Chamber of Horrors

All eyes are on Congressional races, but voters next week will also be casting ballots in hundreds of judges' races that they know almost nothing about. I voted absentee the other day (I'll be in Boston on election day at the annual American Public Health Association meeting), and my eyes glazed over as I stared at a ballot whose last page was filled with judgeship races that I had not seen, much less read, a single story about in the runup to the election.

If we did pay attention to judges' races, we'd quickly discover that the news isn't good. As Public Citizen pointed out in a press release today, the nation's business community has poured millions of dollars into these races to get a judiciary that is friendly to their anti-consumer and anti-worker agenda. But by going over the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's tax returns, Public Citizen discovered that the Chamber failed to report those taxable expenditures to the Internal Revenue Service.

The corporate gambit paid off in the short run. The nation's rightward drift over the past three decades has been fueled in part by a sympathetic judiciary willing to trample on our basic rights, ignore executive overreach, and undermine our economic security.

Abramoff, Ney, Cunningham ad nauseum are history. It's time to put corruption of the judiciary on the political agenda.