No Merit
August 25, 2008
In a follow-up on its August 14 editorial, the Wall Street Journal brings out more guns against the plan by the American Bar Association and other George Soros-funded groups like Justice at Stake to end state judicial elections and allow lawyer-dominated panels to decide who sits on the bench.
Far from taking “politics” out of the courts, “merit” selection schemes just move the politics into the backroom, out of the public eye. Using Missouri as an example, the Journal notes:
Though the Missouri Plan is supposed to keep politics out of the process, it has instead transferred power from voters to state bar associations and legal groups that control the judicial commission. The result is a system that’s contentious and opaque – and has tipped the state courts steadily to the left.
Of course, tipping the courts to the left is exactly the point for outfits like Justice at Stake. They know that the activist judges they support have a difficult time winning support from the people voters – so they take the people out of the equation.
In Missouri, the unelected, unaccountable judicial selection board just sent Governor Matt Blunt a slate of three names to fill a pending vacancy of a rule-of-law judge: one is a liberal activist, one is a former trial lawyer previously bypassed by Gov. Blunt and the third has already been rejected by the governor for a lower court slot.
As the Journal points out, Gov. Blunt has the opportunity to take a “principled stand” and fight for reforms to Missouri’s rigged scheme for picking judges. He can start with the principle that democracy is better served when voters select judges in public, instead of lawyers picking them behind closed doors.
The Los Angeles Times, not surprisingly, has a different take. They cling to the notion that giving a panel of unelected attorneys more control over judicial appointments will somehow take dreaded “politics” out of the process – a notion that has been disproved in every state that has experimented with “merit” selection.
The LA Times protests that “the purpose of the screening panels is to identify qualified candidates from which senators and presidents can choose, not to make the appointments themselves.” The responsibility of senators and presidents in picking judges arises, of course, from the U.S. Constitution, whose framers, unless I’m mistaken, never carved out a role in the process for the American Bar Association or other special interest groups.