Cheese is getting expensive
"Big Political Cheese" got its name in honor of all those Cheeseheads who love a little politics with their lives in America's Dairyland. But that political cheese is getting more and more expensive. The latest report studying state Supreme Court elections across the country shows that spending on those races doubled in the past decade.
Seriously. Until recently, who gave a rat's ass about state Supreme Courts? It would be convenient to blame John Grisham for demonstrating how easy it would be to rig high courts to favor corporate malfeasance as he did in "The Appeal," but he didn't show off a tactic that others later exploited... his was Art already imitating Life; by the time his book came out in 2008 special interests were well on their way to spending over $200 million on state supreme court races between 2000 and 2009.
Wisconsin, to its credit, gets special mention for being one of a handful of state's to do something about this by making the public funding option more competitive vs. slopping at the special interest trough.
Democratic legislators, unfortunately, had the "Two" of their "One-Two" election reforms temporarily blocked last week by our own Fake Supreme Court. You know, the one with a majority of justices bought and paid for by corporate special interests. On an unsurprising 5-4 vote, the Corporate Justices set aside rules that would have required special interest groups to do what every political candidate has to do: tell us who's paying for you. Voters have the right to see who's written checks to every politician, yet you have no right to know who's behind all those shadowy groups like "Wisconsin Victory Fund" or "United for Growth" or all those other bullshit names on commercials that smear and lie and... win elections.
Under the current idiotic rule, these groups can say "Call Candidate Jones and tell him blah blah blah," and everyone KNOWS this is an election ad because they only run right before elections... not when legislatures and Congress is actually in session. But because it doesn't say VOTE FOR or VOTE AGAINST Candidate Jones, the courts have said it's not REALLY a political ad, so voters aren't allowed to know the names of the people whose contributions paid for that ad.
Make sense? Of course not. Unless you got on the State Supreme Court because of sleazy ads bought by anonymous donors that fooled enough voters into thinking your opponent really did kick puppies or served on a Death Panel. Then the current system makes perfect sense. And so even more big money will needed to enjoy a slice of political cheese.
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Ironically, tragically, the price Wisconsin farmers are getting for Real cheese is still woefully low... most likely because of big money that's tough to control between corporate food processors and commodity markets. Not that Wall Street didn't need reform, but there's another area tainted by big corporate bucks at the expensive regular Wisconsin families.
