Junkets for judges

For the last three years, campaign finance reform has been at the top of the nation’s good government agenda. While all the attention has been focussed upon the influence of money on the White House and Congress, its corrosive effect upon the third branch, the Judiciary, has gone largely unnoticed.

Thankfully, not entirely unnoticed. Hard money, soft money PACs and all the rest of the electoral swag has gotten the headlines, but exposing the systematic attempt to sway judges through luxury vacations has been the work of the Community Rights Counsel, a little-known but highly diligent Washington-based public-interest group.

CRC has investigated, catalogued and brought much-needed daylight to a situation that, though nominally legal, is simply unconscionable: Every year, nearly 100 federal judges from throughout the country spend a week or more being ”educated” in seminars held at swank golf resorts and scenic dude ranches with corporations and pro-business special interests picking up the tab.

CRC first revealed this unacceptable situation in 1998. Its scathing and thoroughly documented report last year (”Nothing for Free: How Private Judicial Seminars are Undermining Environmental Protections and Breaking the Public Trust'”) detailed case after case in which a judge’s education/vacation led to favorable rulings from the bench. Ten of the last decade’s most dramatic departures from established precedent followed these junkets. In six cases, the judges attended a seminar while the case was pending. In one, a judge voted to uphold an environmental law, attended a seminar, came back and switched his vote. A hidden-camera report from Arizona golf resort aired two weeks ago on ABC’s ”20-20” – with graphic images of judges relaxing poolside on the special-interest dime – should bring this issue the broader attention it deserves.

The junkets are not illegal, but they are ethically wrong. The only possible defense is that judges, like many other professionals, require continuing education to keep current, but that defense simply does not stand up in the court of public opinion or pass the straight-face test. American taxpayers already fund an extensive educational program for the judiciary, with courses and seminars held throughout the country. The difference is that the taxpayers’ program is done in classrooms, not clubhouses.