Talking Points
* Michigan Supreme Court election campaigns have become expensive and highly contentious over the past decade. Since 2000, spending has exceeded $23 million for nine seats on the Court. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has likened such campaigns to " ... political prizefights where partisans and special interests seek to install judges who will answer to them instead of the law and the constitution."
* Candidate-focused television issue advertisements, for which there is no campaign finance accounting, have absorbed $10 million in spending since 2000. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce has spent $6 million of that total supporting the five incumbent Republican-nominated justices or opposing their opponents. Contributors to these ad campaigns are anonymous and their contributions are not subject to limits.
* There are no published standards for self-disqualification, or recusal, for Michigan Supreme Court justices. They are the only state court judges in the country who operate without a standard process for self-disqualification.
* Contributors to Michigan Supreme Court election campaigns frequently appear as litigants in cases decided by the Court. For the decade of the 1990s, 86 percent of the Court's cases had at least one contributor to at least one justice hearing the case. Many contributions are small and inconsequential. Some are large.
* The American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct recommends that states should establish some threshold contribution amount, above which a justice should recuse himself from a case involving his campaign's financial supporter. Eighteen states have formed committees to develop recommendations for implementing the Model Code. Michigan is not one of them.
* Because there is no campaign finance accounting of Supreme Court issue advertisements, there is no way to detect and evaluate potential conflicts of interest involving contributors to those advertising campaigns. Contributors to issue advertising campaigns should be identified in the public record.
* The American Bar Association recommends that states that elect their Supreme Court justices in competitive elections should provide full public funding for those campaigns. This allows candidates to have financially viable campaigns without having to solicit support from special interests. The Representative Assembly of the State Bar of Michigan passed a resolution in support of public financing in 2002. Two states, North Carolina and New Mexico, already have established full public financing for their Supreme Court campaigns.
* Michigan has a State Campaign Fund that was established to provide public funding for gubernatorial campaigns. Because of the high costs of recent gubernatorial campaigns, it is inadequate for that purpose. The State Campaign Fund could easily accommodate contemporary Supreme Court campaigns (unless the MI Legislature redirects it).
10/22/07