That's the shocking headline of a story by Houston's KHOU TV station. The story concerns political contributions to the justices on the Texas Supreme Court, and how those contributions might give the appearance of influencing judicial decisions. Watch the video.
The Dallas Morning News published an editorial today regarding the credibility problem of our current Texas Supreme Court. The newspaper is definitely right in saying the Court has a credibility problem, but the paper is misinformed in one of its statements, and in my opinion is wrong in its suggested solution.
The misinformation is in the statement that "Texas trial lawyers who argue directly before the justices also have been huge contributors." The implication is that plaintiff lawyers are contributing to the justices. This may have been true in the past, but I don't think there are many plaintiff lawyers now who would even consider making a contribution to any of the nine sitting Republican justices.
The newspaper's conclusion that the best solution to the current problem would be appointed justices is, again in my opinion, simply wrong. This would be dangerously close to the federal judicial system of appointments for life. And while there are many fine federal judges, there are some who never should have been appointed, and who will never leave the bench.
The correct solution is fair and open elections, with full disclosure of campaign contributions, combined with an educated electorate who understand the influence that campaign contributions can have on judges' legal opinions. Full public financing of judicial elections would be even better.
Here is the text of the editorial:
The reputation of our state's judiciary has been tarnished for years. As then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Phillips told the Legislature all the way back in 2001, when judges owe their jobs to an electoral system dominated by political parties and big campaign donors, their judicial objectivity comes into question.
Nothing underscores this point better than the May 2 Texas Supreme Court decision favoring Perry Homes over homeowners Jane and Robert Cull. The court's decision, overturning two lower courts' rulings to compensate the Culls for a defective home, probably will be debated for years.
But what isn't debatable is that the founder of Perry Homes, Bob Perry, is a major donor to the campaigns of the Supreme Court's justices. He, his family and their political action committees have donated more than $250,000 to the nine justices – all Republicans – including those who dissented in the Cull case.
The justices may have used flawless legal analysis in ruling against the Culls. That's not the point. In the public's eye, their decision is tainted by the fact that they owe their elected positions, at least in part, to Mr. Perry.
He isn't the only big donor with business before the court. Texas trial lawyers who argue directly before the justices also have been huge contributors.
And to add to the credibility problem, three Supreme Court justices are fending off allegations that they abused their campaign funds. And a report yesterday by the judicial watchdog group Texas Watch criticized the court for relying too heavily on anonymous opinions, which effectively reduces the panel's public accountability.
The method of electing Texas judges – from the Supreme Court all the way down – is badly in need of modernization. Campaign donations from special interests should have no place in an independent judiciary.
The state needs a system in which the governor appoints judicial nominees by merit, with Senate confirmation, and voters regularly decide whether or not to retain them. That would help remove partisan politics and make court decisions less suspect.
That's one of several options put forth by Mr. Phillips in 2001. His argument made sense then, and it's no less valid today.
Update: now you can see the presentation of this Supreme Court story made on the ABC TV station in Dallas February 27, 2008.
From the consumer group Texas Watch comes this press release about the Texas Supreme Court:
As reported in the Dallas Morning News, the arson case against the family of Texas Supreme Court justice David Medina just won't go away. Here are excerpts from the latest story:
Six members of the grand jury that indicted a Texas Supreme Court justice and his wife over a house fire have filed a lawsuit so they can speak about evidence in the case.
By law, grand jury proceedings are secret.
But the grand jury members say they want to disclose details they heard to a new grand jury. They also want to defend themselves from accusations alleging they were a "runaway grand jury," said Jeffrey Dorrell, an attorney who served as the group's assistant foreman.
They were part of a grand jury that indicted Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina last month on a charge of tampering with a document; his wife, Francisca Medina, was indicted on an arson charge.
The charges are related to a June 28 fire that destroyed the Medinas' house in the Houston suburb of Spring.
Hours after the indictment, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal dismissed the charges, citing "insufficient evidence."
Mr. Dorrell said he didn't believe the district attorney's office planned to properly investigate the case. Grand jurors had asked the prosecutor to bring them witnesses and evidence, but that never happened, Mr. Dorrell said.
