Tonight Friday, February 19, PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal will air a story about the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance ruling. Moyers’ report will include a lengthy excerpt from "Justice for Sale," a 1999 Frontline documentary produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The documentary focuses on the impact of campaign contributions on the judicial election process.

In “Justice for Sale,” Moyers interviews Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee, and Justice Stephen Breyer, a Democratic appointee, at length because they both expressed—in a bi-partisan statement—their deep concern about the threat to judicial independence and integrity posed by campaign contributions in state judicial elections.

In the interview, Kennedy states:

“In part, it's because the campaign process itself does not easily adapt to judicial selection. Democracy is raucous, hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble. This is a difficult world for a jurist, a scholarly, detached neutral person to operate within. Now, when you add the component of this mad scramble to raise money and to spend money, it becomes even worse for the obvious reason that we're concerned that there will be either the perception or the reality that judicial independence is undermined.”

Kennedy’s 1999 statements about judicial campaigns reveal the deep divide between his concern for the negative impact of contributions on judicial campaigns and his opinion earlier this year in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which erased two of the court's precedents and decades of legislative restrictions on corporate and special interest spending in political campaigns.

Check your local listings to atch the entire program.