February 15, 2010 11:47 PM UTC

A "Tough Vote"--Context, Please?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Can somebody explain to us how this Denver Post story even got written?

Judicial-retention elections are traditionally quiet, noncontroversial affairs that barely get attention before Election Day.

But a series of decisions made by the Colorado Supreme Court over the past decade has energized opponents of four justices who will be up for retention this fall, including Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey.

Critics say the majority of the justices’ rulings on property taxes, eminent domain and congressional redistricting have violated the state’s constitution or are clearly partisan.

“This Supreme Court is arguably the most partisan Supreme Court in all of the country, and they have a special knack for redefining English words to suit what they need,” said Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, a think tank in Golden that describes itself as nonpartisan. “If some of them do not lose their seat, then the retention system is an absolute joke.”

That’s the word from today’s lengthy infomercial feature story on the efforts of Jon Caldara, John Andrews and some new face they’ve put up for the latest iteration of their perennial quest against the state judicial branch. If you read this story uncritically, you might actually get the idea that there’s a hope in hell of this newest anti-judge campaign being successful.

But that’s not what the clear history of Caldara’s and Andrews’ repeated ballot-initiative assaults on “politically activist judges” indicates. In 2006, Andrews’ Amendment 40, dubbed the “Limit the Judges” initiative, was defeated by a fourteen-point margin. Despite the furious response by Caldara and some other conservatives to Supreme Court rulings they consider ‘flawed’ (meaning the Court didn’t rule the way they liked), retention elections are just not politically controversial affairs–and the repeated attempts to politicize judicial retention by conservative activists are widely disdained in the legal community.

The short answer? This is a fringe campaign, run by fringe perennial usual suspects, destined to end in failure like all such fringy perennial campaigns do. Before we’re willing to entertain this idea that any of these justices face a “tough vote,” like this Post story beckons, we’d like to see some evidence of more than the discontent Andrews will pack to his grave regardless.