ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) – A politically active state judge, who flew to Florida in late 2000 to help battle for George W. Bush during the presidential election recount, should be removed from office for hitting up lawyers to give to a defense fund for him, a state commission recommended Friday.

While state Supreme Court Justice Thomas Spargo has 30 days to ask New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to review the recommendation from the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, his lawyer, E. Stewart Jones Jr., said there would be no appeal. Spargo was accepting removal from the $136,700-a-year judgeship, Jones said.

“I think it’s a dark day for the civil justice system,” said Jones.

“We’ve lost a good judge,” he added.

The Republican judge, reached at his chambers in Albany, declined to comment on the commission’s actions.

The commission said Spargo and friends inappropriately pressured lawyers with cases before the judge to contribute to a defense fund created to help pay for Spargo’s battle against the state commission.

“By soliciting funds from lawyers with cases pending before him, Judge Spargo exploited his judicial office for personal benefit,” said Robert Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator. “Ironically, this misconduct, which grew out of the judge’s effort to stop our investigation of other charges against him, was far more serious than the original complaints.”

The watchdog commission also took Spargo to task for giving out $5 gift coupons for gas and coffee, and buying pizza and drinks for potential voters, when he was running for town justice in 1999 in the Town of Berne near Albany. He was elected to state Supreme Court, New York’s major trial court, in 2001.

Spargo was also criticized by the commission for accepting Albany County’s district attorney-elect as a client of his law practice in 2000 even though as town justice Spargo presided over cases brought by the District Attorney’s office. And, the commission said, Spargo should not have been a featured speaker at a Conservative Party fundraising event in Monroe County in 2001.

The commission dismissed a complaint about Spargo’s Florida activity on behalf of Bush, a trip that included his taking part in a nationally televised demonstration. One of the commissioners voting to dismiss that charge, Manhattan lawyer Richard Emery, wrote that Spargo’s “partisan political activities in Florida are protected by his First Amendment rights, notwithstanding his part-time judgeship.”

“The Spargo case is a sad tale and, at the same time, a paradigm for what is wrong with our adversarial elective system for selecting judges,” Emery added in arguing that New York move to an appointed system for selecting all its state judges.

Emery, in his own opinion attached to the commission’s ruling, noted that Spargo got in real trouble because he and his friends started the defense fund after his legal bills had climbed to $140,000 fighting what turned out to be the more minor charges the commission was considering.

“His tragic overzealousness can only be characterized as a self-inflicted wound,” Emery wrote. “The story is not pretty.”

But Emery’s toughest language was saved for the state’s system of having elected state Supreme Court judges.

“Judicial candidates cannot even anonymously participate in a phone bank, though they can publicly buy tickets to, and attend, political party functions,” Emery wrote.

“This baroque dichotomy between their sublime aspirations of judicial excellence and the ridiculous rules to which they have to conform while they pirouette to the demands of politicians and titans of the bar must bend the minds of the best and idealistic judicial candidates like a pretzel,” Emery wrote. “We are destroying the very institution we are trying to save.”

Before joining the bench, Spargo was considered one of the state’s top election-law lawyers and Jones said he expected his client would return to the election-law specialty.

Spargo had defended his actions as protected by the U.S. and state constitutions. In November, a mid-level state appeals court ruled against Spargo and said the commission can punish judges who violate rules governing political conduct.