Lawyers pay for defying campaign tax
My column today:
You don't need a law degree to understand what Greensboro attorney James H. Jeffries III thinks about the surcharge on his State Bar dues.
"You may have this $50 when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers," he wrote to L. Thomas Lunsford II, secretary of the organization that governs the legal profession in North Carolina.
Jeffries won't be cold and dead, but his defiance will kill his legal practice in North Carolina before the end of the month. And he won't be alone. Dozens of lawyers are heading for the same fate. ...
Blame judicial campaign financing, a relatively new creation of the state legislature that, it's safe to say, isn't quite working out as intended.
The original purpose was to create a public fund for candidates running for statewide judicial offices so they wouldn't have to rely on private donations, largely from lawyers and special-interest groups. Money would be generated by taxpayers designating $3 on their income-tax return and voluntary contributions from attorneys. Participating candidates would receive a uniform sum of money and abide by spending limits, putting them all on a level playing field.
So much for bright ideas.
In reality, few taxpayers and lawyers agreed to play along. So the rules were changed. Taxpayers still can authorize $3 for the judicial campaign kitty, but lawyers are required to pay $50 a year. In addition, the state's General Fund is tapped to meet extra expenditures. Yet, some judicial candidates choose to raise their own funds anyway.
Rusty Duke, a Superior Court judge running for chief justice, opted out. His opponent, sitting Chief Justice Sarah Parker, is participating. She received $216,650 from the state but, because Duke raised more than that, the state kicked in another $54,594 to catch Parker up.
At that point, Duke told me last week, he stopped trying to raise any more. Every dollar he added was helping Parker as much as himself.
Last year, Duke and Barbara Jackson, a judge on the N.C. Court of Appeals, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state's judicial campaign finance system. To date, the action hasn't gone very far.
Among other things, they object to the $50 surcharge, which they say forces them, as lawyers, "to support participating candidates with whom they ideologically disagree, including their opponents."
Interviewing Parker last week, I failed to elicit her opinion on the subject. "Everybody's free to complain," was the most I could get.
Complaints by Jeffries and other refuseniks, however, are anything but free. He's going to pay a price for telling the Bar Association (Correction: Bar, not Bar Association), in a Sept. 11 letter: "This extortionate and selective tax to support candidates for judicial office in general elections is so manifestly illegal and unconstitutional that I am amazed a lawyers' organization would try to enforce it with a straight face."
In an answer dated Sept. 18, Lunsford gave no hint of a smile: "While I appreciate your strong feelings ... I must advise you that your failure to pay the amount owed will in all likelihood result in your suspension as an active member of the State Bar, rendering you ineligible to practice in this state."
Similar warnings have been sent to "dozens" of attorneys, Lunsford said Monday. Their day of reckoning will arrive Oct. 20 before the Council of the North Carolina State Bar.
The Bar doesn't have a choice, Lunsford added. It was given a legislative mandate to collect $50 annually from each of its 22,000 members and forward the proceeds to the State Board of Elections. "It's not something we asked for but ... we're bound to do it," he said.
Jeffries, who's 72, insists he won't back down. His stand on principle is admirable, but it's a rotten way to end a long legal career.
Where's the fairness? No one would tax teachers to fund school board campaigns and kick them out of their classrooms if they refused to pay.
Public financing of elections should be supported by the willing, not the coerced.
No one should have his license to practice his profession yanked from his "cold, dead fingers" for such a senseless reason.
Comments (6)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
Semper Fi, Col. Jeffries!
Posted on October 4, 2006 10:28 AM
I agree that it was rotten of the legislature to levy this stealth tax. If Mr. Jeffries’s protest did end his legal career (and I hope it doesn't), it is a pretty glorious way to go out. Most of us ingloriously bent over, like our Bar, and just submitted to this extortion as a cost of doing business. I applaud Mr. Jeffries and the other protesters for pushing the point at some cost to themselves.
Posted on October 4, 2006 12:10 PM
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical."--Thomas Jefferson
Posted on October 4, 2006 7:31 PM
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical."--Thomas Jefferson* Wendell Sawyer
Sorted confirmes Rory Blake's election fears
Posted on October 4, 2006 8:30 PM
Correcting a mistake, thanks to this from Russell Rawlings, posted with his permission:
Doug,
I enjoyed reading your item on Jim Jeffries. Unfortunately, you incorrectly stated that Jim was going to pay a price for what he told the "Bar Association."
It was indeed the N.C. State Bar, as you stated elsewhere, and not the North Carolina Bar Association to which he has written.
Russell Rawlings
Director of Communications
North Carolina Bar Association
My apologies to the Bar Association for mixing it up in one reference with the State Bar. They're separate organizations with completely different functions.
Posted on October 16, 2006 4:59 PM
My perception of this legislation is that its purpose is to give judges freedom from the abhorrent practice of obtaining campaign funds from identified lawyers who then are advocates in their courtrooms. I contribute willingly to this fund and applaud the effort.
My perception also is that the quote from Jefferson is taken out of context, in that he was opposing establishment of a state religion when he said:
"fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness;"
Posted on October 16, 2006 5:57 PM