from HuffPost:
Ian Millhiser
Attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center, blogger at OverruledBlog.com
Posted March 3, 2009 | 02:32 PM (EST)
Supreme Court's Judge-For-Sale Case Is Just The Tip of a Larger Iceberg When a jury ordered Don Blankenship's company to pay $50 million to one of its competitors, Blankenship had a plan; rather than pay the money, Blankenship decided to buy a judge. An unknown lawyer named Brent Benjamin was in the midst of a quisical election campaign against incumbent West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. With no name-recognition, and only $25,000 in the bank, Benjamin's campaign was going nowhere.
That is, of course, until Don Blankenship showed up.
Seeing an opportunity to shape the judges who would decide his appeal, Blankenship spent $3 million dollars in contributions, independent ads and other expenditures intended to place Brent Benjamin on the bench. One ad, funded entirely by a front-organization created by Blankenship, accused incumbent Justice McGraw of voting to free an free an incarcerated child rapist, and of allowing that rapist to work in a public school. Armed with Blankeship's millions, Brent Benjamin became Justice Benjamin, and he soon cast the deciding vote in a case overturning the verdict against Blankenship's company. Blankenship paid $3 million to buy a judge, and saved $50 million for his company---a 1667% return on his investment.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case which could reverse Justice Benjamin's decision and require similarly bought-and-paid-for judges to recuse themselves from cases involving their sugar daddies. But the Blankenship/Benjamin incident is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Indeed, thousands of Americans who depend on the courts for impartial justice are left in the cold by an increasingly pro-corporate judiciary.
Like Don Blankenship, the business interests who supported George W. Bush's two campaigns for President were rewarded with judges who are overwhelmingly sympathetic to their concerns. The federal judiciary is more conservative now than it has been since the Great Depression, and corporate interests have reaped the rewards. A University of Houston study found that President Bush's judges side with civil-rights plaintiffs, workers, consumers and other similarly disadvantaged parties only 33% of the time, three percent less often than even Ronald Reagan's appointees to the bench. Another study, published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review, determined that federal appeals courts are almost five times more likely to side with employers than with employees in discrimination cases, now that President Bush has stacked the bench with judicial conservatives. Such pro-employer bias explains the Supreme Court's now-infamous decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, which held that employers are immune to accountability for paycheck discrimination, so long as they keep their decision to discriminate secret for six months. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-millhiser/supreme-courts-judge-for_b_171498.html