One can make many solid criticisms of Courtney Goodson, who seeks to rise from associate justice to chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
I've endeavored diligently to make all of them.
But for an out-of-state conservative group that seeks damage caps, pro-business rulings and so-called tort reform to call Goodson a liberal stooge of President Barack Obama, as is the case with fliers arriving in homes across the state last week ... well, if only it were remotely true.
Alas, it's utter and egregious nonsense, and the offending outside group, the arch-conservative Judicial Crisis Network, surely knows it.
If the group has studied Goodson at all, as it plainly has, then it knows she spends her time as a justice finessing politically perilous issues. It knows that she has tested the prevailing conservative Republican wind that blows across Arkansas and thrown herself into it.
The outside group cites the state Supreme Court's unanimous overturning of the legislative act requiring voter identification. The law plainly exceeded voting requirements as laid out in the state Constitution, which was the basis for the 7-to-0 ruling to overturn it.
Even at that, the ever-political Goodson, trying to attend to her electoral ambition amid the inconvenience of justice, whipped out a concurring opinion. In it she wrote that she was joining the majority only on procedural grounds--that the bill should have been passed by a two-thirds legislative majority. It was her political signal to Republicans.
But the national right-wing group alleges that Goodson, by joining her six associates in an unavoidable ruling, conspired to let illegal immigrants vote and impose Obama's leftist agenda.
The charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and deplorable and morally bankrupt.
What the national right-wing group is up to, I think, is twofold: One, it legitimately worries about Goodson because, after all, she is married to a super-rich and politically hyperactive class-action lawyer whose methods are widely disparaged. But, second, and mostly, it wants to send a message to anyone who intends to become, or try to remain, a Supreme Court justice in Arkansas. That message is to veer hard to the pro-business line, and against trial lawyers and working folks, unless you want to experience the same slime Goodson is getting.
It all has very little to do with Goodson's opponent in the chief justice race, Circuit Judge Dan Kemp of Mountain View.
Kemp's main obligation is to do what Associate Justice Robin Wynne coldly and sadly would not do two years ago.
That is disavow the outrageous smear being visited on his opponent by alien snipers.
You might remember that Wynne was opposed for the Supreme Court by Tim Cullen, who came under attack in television commercials from a mystery group accusing him of being a pedophile, practically. In truth, Cullen merely had been assigned by a federal appeals court to prepare a perfunctory appeal brief for a man facing child-molestation charges.
To this date no one knows who those masked assassins were. No one knows why they would spend large sums to engage in a cowardly anonymous smear against a wholly innocent man who probably was going to lose anyway, considering that he didn't have "judge" before his name on the ballot--like Wynne, at the time a member of the state Court of Appeals.
What we do know is that Wynne wouldn't disavow the smear. He remained silent. He valued the practical advice of his political consultant more than the principles of fairness, relevance and accountability that are so important to the court and to justice.
Wynne won, 52 percent to 48 percent. I and others believe he'd have won by a bigger margin if he had risen to the occasion of fairness rather than hold himself hostage to a political consultant's ever-tactical advice.
So the relevant question was whether Kemp would react, and, if so, how.
He did so ... adequately.
He performed better than Wynne, which means better than nothing.
On Thursday Kemp put a statement on his Facebook page saying he had become "deeply concerned" by outside groups practicing "political gamesmanship."
"Let me be clear," he wrote. "I do not believe there is any place in our judiciary for this type of politics. I firmly reject it."
So Kemp passed the test with a B or B-minus. A greater expression of moral outrage would have been appropriate and earned an A.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that we should stop electing appellate judges on the basis of such polluted dialogue and whether "judge" appears by their name on the ballot.
A system of merit selection of prospects by a committee composed of lawyers and others, from which the governor would make nominations, which the state Senate would confirm, and with appointees standing on the ballot for up-or-down continuation after one term--I've not come across anything better, or nearly as sound.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/21/2016