Mythbusting JudgesOnMerit.org
June 10, 2008
In a new post, JudgesOnMerit.org protests they only want to take away the people’s right to vote for judges – not governors or legislators, at least at this time. I guess Pennsylvanians are supposed to take comfort from the fact that they’ll still be able to vote for the two-thirds of the government which apparently doesn’t need “merit” to qualify. It is only the one-third of our government, the judicial branch, which is too important to allow the people to express their democratic preference. Where “merit” counts, democracy should be replaced by non-democracy.
But judges, they say, are “different from the other branches of government.” What exactly is the difference? Well, judges are required to act “impartially,” without regard for their personal or ideological points of view, while governors and lawmakers “make promises” to the people when they run for office.
JudgesOnMerit.org, knowingly or not, makes two big mistakes. Their first mistake is to believe that judges do not bring an ideology to their interpretation of law. It may be news to legal special interests that some judges become known as “liberal” and others as “conservative,” not because they are narrow minded but because every judge’s interpretation of law inevitably reflects his or her personal understanding of what the common good requires. It seems, however, that these groups believe the people should have no right to say which point of view they favor.
Their second mistake is their claim, or pretense, that governors and lawmakers are not supposed to do their work of enforcing and making law in light of the good of all – only those of their party. This is absurd and insulting. Indeed, if it were true, it would mean that our democracy cannot endure.
Our nation’s founders such as Washington, Madison, and Jefferson staked our democratic constitutional experiment on the belief that governors, lawmakers, and judges are equally bound to govern for the common good. No doubt there have been some who have disregarded the good of all the people. When that happens, fortunately the people have the right through elections to replace them with better choices. Or at least they will have that right if we can stop JudgesOnMerit.org from ending democratic judicial elections.
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Judicial Elections, Pennsylvania, State Battlegrounds
2 Responses to “Mythbusting JudgesOnMerit.org”
[...] our best efforts, Merit Selection opponents persist in spreading misinformation about what Merit Selection is, how it works and why supporters wish to implement it for [...]
[...] to JudgesOnMerit, democracy is just a “buzzword” – and opponents of secret judicial selection use “pretty language” about it to try to “scare the public” into defeating their [...]