Litigation

WV Finance Bill Gets Media Attention

By Peter Hardin

As West Virginia’s legislature weighs a plan for public financing of state Supreme Court elections, the state has become a battleground in a national debate about preserving fair and impartial courts.

A poll unveiled Monday by the Justice at Stake Campaign and the Committee for Economic Development, already mentioned in Gavel Grab, showed most West Virginia voters favoring public financing of elections for the high court. Dueling with these national groups in West Virginia was the Virginia-based Center for Competitive Politics, according to an Associated Press article.

The public financing proposal is aimed at insulating courts from special-interest influence. It has passed the state House of Delegates. Its approval on Monday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite questioning by some legislators, was the topic of news reports in the Beckley Register-Herald, the Charleston Daily Mail, the Charleston Gazette and the American Bar Association Journal. (Earlier, the poll was discussed in a Legal News Line article.)

State Sen. Jeff Kessler, a proponent of the legislation, said it would help restore voter confidence in election of high court justices. “All we want is … to reduce to the extent you can the role money plays in these elections,” Kessler said.

The Center for Competitive Politics issued an analysis predicting the legislation, if enacted, would bring a challenge in court. But Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, said Monday at a press conference in Charleston there are strong precedents for the pilot program proposed in West Virginia.

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin’s proposal was inspired by a provision in North Carolina’s public funding law that has held up under legal scrutiny, Brandenburg said. The North Carolina law was upheld in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from five states including West Virginia.

“The law of the land right now in West Virginia puts this particular provision on very good footing,” Brandenberg said.

Manchin enjoys a 77 percent approval rating, according to the poll, a fact that Kessler spotlighted. ?Hopefully that will let him use that bully pulpit to get that bill through,? Kessler said, according to the Register-Herald.

The Senate Finance Committee must approve the bill before it goes to the full Senate. That panel’s chairman is not making promises about taking up the measure before the scheduled end of the legislature’s session Saturday, West Virginia Metro News reported.

It is not surprising that West Virginia is getting national attention on the judicial election front. In 2004, coal executive Don Blankenship spent $3 million to help Brent Benjamin win election as a state Supreme Court justice. Last year, that episode figured prominently in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Caperton v. Massey, concerning due-process rights when a judge hears a case involving a major campaign backer.

The U.S. Supreme Court ordered Justice Benjamin to step aside from a multimillion-dollar legal dispute involving Blankenship’s company, and a number of states since have begun rewriting judicial codes to take Caperton into account. You can learn more from Gavel Grab. You also can learn more about the Caperton case at this Justice at Stake in-depth issues guide.

Full post as published by The Gavel on March 09, 2010 (boomark / email).