The Game of Judge
Judicial candidate Ellen Green-Ceisler is smart, qualified and determined. But getting elected is still a roll of the dice.
; "THE ELECTION SLIDE: Few question Green-Ceisler's credentials, but getting the party's backing can prove to be an expensive trip through a political maze.")
THE ELECTION SLIDE: Few question Green-Ceisler's credentials, but getting the party's backing can prove to be an expensive trip through a political maze. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
Ellen Green-Ceisler reaches into the cardboard box and shuffles the papers around. She's fantasized about this moment: The paper will find her palm, she'll pull it out, look down. ... In her mind's eye, she's seen a one, two or three so many times that she's no longer even worried about the number. The right slip, she believes, will come to her. Of greater concern is how she'll respond when it does. She's played her daydreams forward to the moment after she draws. The key, she has decided, is humility. She doesn't want to upset her less-fortunate counterparts.
There could be quite a few. At the time of this drawing, which will determine the order of candidates' appearance on the May 15 primary election ballot, 27 people are vying for just four open seats on the Court of Common Pleas. Because voters pay so little attention to judicial elections, and frequently pull the first lever they see, the candidates at the top of the ballot stand a much better chance of getting elected than those at the bottom. The lottery is, therefore, a moment of great tension.
For Green-Ceisler, it is also an occasion of enormous karmic significance. This is her second attempt at procuring a judicial robe; she first tried in 2005, drew a bad ballot spot and finished ninth in a race for eight seats. This was hard to take, because she'd been pretty sure she was qualified.
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Illustration By: Ryan Casey (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
For years, she'd worked in the Police Department's Integrity and Accountability Office, monitoring the department and writing reports about its practices, often against its will. In 2004, she sparked controversy by authoring a scathing study on police misconduct that Commissioner Sylvester Johnson called "wrong," "false" and "disgraceful" (the findings were later confirmed by an independent federal auditor). Her work was fair, thoughtful, independent of political considerations and indicative of an ability to make intelligent recommendations about complex problems — precisely the qualities one looks for in a judge. What's more, Green-Ceisler wanted badly to serve. Her ex-husband, political gadabout Larry Ceisler, remembers that as early as her late 20s, while working as an assistant district attorney, Green-Ceisler dreamed of sitting on the bench. Adjudication, she'd decided, better suited her temperament than advocacy.
In Pennsylvania's absurdist slot machine of justice, however, neither qualifications nor determination necessarily matter.
The papers in the cardboard box are numbered 600 to 660. On the ballot, candidates will appear in ascending order of the numbers they draw today. So, the lawyer who draws 601 is guaranteed to be first on the ballot; 605 would likely have a good spot. 620? You never know.
Green-Ceisler seizes on a piece, her piece. "When you finally grab it, you say, OK, this is the one I was told to grab."
She reads it: 629.
Humility comes easily. Green-Ceisler returns to her seat in Harrisburg's Keystone Building and watches as candidate after candidate draws better numbers than hers. Her friend Linda Carpenter draws the first spot. Some guy who hasn't been a lawyer very long gets a good position. By the time it's all over, she's 19th out of the 27.
Fate has betrayed her.
On her drive home and afterward, walking alone along the Wissahickon, Green-Ceisler ponders dropping out of the race and, more to the point, abandoning the focal ambition of her adult life. All of her superstitions have evaporated now. She knows that her chances of winning are slim, and that running for judge is time-consuming and expensive. Yet she can't quite bring herself to quit.
By early afternoon, she's decided not to take her name off the ballot; she also allows that she "probably will keep attending campaign events." By the next day, she's rediscovered the gambler's mysticism necessary for a Philadelphia judicial campaign.
"I think I've decided," she says, "that 19 is a lucky number for me."
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Two days after the ballot lottery, Green-Ceisler pulls her Ford Escape to a stop on a darkened street in lower North Philly. Back in 2003, when she was still a detested woman amongst the city's police brass, Green-Ceisler was profiled in Philadelphia magazine: A story titled "Soccer Mom in a Bullet-Proof Vest" played up the seeming incongruity of her hard-boiled job and her cautious, suburban-mom persona. It was a fair angle. Her SUV beeps loudly while backing up, the tones increasing in frequency as the vehicle approaches an object behind it.
"I've learned that I've got 6 more inches," a rebellious Green-Ceisler had said when the warning signal reached a crescendo at a different location.
