The Waltons, Stephenses, Tysons and Murphys gave tens of thousands of dollars to Dan Kemp's recent winning campaign for chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Oh, dear. I hope Kemp didn't just see that. What was I thinking?
Does anyone know whether Kemp reads this column? Do you know whether he gets up early? Could somebody run over to his house and get the paper off his stoop? I'm assuming he doesn't read it online, being in his 60s and thus not knowing how.
Rules of judicial conduct require judgeship candidates to do the best they can not to know who gives money to their campaigns. Their campaign-finance people are supposed to solicit and keep up with such things while they remain pristine. Their people are supposed to report all of that on public forms that the candidates themselves are never to see or read accounts of in the newspaper.
Judgeship candidates are expected to go to receptions in people's homes for the purpose of raising money for their campaigns, and not to know whose homes they're in or the identities of the well-dressed people attending and introducing themselves and wishing them all the best in their campaigns.
It seems to me that it's a violation of judicial campaign conduct for any judgeship candidate ever to attend any such reception without wearing a blindfold and earplugs. The would-be judge should be led around these receptions by his finance chairman, who should be telling reception guests to look but not speak.
I talked to a guy once who had run for the Supreme Court. He said people would come up to him and extend a check. He said he would avert his eyes and tell them to go talk to his finance chairman. He said it was hard to get those images out of his head, but that he tried as best he could under the rules of conduct.
The best way to enforce that rule is to quarantine immediately any person declaring as a candidate for a judgeship. But how are voters supposed to assess these judgeship candidates if they can't even get a look at them?
And get a load of this attendant little gem: The rules of conduct also tell a judge to disqualify himself from cases posing conflicts involving any substantial financial assistance he has received from campaign donors.
Let me run that by you again: He must not know his campaign donors. Then he must disqualify from cases in which those campaign donors are parties.
A headline in this paper Sunday called that a "Catch-22." I call it crazy as a betsy bug.
People are saying we need to fix this nonsense. Most of them say we should allow the judges to know their campaign-donor identities (which they do already, of course) so that the judges could disqualify themselves knowledgeably.
But I think the problem is more basic than that.
The very concept of a rule trying to insulate a judgeship candidate from campaign donations suggests our acknowledgement of a basic unseemliness, indeed inappropriateness, to giving money to a person seeking to be a judge--indeed, to subjecting a judge to electoral politics.
And the very concept of trying to keep an elected judge from considering a legal case involving a party that has given him money reinforces the premise of unseemliness and inappropriateness in the election process.
We're electing people to do a job they can't do because of having to get elected.
The solution is simple. It's to stop electing judges, at least at the appellate level. It is to make judgeship selection a matter of meritorious peer review and gubernatorial nomination and state Senate confirmation.
If it was good enough for the nation's founders, then it's good enough for modern-day Arkansas--which, I would point out, is in the minority of states engaging in the charade of judgeship elections.
What we need is to be honest with ourselves and extend our logic to its conclusion.
To try to keep our judge candidates from doing basic politics even as we require them to engage in basic politics is to reek of contradiction and indeed hypocrisy, and we ought to stop it.
We need the Legislature to refer us a constitutional amendment to stop electing judges and to appoint them.
In closing, I hope it's not too late to warn Dan Kemp not to read that first paragraph.
The rules of judicial conduct require him to skip directly to the second paragraph.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/07/2016