RadiomanATL
Senior Member
Iowa voters oust justices who made same-sex marriage legal - CNN.com
Voters in Iowa chose to remove three high court justices who helped make Iowa the first Midwestern state to permit same-sex marriage.
The vote marks the first time a member of the Iowa Supreme Court has been rejected by the voters under the current system that began in 1962.
Under the voting system in Iowa, each of the three justices up for retention -- Chief Justice Marsha Ternus, David Baker and Michael Streit -- needed simply to get more "yes" votes than "no" votes in the election to be elected for another eight-year term. They faced no opponents. None of the judges raised money for the campaign.
The group wrote on its site that a "special interest group" was "pouring money" into the race, when in the past three decades all of Iowa's judicial campaigns had "combined spending of $0."
And while the justices did not actively campaign to keep their seats, Ternus did give a speech last month that warned against the power of special interest groups -- like the groups that campaigned against the justices. "[They want] our judges to be servants of this group's ideology, rather than servants of the law." Ternus said, according to the Des Moines Register. "They simply refuse to accept that an impartial, legally sound and fair reading of the law can lead to an unpopular decision."