Her life remains incongruous. She's come here tonight to attend a fundraiser in the heavily Latino 19th Ward, far from her home in Chestnut Hill. She speedwalks through a drizzle and into a big building called El Concilio, where's she's greeted by ward leader Carlos Matos. Matos is practically a caricature of a boss in an old-school political machine: Vaguely reminiscent of Tony Soprano (without the crime, presumably), he's big, has a booming voice, is connected — his mother-in-law is City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione — and can turn from icy and intimidating to gregarious and charismatic at the drop of a dime. He switches to this latter state when Green-Ceisler enters.
"Wassup, baby girl?" he cries, reaching out to engulf the 5-foot-2 Jewish mother of two. Green-Ceisler's head is at about the level of the chest hairs curling out of the ward leader's shirt. She smiles; she likes Matos. In 2005, he promised to support her, and actually did.
That said, Green-Ceisler is not here for pleasure. As she hangs up her coat, she'll be approached by a long-haired woman in search of a check — at this fundraiser, candidates don't collect money, they pay, and Green-Ceisler is forking over $250 for the privilege of paying homage to Matos tonight. Then, the candidate will begin to work the room. Often, Green-Ceisler has to psyche herself up before embarking on these handshake journeys. "Almost every time I go out I have to say, 'I have a right to be here. I'm trying to do something good,'" she says.
She hates this. But she can't afford to ignore any piece of what she's come to view as the giant, citywide puzzle.
Because voters pay so little attention to judicial elections, candidates rely on a small network of opinion-makers to assess them and pass their conclusions on to voters. These agents range from big organizations like unions to individual committeepeople influential amongst their neighbors. A candidate's job is to piece together enough endorsements to get elected.
Green-Ceisler had begun work on her personal puzzle back in September, after resigning from her $95,000-a-year job at the Controller's Office. The most basic piece was the Bar Association, which looks at the professional backgrounds of everyone who collected the requisite 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot and gives each a simple "recommended" or "not recommended" rating. The bar says it looks at professional experience, integrity and temperament. This year, it has endorsed 15 candidates for the Court of Common Pleas; green-Ceisler among them.
The next piece is the Democratic City Committee. When voters aren't familiar with candidates, they'll sometimes take cues from their party. Green-Ceisler pursued the Democrats' endorsement unsuccessfully in 2005, and doesn't expect to get it this year, either. "A lot of the people they will endorse are people who have given a lot of their time to the party," she says. She considers this a disappointment: The party's endorsement is indicated on the ballot, and promoted on fliers passed out on election day. But there's an upside to not getting the endorsement, too. The party charges for it: $35,000, ostensibly for printing and labor costs. And the endorsement guarantees nothing. In 2005, the City Committee endorsed 11 candidates for Common Pleas and Municipal Court. Six won and five lost.
In part, this was because of ballot position, which the party can't control. But it was also because the backing of the party does not necessarily bring the backing of party operatives. Many ward leaders act independently when it comes to judicial endorsements, printing their own fliers to distribute at polling places, and charging candidates for the cost.
This phenomenon has led to perhaps the most notorious aspect of our judicial election process: the consultants. In a well-known 2005 story, the Daily News described a meeting held by the industrious consultant Pete Truman. Truman had established a "consulting firm" that claimed to help guide judicial candidates through the election process, but in reality, just bought them access to a team of ward leaders loyal to Truman (Councilwoman Carol Campbell offered a similar service). After paying Truman, judicial candidates were led before an assemblage of ward leaders (including Matos) at the Airport Sheraton, and handed each a check for $1,000 or $2,000, depending on the size of the ward. If a ward leader didn't plan to back a candidate, he was supposed to turn down the check. The story cited a witness who said candidate Beverly Muldrow tried to pass out campaign literature instead of checks, but was jeered. She left the room crying.
Green-Ceisler has chosen not to work with Truman or Campbell. Her plan, instead, is to piece together ward leaders' endorsements on her own. This independence is perhaps more plausible for her than for some other candidates because of her ex-husband. Larry, a longtime political consultant and PR man, was married to Green-Ceisler for nearly 15 years. They have two children together, and remain close: He seems happy to help with her campaign, having loaned her money and helped her to navigate Philly's mucky political waters. In 2005, a number of his allies backed her ("Politics makes strange ex-bedfellows," Ellen quipped to the Daily News at the time).
"A lot of this is based on relationships," she says. "Larry has a lot of relationships with people, and he's helping me."
Making a pitch to a ward leader, or to anyone, really, is an odd process for a judicial candidate, because — and this is a central illogic of the way we select judges, in addition to the fact that no one pays attention to the races — the candidates don't really have platforms. They can't: State law prohibits them from committing to decide a disputed issue in a particular way. You think politics lacks substance? Judicial races are literally politics without the issues.
