Does “merit selection” – where lawyers meet in secret to decide who wears the black robes – take politics out of judicial appointments? Not according to Paul Jacob, who runs Missouri’s “merit” plan through the wringer in an excellent piece in Human Events and shows just how political this allegedly non-political system can be.

Jacob calls Missouri’s process “an insider game, a stacked deck,” which of course it is. The Missouri Bar chooses three members of the state’s seven-member judicial nominating commission, but the state’s chief justice is also a member, giving the Missouri Bar a virtual hammerlock on judicial nominations. As Jacob writes:

“The assumption that the Bar Association is a public service group with a disinterested agenda, unaffected by biases and exempt from corrupting influences, is hard to maintain with a straight face….It is far more reasonable to argue that the Bar is the last group one wants in charge of a judicial selection process, rather than the primary group. It is a guild, and its interests can be as antagonistic to the public interest as any group’s can possibly be.”

In 2007, the commission sent three nominees to Gov. Matt Blunt, all of whom were activist judges who didn’t reflect Gov. Blunt’s views or the people who elected him. As part of the vetting process, Jacob writes, the commission “grilled” nominees about such non-judicial issues as their views on the Adam Smith Foundation, a group that calls for changing the state’s judicial selection system.

It’s natural that lawyers want to control who will sit in judgment of state laws, but it’s hardly democratic to give one special interest group – even one with as lofty a view of itself as the legal profession – all that power. Far better, as Jacob proposes, to scrap secret selection and put the people back in charge.