A successful candidate in Florida for a county judgeship has been fined $25,000 by the state Judicial Qualifications Commission. Her offense? Apparently trying to insinuate that her opponent’s campaign contributors expected to get something in return for their support.
The Orlando Sentinel reports:
Brevard County judge has agreed to a public reprimand and a $25,000 fine for “improper conduct” during her successful campaign last year to the bench, officials announced today.
A panel that investigates judges said Michelle Baker’s campaign mailer violated judicial cannons of conduct that require “dignity appropriate to judicial office.”
…At issue is a campaign mailer that said Hotusing’s campaign donors largely consisted of criminal defense attorneys and it asked voters: “What are they trying to buy?”
The statement wrongly implied that Hotusing’s donors were trying to use donations to obtain favors from Hotusing and that Hotusing would favor those donors and their clients if re-elected to the bench, according to the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission.
This brings to mind the case of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, whose own campaign speech has seemingly fallen outside what the speech police of the Badger State find tolerable.
On the one hand, it is somewhat amusing to see a candidate get slapped down for pushing the stale “contributions to my opponent equal bribes, while my contributions equal support from the community” line that is so much a feature of modern campaigning.
On the other hand, of course, is the First Amendment, which gives candidates and all citizens the right to pretty much say anything they want about politicians and public officials, campaigns, government, public policy, and other issues of public interest and import. The penalty imposed on Judge Baker for employing what is essentially standard political rhetoric is simply not acceptable in a nation that protects free and unfettered political speech.
As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, “If the State chooses to tap the energy and the legitimizing power of the democratic process, it must accord the participants in that process … the First Amendment rights that attach to their roles.”
However annoying and unsupported candidate Baker’s statements about her opponent’s campaign contributors were, it’s hard to imagine that they aren’t protected under the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court even overturned a case from West Virginia earlier this year based entirely on the premise (faulty, in our view) that large independent expenditures in a judicial election cast doubt on the legitimacy of the winning judge’s vote in favor of the defendant. Given that, it’s hard to see that a judicial candidate could be sanctioned for essentially parroting the view of the U.S. Supreme Court that contributions to judge* can lead to improper influence.
*The West Virginia case, Caperton v. Massey, was about independent expenditures, but the same reasoning would seem to apply