In light of this, Green-Ceisler tries to make her pitch about qualifications — her work with the police, her time with the District Attorney, her work with the Controller's Office, and how all of it shows fairness and independence. Should someone ask about her judicial philosophy, she tells him that she'll "treat people with respect" and be impartial.
"What ward leaders do is constituent services," she says. Though there are probably some who consider political loyalties when making their endorsements, and others who just sell them off, Green-Ceisler says she believes that most are concerned with who would do the best job. Common Pleas Court includes everything from Family Court to civil and criminal trials, and their constituents could well end up in front of a judge."I don't care what you hear," Green-Ceisler says. "There's a lot of honor among the ward structure still."
In 2005, Green-Ceisler had about 10 ward leaders behind her. Thus far this year, she estimates she has 20 or 25, including some of the big wards that she considers the "Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida" of Philly judicial elections.
She's also put some of the smaller puzzle pieces in place. She's gotten endorsements from several labor unions, and she's hoping to again receive the backing of the Inquirer. (While some candidates deride the Inquirer's endorsement process — which consists of a single questionnaire — as an "essay contest," Green-Ceisler says the paper is key in certain wards. People actually clip out the page and bring it to the polls). Perhaps most meaningful is her endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police. The union declined to support Green-Ceisler in 2005 after her controversial reports. But with the benefit of time, the police have decided that she was looking out for cops' best interests.
"Nobody seemed to know the issues of our members better than she did," says FOP spokesman Gene Blagmond. "She made it real easy."
If the pieces are coming together, though, gathering them has been expensive. Attending fundraisers, printing literature and paying for ward endorsements all cost. And judicial candidates have a hard time raising money, because interest groups rarely fund politicians without platforms. This leaves them with two choices: Take trial lawyers' money, which has, at best, the stink of corruption on it, or fund their campaigns themselves. In the past, some candidates have mortgaged their homes to pursue this latter option.
Two years ago, Green-Ceisler was fortunate to fund her $65,000 campaign with mostly donated money. This time, she expects to receive more endorsements, and will spend nearly double that, about $130,000. She's reluctant, she says, to go back to the same sources for donations, so this time most of the money will be her own. Judges serve 10-year terms and make $135,000 a year, with a good pension. But for anyone not independently wealthy, running for a seat on the bench is a heck of a gamble.
"I'm putting all my savings into this," Green-Ceisler says. "I have a nest egg, and it'll be gone after this election. Any financial stability I have at this point is gone."
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After Green-Ceisler drew her bad ballot position, Larry gave her a pep talk.
"Ellen, we've got to make you a destination lever," he told her. The upside of no one caring about judicial elections, the political operative knew, was that a relatively small number of voters could sway them. In 2005, a candidate named Glenn Bronson, running for the third time, managed to have enough voters looking for his name that he got elected, despite drawing a bad ballot position. "I'm going to make this bad ballot position work to her advantage," Larry says.
Green-Ceisler's job was to get out and sell herself. She got something of a lucky break to this effect when, in early March, the School District released a report she'd completed several months earlier about its disciplinary system. (The district, which had been suspiciously delaying the release, finally came under pressure from the Inquirer after a student attacker broke a teacher's neck at Germantown High School, and the city was flooded with school-violence coverage.)
Usually, judicial candidates have a hard time reaching the public. They find themselves at forums where candidates outnumber voters — "shoveling sand at the beach," as Green-Ceisler says. All of a sudden, she was being invited to TV and radio programs to discuss her findings.
On March 10, Green-Ceisler sat in the lobby of the CBS-3 studios at Fifth and Market streets, waiting to tape a segment of a CW57 public-issues forum called Speak Up. Standing in front of her was the show's producer, Chris Conner. When he invited her on, Conner had advised Green-Ceisler that because of equal-time concerns, her candidacy could not be a topic of conversation. She was trying, with a characteristic lack of suavity, to find out how serious he was about that prohibition.
"When I was on Marty Moss-Coane's show [Radio Times on WHYY], she gave me three plugs," Green-Ceisler said to Conner. "Just so you know." She imitated Moss-Coane describing her as a candidate for the Court of Common Pleas. " That's what she said. Three times."
Green-Ceisler paused and glanced up, then added: "She wasn't uncomfortable with it."
Conner, a polite, soft-spoken producer, looked terrifically uncomfortable. He stammered, fishing for the proper response.
"If she asks me what I'm doing now," Green-Ceisler persisted, "I have to say it."
This, Conner allowed. Sort of.
"If it comes up in that context ... " He trailed off, leaving the matter unresolved.
