Big out-of-state money pours into Missouri judicial race

The scales of American justice are supposed to be balanced. Judicial candidates’ campaign war chests, however, don’t have to be.

Consider the largely rural Cole County, Mo., circuit judge race, which received a financial jolt of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a national conservative group seeking to influence state-level races.

In the only contested judicial race in Missouri, Brian Stumpe, the Republican candidate, is running to unseat 20-year Democratic incumbent Pat Joyce. Cole County has a little more than 50,000 registered voters, but it includes the state government in Jefferson City.

As a result, Cole County circuit judges often hear cases of significant statewide importance, which might explain why the candidates’ coffers have bulged with cash. (One of Joyce’s rulings two years ago, for example, effectively stamped out a 2012 statewide ballot initiative backed by conservatives that aimed to replace income taxes with sales taxes.)

In this year’s race, Joyce has had plenty of donors on her side, having raised almost $100,000, according to campaign disclosures filed this week. Her disclosures show dozens of donations from professionals in Cole County and across the state, many of them attorneys, at least partially thanks to Missouri ethics rules that allow lawyers to donate to judges who might handle their cases.

At the start of this month, Stumpe, by comparison, appeared to be running on financial fumes, with his campaign more than $12,000 in debt. Since then, he’s gotten just seven more contributions from supporters -- but one of them was for $100,000.

It came from the Republican State Leadership Committee, an influential conservative political nonprofit that also spent more than $150,000 on more than 100 third-party television ads in opposition to Stumpe’s opponent.

“Meet liberal Judge Pat Joyce,” starts one tye-dyed ad created by the committee, with trippy music thumping in the background. “Radical environmentalists think Joyce is so groovy, and the lawyers funding her campaign do too.”

The partisan tone of the third-party ad and the mailers in the race came as a bit of a surprise to Joyce, who protested in an open letter to her supporters on Sunday.

“The large sums of money being spent by and for Brian Stumpe are staggering,” Joyce wrote. “The vast majority of his support is being provided by a person or persons unknown, and that should be alarming to citizens of this county who believe judges should be fair and impartial.”

Missouri’s judicial rules require candidates to run with “dignity” and to “review and approve” all campaign materials for their race.

Stumpe, a Jefferson City prosecutor, has distanced himself from the negativity of the Republican State Leadership Committee’s groovy ads.

“Those come from organizations that I cannot tell not to do that, so my hands are tied in those areas -- those are not from me,” Stumpe told local radio station KWOS on Monday, adding, “I’ve never once said anything about my opponent -- never said anything negative about her. None of the money I’ve used is for attack ads. I’ve never once mentioned my opponent’s name.”

The ads are from “third-party money that I cannot control,” added Stumpe, who could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

A statement from the Missouri GOP praised his candidacy and criticized Joyce as a “liberal Democrat” who has been “plagued by media attention on her acceptance of campaign contributions from lawyers appearing before her.”

Joyce’s campaign disclosures identify her donors by profession. That makes it easy for opponents to criticize contributions from Missouri attorneys and raise the question of conflicts of interest.

By contrast, the donations from the Republican State Leadership Committee make the direct lines of influence harder to track. Stumpe’s donation came from the group’s Missouri-specific committee, which received its donation from the national committee’s pool of funds.

The national group’s biggest donors include traditionally conservative players like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industries, as well as tobacco company Reynolds American.

A spokeswoman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, Jill Bader, told the Los Angeles Times in an email that the donation came as part of the group’s “Judicial Fairness Initiative” to elect “down ballot, state-level justices across the country whose backgrounds and philosophies best reflect the will of the voters. Too often voters are starved of information about judicial candidates up for election and forced to vote completely in the dark.”

In an April announcement, the group said that “the judicial branch has frequently had a chilling effect for those focused on conservative, free market solutions. Judicial activism is slowing economic growth, threatening liberties and costing citizens dearly.”

Big campaign spending, as well as outright election mudslinging, is normally associated with the legislative and executive branches; the nation’s judicial system often follows a less openly political line, with many bench seats coming with life terms so that judges don’t have to directly face the pressures of popular will.

Missouri’s judges enter office through a hybrid system. The state’s supreme court, appeals court and circuit judges in the largest counties get vetted and selected by a nonpartisan commission.

But the state’s other circuit courts, including Cole County’s, run in partisan elections, allowing the Republican State Leadership Committee’s financial intervention.

Last week, the judicial advocacy group Justice at Stake released a report saying that judicial candidates and outside groups had spent at least $9.1 million on television ads, with political parties and outside groups funding 63% of the total ad buys since January.

“Dark money and hardball politics are turning judicial campaigns into auctions, and judges are trapped in the middle, pressured to answer to donors and supporters who appear before them in court,” the group’s executive director, Bert Brandenburg, said in a statement. “Every state that elects judges needs to take steps to keep cash out of the courtroom.”

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