Politics

High Court KOs Spending Limits

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 19, 1999 / 5:41 PM EST / CBS

Ohio's effort to revive election campaign spending limits for candidates seeking to become state judges was rejected Tuesday by the Supreme Court.

The court, without comment, let stand rulings that struck down the limits as unconstitutional interference with free-speech rights.

Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery had urged the justices to consider creating a judicial-elections exception to their landmark 1976 free-speech decision that barred limits on what any candidate for elected office may spend.

The state's appeal argued that efforts to ensure "the impartiality of the judicial system" must be viewed as compelling state interests that trump some candidates' and voters' freedom of speech.

"Judges are different," the appeal said. "For all other elected offices, impartiality is unnecessary, and indeed discouraged. Voters have a right to elect representatives biased toward their viewpoints. But with judges, political-issue bias is unwelcome."

Nationwide, most state judges - about 87 percent of them - are held accountable in elections, either against opponents or in retention votes.

"In light of the special circumstances of promoting the appearance of judicial impartiality and the skyrocketing expenditures in judicial elections, the fundamental reasoning of ... (the 1976 ruling) should be revisited to establish a judicial exception," Ohio's appeal said.

The Ohio Supreme Court in 1995 amended ethical rules for judges to establish spending limits for judicial candidates. The limits ranged from $500,000 for someone seeking to become chief justice of the state's Supreme Court to $50,000 for candidates to a county or municipal court.

The limits were first challenged in a 1996 lawsuit by two trial judges in Cuyahoga County, Ronald Suster and Patricia Cleary. The new rules imposed a $75,000 limit for them.

A federal trial judge struck down the limits, and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld that ruling even though Ohio's top court had amended the limits while the state's appeal was pending. The new limits were population-based, and ranged from $50,000 to $125,000 for elections of general jurisdiction trial judges.

Discounting state officials' arguments that the limits are needed to ensure a judicial candidate is "beholden to no one," the appeals court said it could not see a link between "a spending limitation on a candidate's own money to such an assurance."

"We are hard pressed to discern how the interests of good government could possibly be served by campaign-expenditure laws that necessarily have the effect of limiting the quantity of political speech in which candidates for public office are allowed to engage," the 6th Circuit court said last July.

Ohio's ensuing appeal said the appeals court wrongly had blurred "historic and important distinctions between the judiciary and every other eleted office in our constitutional system."

The appeal was supported in friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in behalf of about half the states.

Lawyers for Suster and Cleary called Ohio's effort "a reaction to popular perception, not sound constitutional principles."

The case is Marshall vs. Suster, 98-737.