Were there such a thing as political commandments, one of them would surely be, Thou Shalt Not Go on Television During a Campaign and Fail to Mention Thou Art Running for Office. It was unclear, however, as she walked through the hall into the studio, whether Green-Ceisler would blaspheme.
Speak Up is a simple show: Two people sit in front of a logo and have a conversation. The format suited Green-Ceisler. In responding to questions from host Natasha Brown, she quickly nailed her central points about the district's need to better assess its contracted services. She was so competent, in fact, that while she spoke, one could imagine her mind elsewhere, sorting through her dilemma. On the one hand, the show was about school violence, and she wanted to respect that; on the other, she wanted to be a judge — on Family Court, in fact, where she'd deal with the very population responsible for much of the chaos in schools. Think of the impact she could have in that capacity.
Perhaps what separates the natural politician from the rest of us is that, faced with this choice, he always picks ambition. He justifies it as the advancement of his beliefs, sure; but he sneaks in the talking point, he makes the politically expedient decision. He goes on television and says he's running for office when he's been asked not to.
Green-Ceisler does not. At the bottom of the Speak Up screen, a label identifies the guest as "Ellen Green-Ceisler, Attorney." That's all viewers will know about her.
This is a fairly minor setback, but it speaks to another philosophical problem with how we select judges. We require the candidates to be politicians. But judges aren't supposed to worry about public perception; they're supposed to worry about interpreting the law.
Green-Ceisler is no politician. It's not that she can't speak in public (she's been a courtroom lawyer) or spin something favorably. Frankly, you won't find anyone who gets covered as positively in the press as she does. Rather, Green-Ceisler has no instinct for self-promotion. Her mind just doesn't go there.
Standing outside a mayoral forum, passing out fliers, Green-Ceisler doesn't think to tell a reporter how well her campaign is going, or how qualified she is. Instead, she lets loose with awkward bursts of disclosure. "I'd think more people would recognize the name, but it's just not happening," she says. And later, "You just gotta hope [the fliers] don't end up littered on the floor. These are expensive." Driving in her car on the phone with Larry, she needs to be reminded to promote her endorsements.
She's hassling him about getting to the airport early — "If your flight is at 8:30, gosh, you should be there at ... " — when she gets interrupted. "No, I didn't tell him." She turns. "I got the AFL-CIO endorsement last night."
Perhaps most startlingly, after several days of being tailed, she's asked for a quick bio (she had seemed, to a generalizing eye, to have had an unsurprising middle-class upbringing), and for the first time mentions that she had an abusive, "kind of sociopathic" father who moved the family frequently and abandoned them when Ellen was 14. Ellen's mother had no degree and had never worked, and so had to take minimum-wage jobs; Ellen lived with an aunt on and off, and had to start working to help with the rent at 15. She didn't see her father for 35 years.
Asked whether this story might not be spun, somehow, into a campaign narrative about her desire to sit on Family Court, she looks genuinely surprised.
"You think?" she says. And then, jokingly: "Am I gonna have to pay you for the psychoanalysis now?"
This trait, of course, can be admirable. But in American politics, where people treat biographies like qualifications, it's surprising. What we have in Green-Ceisler is a perfect storm of Philly inanity: a woman who is not a politician, in pursuit of a job that should not be political, desperately trying to survive in a world of politics.
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Sometimes Green-Ceisler thinks back to when she first started voting, and how she decided whom to support for judge.
"I'd walk in and I'd go, hmm. Sometimes I'd know one person, because I'd heard about them, but otherwise I would just kind of look and say, well, what do I do here? I'd pick a Jewish female. I'd try to push a woman.
"Is that a way to elect a judge? Absolutely not. And then I started to feel very uncomfortable with that, like, I don't know, I could be voting for someone who's terrible. So then I just stopped voting for judge." (These days, she votes.)
Judges don't make the sweeping policy changes that get people talking. But they do make decisions momentous for individual citizens — whether you can keep your driver's license, say, or, at Family Court, whether you can keep your child. Our near-arbitrary selection of them should be cause for discomfort.
About the men and women on the bench now, Green-Ceisler will say only, "It's amazing how many good people get through." But in 2005, for instance, Municipal Court Judge Frank Palumbo, who had a recognizable name and a good ballot position, was elected to the Court of Common Pleas despite being "not recommended" by the bar, and having the lowest lawyer approval rating, at 67.1 percent, of any judge seeking election.
