interests have dominated these races. The state party put $820,000 into ads for three of its challengers, Jim Jordan, Linda Yanez and Sam Houston. In a line that has to grate on the nerves of Roger Ailes – and Rove -- the ad says it’s time to return to a “fair and balanced” state supreme court.

With Republicans holding all nine supreme court seats in Texas, Democrats have a long way to go, but after sweeping out more than 40 Republican judges in Dallas County two years ago, they have high hopes of cracking the state’s highest court, as well as unseating Republican judges in Harris County (Houston).

These races are happening in places where the presidential race isn't going to make much news. But Democratic gains in any of these races would be part of a bigger national story.