After trying to explain why we should be skeptical of political accusations, On the Media goes full ad hominem, saying that a group attacking a judge for being soft on crime has, IN THE PAST, taken money from the Koch brothers, the implication being "Koch brothers = case closed." I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that "soft on crime" accusations generally fall apart upon examination (including this one). But instead of fully explaining the principle of ex post facto relevant in this case, a tenuous connection to the Koch brothers is provided. Similarly, in a later segment, the show declines to attempt an adequate explanation of Gamergate, instead pretty much saying that it's a bunch of loser gamer geeks against all women, aided by right-wing personalities. If you're not going to explain what something is - especially if most of your listeners don't know about it - don't bother covering it, because it makes the show sound like the type of media hackery it was founded to criticize.

In a speech that I presented to my Toastmasters club several years ago, I argued against the popular election of judges. Thank you, OTM, for reviving my interest in this topic.

Sorry; "WNYC", not "WNET."

Okay, Bob. I am one of those people who, when he hears a story like this, is likely to read the actual report. Because when I hear about a report like this one getting the kind of wall to wall coverage that NPR and WNET specialize in (where an NPR listener can hear about this story from The Takeaway on Wednesday, and OTM on Friday, and from the ACS' own website, and from the Brennan Center's website, and every other liberal outlet that is operating off their own sources of 'dark money' to use your own term).

Anyway, I was struck by a few paragraphs from the report with which I actually agreed:

"The last 20 years have marked a new era of contentious politics and exploding spending in the once sleepy world of judicial elections. Before the 1990s, judicial elections were low-key affairs, attracting little campaign spending and often less attention from voters. The very few exceptions to this pattern, including two aggressive campaigns in the 1980s that used the death penalty as a wedge issue to oust justices in California and Tennessee, were viewed as outliers by most observers.

"But beginning in the 1990s, and accelerating in almost every election cycle since, judicial elections have become more competitive and contentious, and campaign spending on these elections has skyrocketed. Incumbent judges almost never lost their reelection bids during the 1980s, but by 2000 their loss rates had risen higher than those of congressional and state legislative incumbents.3"

Those words from the report are almost certainly true in my observation as an attorney working in litigation in a state (Michigan) where the authors of the report mistakenly listed us as having "partisan" elections. (Our judges run on a non-partisan ballot, and only Supreme Court nominees get nominated at state party conventions, to then run as non-partisans on a non-partisan ballot.)

In any event, the new wave in spending on state supreme court elections predates the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC by 20 years. And there's a simple reason for that. It is in the last 20 years that the judicial system across the nation, state by state, have confronted legislatively-enacted tort reform. And the plaintiffs' bar of tort lawyers has ramped up their efforts to oust conservative judges who might uphold such laws.

Everywhere that states have reverted to appointive (a/k/a "Missouri plans") systems for installing appellate judges, those states have seen decisions move measurably in the direction of more pro-lawyer, pro-liberal social policies.

It is just so typical of OTM and public radio to trumpet this report in exactly the way we see in this segment. Just as it's impossible to imagine OTM ever doing the same with a report on the same subject from the Federalist Society:

https://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/the-case-for-partisan-judicial-elections