At Family Court, where Green-Ceisler hopes to preside, advocates have long complained of judges who start their days at 10 a.m. and seem detached. Candidates don't actually run for Family Court — Common Pleas is split into three divisions, to which judges get assigned — and so Family Court has sometimes been seen as a "dumping ground." Frank Cervone, who runs the Support Center for Child Advocates (SCCA), says the bench is going through something of a golden era now, with a number of quality judges. But when asked what characteristics he looks for in a judge, he cites only that they "want to be there," and have "tolerance for the tensions involved with family law practice."
Not to take Cervone to task, because his standards are a reflection of the bench he's known, but this is a pretty low bar. Even Green-Ceisler, who spent time working under Cervone at the SCCA, and whom he respects, seems qualified only comparatively when you consider that, by her own admission, she's "not an expert" on things like foster care, mentoring programs, child removal and other aspects of the Family Court universe. Wouldn't we ideally be seeking candidates who are truly sentient in their fields, rather than expecting people to learn on the job?
There are other ways to pick judges. One common proposal is to rotate ballot position from division to division, so the lottery drawing isn't so determinate. Another plan would place bar-recommended candidates at the top of the ballot.
The main alternative to judicial elections, though, is "merit selection." Pennsylvania is in a minority of states that elect all of their judges (though most states elect at least some); a group called Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts (PMC) has been pushing for years to change this. It offers a blueprint for selection to statewide courts in which a nominating commission submits names to the governor, who makes judicial appointments subject to Senate confirmation. (The tricky part is determining who sits on the commission; PMC recommends a mix of legislative and executive appointments, and some "public seats" filled by civic organizations.) After an initial term, judges would stand for public retention elections.
There is some political momentum behind this idea. Gov. Ed Rendell recently proposed appointing judges to state appellate courts. This wouldn't affect Philly's local judicial elections, but, argues PMC's Shira Goodman, it would be a first step toward changing the culture of judicial selection statewide. (In 2005, state Sens. Vince Fumo and Anthony Williams co-sponsored a bill that would have allowed Philadelphia officials to appoint Common Pleas and Municipal Court judges. Surprisingly, they received the backing of Mayor Street and party chair Bob Brady. But the idea went nowhere.)
There are those who doubt that the reform would do much good. Opponents of merit selection argue that an appointment process would be at least as political as elections. They imagine smoke-filled rooms where politicos hand judgeships to friends and ideological allies who have never campaigned, and therefore aren't acquainted with the problems of the city. These are valid concerns: New Jersey's appointment process is reputed to be expensive and exclusive (though it lacks a nominating commission). So, the thinking goes, why not leave the decision in the hands of the public? Writing on the blog YoungPhillyPolitics, ward leader Lou Agre argues: "The fact that you think judges should be appointed points to a certain elitism that thinks the elites can choose better than the people."
But this is a false choice. The main problem with judicial elections is not that the people choose badly. It's that the people don't really choose. The politics that should be irrelevant to judicial selection may be inevitable, but they're made worse by the fact that they're conducted under the cover of public indifference.
Pennsylvania is operating under a false premise. The reason we outsource any official appointments — police commissioner, tax assessor, the head of FEMA — to elected representatives is that the public has neither the time nor the inclination to micromanage the government. Judicial selection is no different. This problem could be addressed in a couple of ways: by spending public money to promote elections in which candidates' qualifications are carefully explained (along with a new media commitment to cover them), or by switching to a merit system with strong checks and balances. But it would seem appropriate to adapt to the reality of the situation, and stop making candidates go through an expensive, irrelevant charade.
Sitting in Mount Airy's Trolley Car Diner, drinking a ginger tea that was recommended to her by a member of the Haitian black clergy when she appeared before them with a sore throat, Green-Ceisler reflects on her campaign thus far. She's learned a lot on the campaign trail, and thinks she's a stronger person for the experience. But asked for her verdict on the judicial selection process, she does not equivocate.
"I think it's got to change," she says. "It shouldn't be based on something as arbitrary as picking a number out of a cardboard box. The voters as a general rule don't know who they're voting for. The judges are not in a position to solicit money so that they can get their message and qualifications across. That process alone inherently compromises the integrity of the judiciary, even if the judges are honest."
Like many judicial candidates, she's wary of merit selection. But she's sure that the present system "discourages people" from running (after the ballot lottery, several Common Pleas candidates dropped out) and has little to do with who would make a good judge.
"It's just too important of a position to be left to such chance," she says.
Another slightly unpolitical aspect of Green-Ceisler's persona is the language she uses to discuss her candidacy. When most politicians speak to the press, they use the phrase "if I win" accidentally, and then correct themselves and say, "when I win." At the Trolley Car, Green-Ceisler does precisely the inverse. "When I'm a judge," she says, and then pauses, as if remembering not to jinx herself. "If I'm a judge ... "
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