“Please do not let our court system be polarized in any way,” Lewis said to those assembled at the fundraiser.
“We want our system to continue without the politics,” Quince added.
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“I know you want us to not be scared that [because of] the way we rule on a given case, someone wants to take us out,” Pariente told the crowd, saying she was outraged by the “faceless, nameless opponents” so eager to attack judges based on a select few rulings.
Just a dozen miles from where the justices were raising money, in a quiet suburban neighborhood, one of those opponents already had lined up a strategy session for the following night on how to boost the campaign against them.
‘Like sitting ducks’
Judicial elections have long drawn the interest of wealthy benefactors, business and labor groups, and trial lawyers, but watchdog groups say they are particularly troubled by a new trend: The universe of big donors has grown smaller and more concentrated.
In a 2010 study that examined 29 judicial races, the watchdog group Justice at Stake found that the top five spenders averaged $473,000 apiece, while all other donors averaged $850. In addition, loopholes in disclosure laws gave those big donors ways to spend money “in substantial secrecy,” the report found.
“Outside forces are becoming a bigger deal,” said Roy Schotland, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on judicial elections. “We’re seeing more takeover of the races from the outside.”
Schotland said state judicial races are increasingly becoming “floating auctions,” in which special-interest groups focus money and manpower in states where they can upend judges they don’t like. “The justices are like sitting ducks,” he said.
Judicial races have been attractive to donors in the past in part because of their relative obscurity. The contests often draw little public scrutiny, voters rarely know the names on the ballots, and backing them is cheaper than trying to buy an entire state legislature.
“It’s the single best investment in American politics,” said Charles Hall, spokesman for Justice at Stake. “A few big spenders can really have an outsize effect.”
From 2000 to 2009, spending on judicial campaigns more than doubled over the previous decade, according to a joint report by Justice at Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
The examples are numerous.
Last year, in the wake of a controversial collective-bargaining bill passed by the Wisconsin legislature, outside groups poured huge resources into the state Supreme Court election, airing nearly $4 million in negative television ads.
Much the same happened a year earlier during a pair of Supreme Court races in Michigan, where outside groups spent nearly $9 million — most of it during an ad blitz in the final week of the campaign — far dwarfing what the candidates themselves spent.
In a now-famous example from 2004, Massey Energy chief executive Don Blankenship spent $3 million to help elect a justice to the West Virginia Supreme Court who went on to rule in favor of his company in a key lawsuit. The U.S. Supreme Court found that Blankenship’s role had created such a conflict of interest that it forbid the newly elected justice from ruling on the case.
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