The Judge Makers
Once upon a time, a Democratic City Committee endorsement on a candidacy for Common Pleas was golden, because the party’s ward leaders would follow in lockstep with those candidates and get the vote out. That’s still partly true today. Brady, as local head of the party, keeps an ongoing list of potential candidates. You get on the list, you wait your turn — though Brady adjusts the list, depending on the needs of big-time city players like party secretary Carol Campbell, or Ed Rendell, or, at least until recently, Vince Fumo.
But Bob Brady’s list no longer controls who gets elected. Three things shredded his power. In the early ’80s, at a meeting of city African-American leaders, Lucien Blackwell made an impassioned speech: There were 18 spots open for judges that election, and only two of them went to African-Americans. “We’ll never let this happen again!” Blackwell roared — and it hasn’t. Black ward leaders banded together to support minority candidates regardless of what Brady and the party hierarchy wanted to do, which has gone a long way toward balancing the bench racially.
A second change came when Brady ran for Congress in 1997; he needed help from ward leaders, so his control over them slackened. But the third and most important difference has been the infusion of money. Ten years ago, Common Pleas candidates spent, on average, about $100,000 to get elected. Now, led by Erdos, there’s considerably more money in play. Ellen Green-Ceisler spent $160,000; Linda Carpenter, even with that winning ballot position, spent more than $150,000. Nothing makes political players buck leadership like promises of cash, into either their wards or their pockets. It’s called “street money.” The running joke is whether you, a political operative from South or North or West Philly, can pick up enough for a post-election winter trip to the Bahamas. Except it’s not really a joke.
Candidates pay individual wards $1,000 to $2,000 for the privilege of being put on their sample ballots, which ostensibly covers the cost of printing and getting field workers to distribute them, mostly at polls. This is the nuts and bolts of the elective process, since virtually none of us spend the time or know how to check judicial candidates’ qualifications. Your committeeman handing out your ward’s list of preferred lawyers to stick on the bench — why, it’s a service.
These days, the fact that ward leaders listen to consultants instead of Bob Brady is annoying Brady to the point of moral outrage — or what sounds like moral outrage. “The problem I have,” he says, “is that some people can afford to circumvent the system, spend half a million dollars. It’s atrocious, and I don’t understand it.”
What really bothers Brady, of course, is losing control, to the point that he and Vince Fumo stood up a few years ago and said city judges should be appointed, not elected. Calling for a system that would allow them to regain their power made it obvious just how far it had eroded. Brady freely admits — in that way of his that’s simultaneously refreshing and infuriating — that he isn’t any better at vetting the candidates than the voters: “I’m not qualified to tell whether someone is qualified for judge or not,” he says. “They all have law degrees, most are practicing law — I can’t tell you a good one or a bad one.”
