After fabricating nightmarish tales of a Hungarian Puppet Master who controls the media and the banks and topples nations in his pursuit of tyrannical power, Fox News is now advancing the assertion that George Soros is trying to buy America’s courts.
You’ve got to hand it to Fox – they have managed to assemble almost every anti-Semitic slur against Jews into the persona of a single man. Soros, by their estimation, fulfills the racist stereotypes of Jewish dominance of money and media, and now they add legal shysters to the mix. And note that this is actually Fox News, not the rabidly partisan Fox Nation, who is propagating this vile perversion of journalism.
The substance of the controversy involves reported donations to legal reform groups who advocate “merit selection” of judges rather than elections. Many states already use merit selection which, proponents say, takes politics out of the judicial system so that judges don’t have to raise funds or mount campaigns to retain their seats. Elections open up the judiciary to judges pandering to contributors or partisan voter groups rather than staying focused on the neutral application of the law.
The Fox article is based on a report that even Fox’s research debunks. The study by Colleen Pero asserts that Soros has spent $45,000,000 on this issue. A merit selection advocate says the amount is closer to $2,000,000. And Fox itself reported that they could only find $5,000,000, or about 11% of Pero’s figure.
But Pero’s analysis misses the mark on an even more fundamental basis by asserting that if judges are picked by committee it will give left-wing judges the upper hand. How so? The committees already in place are composed mostly of lawyers and former judges chosen by state representatives and governors. That means there is just as much opportunity for the judiciary to be stacked by conservatives as liberals. Ideally the selection committee would be constructed in a way that prohibits partisan influence.
Since the truth is that merit selection would give conservatives just as much potential influence over the process as liberals, why are they so adamantly opposed to the notion? Simple. They prefer a process that allows them to funnel their abundant funds from rightist activists like the Koch brothers into campaigns so that they are the ones who are buying the judges. If Soros actually did want to stack the courts he would line up with right and support judicial elections where he could throw money at liberal candidates. But Soros is advocating a position that would actually give him less influence.
These facts, however, don’t interrupt the relentless Fox News machine’s unsupportable allegations and twisting of the debate to falsely portray Soros as the one manipulating the process. And Fox deftly maneuvers their political advocacy in a manner that insults Jews along with the intelligence of their viewers.
