The Goodson strategy
It was a strategy that denied Courtney Goodson the chief justiceship of the Arkansas Supreme Court two years ago. We’ll see if it boots her from the court altogether this year.
Here’s how it works: A prominent if strange alliance of liberals, conservatives, lawyers and corporate interests finds Goodson objectionable for unattached and even conflicting reasons.
Liberals resent the way she manipulated the court to delay the gay-marriage case until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled so that she could avoid the issue as an associate justice while she was seeking the chief justiceship. Some disapprove of what they see as political stepping stone implications in her personal history.
Lawyers—many with whom I speak, anyway—lament that the state Supreme Court is a near-dysfunctional place of pettiness, politicization and external sniping. They blame Goodson significantly, though hardly exclusively. They think her marriage to John Goodson, a highly political and rich class-action lawyer, poses too much conflict.
Conservative corporate people don’t like a couple of Goodson’s major pro-plaintiff rulings.
For all those reasons, prominent business people, politicos and lawyers, even former judges, set out two years ago to recruit Courtney Goodson an opponent as she proceeded otherwise unopposed toward the filing deadline as a candidate for chief justice.
They were looking for someone quietly competent with “judge” before his or her name. Judges get to appear on the ballot by that title. There is a pattern by which persons appearing on ballots for judicial office with “judge” before the names beat candidates who are lawyers, perhaps paragons of lawyerly excellence, but not persons who may put “judge” before their names on the ballot.
Circuit Judge Dan Kemp of Mountain View was not the first recruiting choice of these anti-Goodson solicitors two years ago. But he, when willing, would do nicely.
He got strong support in the Bar, from the chamber of commerce, from liberals, from conservatives, even the Pulaski County Republican Committee.
Then came the attack advertising on Goodson from dark-money sources—presumably outside corporate ones.
It’s not every day a candidate can win the reform vote of liberal-minded people and the family-values support of conservative-minded people while also reaping the benefit of secret big-money attacks on his opponent from what appear to have been national pro-corporate groups.
So, Kemp won big, and is now chief justice of an unmanageable court. Goodson, meantime, went safely back to the remaining two years of her term as an associate justice on that court. And then she filed for re-election to that associate-justice seat this year. Quickly, an opportunistic extremist and near-libertarian lawyer, David Sterling, filed as a candidate against her. I could most efficiently size him up by saying he ran against Leslie Rutledge in the Republican attorney general’s primary in 2014 and managed to make her the moderate.
So, that same loosely aligned and contradictory group began looking for a third candidate, a Dan Kemp redux, a competent and inoffensive type who could run as “judge.”
Kenneth Hixson of Fayetteville was not the first choice, but he’ll do.
He is a judge on the Arkansas State Court of Appeals. He was an insurance-defense litigator before that. He grew up in a working-class family in Paris in Logan County. He is a Baptist Sunday School teacher and a longtime Republican voter who says he laments the politicization of judging that began—in his view—with Democratic opposition to the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Robert Bork in the late 1980s.
He is a personable fellow but not one I would normally warm to politically. Goodson’s political views might be closer to mine if she had any consistently evident and non-expedient ones.
Hixson is running on what I call a “make the Arkansas Supreme Court respected again” theme. He told me at lunch the other day that he doesn’t blame Goodson personally, but that this Supreme Court has not functioned in a respect-earning way and that all we can do about it is make good decisions on changing the court as the seven justice positions come up one by one.
Hixson told a Republican group the other night that this Supreme Court gets entirely too personal— catty, member toward member—in its opinions and dissents.
He also said he’d heard that the court no longer holds its conferences—its revered private sessions for deciding cases—in person, but through teleconferences from remote locations.
I’m told that is an overstatement. Remote teleconferencing is now available. Some judges have availed themselves of it occasionally and for legitimate reasons, maybe a couple more frequently than others, and maybe some less legitimately than others.
A first round of voting will take place in the May 22 primary. A runoff would seem possible with three candidates.
It’ll come down to whether Kenneth Hixson can recreate that old Dan Kemp magic.
The magic phrase is, “I’m not Courtney Goodson (or David Sterling).”
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.