This is another of those Web sites that lets you put in your political priorities, and then it tells you which presidential candidate best matches up with your interests. This one is a little better than most because it lets you put extra weight on you most important interests. Check it out.
VoteMatch USA 2008 helps you to determine your preference for one of the candidates taking part in the United States Presidential Primaries.
Answer the statements by clicking on agree, disagree or don't know. You can add extra weight to any statements you find especially important. On a separate screen, you will be able to choose which candidates you would like to include in your results calculation.
The results screen will reveal which candidate you agree with most, and the other candidates will follow in descending order. Below, you can see all the candidates’ opinions and click on them for further explanation.
My friend, Virginia lawyer Ben Glass, has written about the recent (and ridiculous) Virginia laws that charge bad drivers enormous fines. Besides the outrage from drivers being fined literally thousands of dollars for minor traffic violations, there now exists the very real possibility that hundreds of thousands of drivers could have their licenses suspended for inability to pay the fines.
The latest development is that the Legislature was going to try to just order the courts not to collect the fines. Oops -- there happens to be a 130-year-old state law that prohibits lawmakers doing that. So back to the drawing board...
I have mixed feelings about the story in the Dallas Morning News today reporting that the backlog of cases pending before the Texas Supreme Court has reached a record level. On the one hand, if the justices would quit illegally using their campaign funds for frequent trips home, maybe they could clear more cases. On the other hand, since this Court finds in favor of big corporations about 70% of the time, maybe we're better off with the Court just leaving all the cases piled up in the corner. Here are excerpts from the Dallas Morning News article:
The Texas Supreme Court left a record number of cases pending at the end of the 2007 fiscal year, even as it agreed to hear more cases.
The delay is drawing fire from at least one candidate for the Supreme Court.
"Texans don't need to be told they need to take a number and get in line and wait," said Jim Jordan, a Democrat challenging Republican Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson. "These kinds of delays create a distrust in the legal system."
Jordan, a Dallas trial judge, said parties that reach the Supreme Court have already spent considerable time and money in the legal process.
But Justice Paul Green, who wrote the fewest opinions during the fiscal year, defended the time he and others spend outside the office, speaking to groups and doing other appearances outside the court.
I have written a couple of times about the recent ethics charges against certain justices on our Texas Supreme Court, and many times about the moral challenges this Court seems unable to overcome. Now Paul Burka has today written an excellent post on his blog about the same subjects. I encourage everyone to read his post in full. I'll quote only the concluding paragraphs:
The Texas Supreme Court has become a public spectacle. It's bad enough that a majority of the Court performs as a wholly owned subsidiary of Texans for Lawsuit Reform. Now it's apparent that a third of the judges -- Nathan Hecht, Paul Green, and David Medina -- have no compunction about flouting ethics rules by using campaign funds as a piggybank for their personal travel to and from work. Texas Watch has filed complaints against all three judges with the Texas Ethics Commission.
The larger concern is that the judges did not make sufficient effort to investigate the legality of their conversion of sizable sums of money from their contributors. They used campaign funds to subsidize their lifestyle. Judges should be held to the highest standard of ethics. Let me rephrase that. Judges should hold themselves to the highest standard of ethics. But the judges on the Texas Supreme Court do not have to worry about how they are perceived, because there is no accountability. The judges are bulletproof. All of them are Republicans. While Democrats have had some electoral success in courthouse and legislative races, they haven't won a statewide election since 1994. Republican judges have little to fear at election time because they are protected by TLR and the big firms with the big clients who always win -- BP being the most recent example. The Court is consistently criticized for being result-oriented at legal conferences, but there is no incentive for judges to change their behavior, either in their decisions or in their ethics, and there won't be until somebody loses a race.
Please read Mr. Burka's post, and while you're there, subscribe. It's always worthwhile and enlightening reading.
This is getting ridiculous. Now we have three Texas Supreme Court justices under ethics investigations. And one of the three just had criminal charges controversially dismissed in an unrelated matter. There have been a series of stories recently in the Dallas Morning News about these justices. Here are excerpts from the latest:
Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht said Wednesday he used campaign cash to pay for dozens of flights to his hometown last year because he was campaigning, even though he's not up for re-election until 2012.
Justice Hecht reported 48 payments to airlines for in-state trips last year and acknowledged that "a good bit" of them were for travel to his hometown of Carrollton, where he still owns a home and attends church.
