Well, here’s a revealing Supreme Court decision that tells you all you need to know about what’s wrong with the radical right wing Justices of our Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a judge who accepts campaign contributions from a corporate CEO during his/her reelection campaign must recuse him/herself in a case involving that corporation. From the New York Times:

By a 5-4 vote in a case from West Virginia, the court said that a judge who remained involved in a lawsuit filed against the company of the most generous supporter of his election deprived the other side of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

”Just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when — without the consent of the other parties — a man chooses the judge in his own cause,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the court. . . .

The West Virginia case involved more than $3 million spent by the chief executive of Massey Energy Co. to help elect state Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin. At the same time, Massey was appealing a verdict, which now totals $82.7 million with interest, in a dispute with a local coal company. Benjamin refused to step aside from the case, despite repeated requests, and was part of a 3-2 decision to overturn the verdict.

The wonder is that the company/CEO and judge are not on trial for bribery.

The decision is entirely sensible. (See supporting statement from the Constitutional Accountability Center, which had filed an amicus brief.) You can’t have a fair trial without a judge whose impartiality is beyond question. You can’t gain respect for the administration of justice if a judge appears to accept payments from those involved in the litigation. It’s hard to think of a more important foundational principle to our system of justice.

But the four radical right wing justices don’t think that way. According to Justice Robert’s dissent (Scalia, Alito, and Thomas also dissenting), we should fear [trying to craft] rules that prevent judges from looking like they’ve been bribed by litigants with cases before them:

”It is an old cliche, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease,” Roberts said. He wrote that it is not clear that Blankenship’s money even affected the outcome of the election.

”I would give the voters of West Virginia more credit than that,” he said.

Both Scalia and Roberts said that the ruling would end up undermining confidence in the judicial system, not enhancing it as the majority contended.

So as we continue the confirmation process of Justice Sotomayor, whose main offense appears to be that she’s empathetic to victims of injustice, consider what the radical right is telling America about the views they’d like to see in a Supreme Court Justice:

Shorter conservatives:

1. A fair trial does not require an impartial judge, let alone the appearance of one.

2. We think our courts should be just as corrupt as our legislatures.

3. We think it should be lawful for judges to rule in cases involving their biggest campaign contributors, when those campaign contributors made the contributions knowing their cases were headed for the court.

4. This is called, "strict construction" or not being an "activist" judge or "calling balls and strikes." The Founding Fathers would have approved this.

5. Anyone who disagrees with us suffers from empathy.

6. You were surprised by Bush v. Gore?