Already the interest in the latest war is tarting to wane…..so I will bow to social convention and start posting on stuff other than the Middle East……

I seems that in some states candidates for judge cannot accept campaign funds……some don’t like that and now they are trying to get SCOTUS to weigh in on this issue……and with our court batch of judges on the court….they could possibly get their way…….

Mother Jones is reporting……..

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could overturn 30 states’ bans on judges personally seeking campaign contributions. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, a county-level judicial candidate was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court in May and forced to pay $1,860 in court costs for signing a fundraising letter during the 2009 election, according to her petition. The court also rejected her argument that the decision violated her First Amendment rights, saying that the state’s ban is constitutional “because it promotes … the integrity of the judiciary and [maintains] the public’s confidence in an impartial judiciary.”

As Williams-Yulee notes, this issue is quite common in that there are hundreds of judicial elections each year. In 2011 and 2012 there were high court elections in 35 states that contested 75 open seats, along with an additional 243 intermediate appellate court races in 29 states. These races are becoming increasingly more expensive: During just those two years, state high court, appellate and lower court judicial candidates raised more than $110 million, according to the National Institute On Money In State Politics (state judicial candidates raised just $83 million total in the 1990s). Justice At Stake, a nonpartisan judicial election watchdog group, points out that 20 states have surpassed records for judicial election spending since 2000. Independent spending on judicial elections is also booming, with more than $24 million being spent in the 2011-12 cycle compared to just $2.7 million a decade earlier.

May I suggest the Americans worry more about this turn of events than the questions before the Court now….this will have long lasting consequences if SCOTUS rules the way I thin they will….if this happens all agendas will be open for partisan BS……