Using political contributions for personal use is against state law, and the Texas Ethics Commission has interpreted the law to ban appellate judges from using campaign donations to pay the costs of commuting between the judge's home city and the city where the court is located.
Justice Hecht told The Associated Press that his homestead has been in Travis County for 20 years. "[But] I feel like it advances my campaign to go up there [to Carrollton] and I almost always work when I'm there," he said.
Justice Hecht was re-elected to a six-year term in 2006.
He refused to produce documents proving that trips to Carrollton were business related.
"I think this is a waste of time," he said.
He is the third Supreme Court justice to face similar campaign finance questions recently.
Texas Watch accused Justice Paul Green of improperly using campaign funds to reimburse his mileage expenses between his home in San Antonio and the court in Austin.
Justice David Medina has said he will repay political funds that he used for commuting between Houston and Austin. He said he received incorrect advice when he used the campaign funds.
This post was written for inclusion in the upcoming Facing Up blog carnival on Social Security.
What effect will aging Baby Boomers have on the Social Security retirement and disability programs? Huge might be an understatement. The Baby Boom generation is defined as those roughly 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The first of the Baby Boomers began to turn 62 in January of 2008. That, of course, is the early retirement age for Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration predicts that about a million Baby Boomers will take early retirement, even though their monthly checks will be 25 percent lower than if they waited until the normal retirement age of 66.
As "Boomers" begin to retire, the effect on the Social Security system will be twofold – first, there will be more retirees receiving benefits. Second, there will be fewer workers paying into the system to support those retirees. Boomers didn’t have as many children per family as our preceding generation did. We had about two children per family, compared with three children per family in our parents’ generation. So we didn’t produce as many new workers to support the old workers now retiring.
In fact, experts say that we have gone from about 16 workers paying into Social Security for every person drawing benefits in 1950, to a little more than three to one today. In a few more years we’ll be down to about two to one. This is not guesswork. We absolutely know how many new adult workers we will have 20 years from now, because they have already been born. We’re not going to have a sudden, unexpected increase in the number of workers. (Unless we have a major change in our immigration laws.)
Economic predictions are all over the map on this, but one guesstimate is that about the year 2017 the Social Security system will start to see that incoming payroll taxes aren’t enough to match outgoing retirement and disability benefits. The timing is less important than the inevitability of the event. Every year from 2008 until 2025 will see another wave of Boomers retiring. Somewhere during that time span, the benefits will outgrow the income.
That doesn’t mean the system will collapse at that time, because there’s enough money in the Social Security Trust Fund to carry us for another 20-25 years beyond the point at which benefits begin to outweigh income. Or at least there is supposed to be money in the Social Security Trust Fund. Unfortunately, the politicians have been raiding that fund for years, and it now consists primarily of IOUs from the federal government.
When the Trust Fund runs out of money, that’s when the crunch will come. Politicians will have to make some difficult decisions – increase taxes, decrease benefits, or both. We all know that politicians are loath to make hard choices, but it’s going to have to be done. And really, it won’t take all that much of a change to get the Social Security system back in balance.
But an even bigger problem will be the Medicare and Medicaid crisis looming ahead of us. These programs face not only the demographic changes the aging Baby Boomers present, but also the runaway inflationary costs of medical and pharmaceutical care. The Medicare shortfall could be roughly five times as large as the Social Security shortfall. That should well and truly frighten you.
Some estimates are that by the year 2040, Social Security and Medicare will consume as much as 60 percent of income taxes collected. The remaining 40 percent of tax revenue would have to finance all the rest of the federal government.
My own, uneducated, guess is that Congress will not significantly reduce benefits for people already receiving Social Security retirement benefits, but will probably have to make major changes to Medicare and thereby reduce medical benefits. I suspect the government will also tighten rules even more on disability benefits, and try to save money by denying obviously qualified Social Security disability applicants.
The future is not hopeless for Social Security and Medicare but it’s certainly not rosy. Big changes are coming, and the sooner they come, the better off we’ll be. The question is whether Congress and the Administration will have the political willpower to deal with the tidal wave on the horizon or whether they will hide their heads in the sand, as usual.
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