“Merit” Selection Lobbyists Target Nevada
July 14, 2009
Nevadans will vote next year on a proposed constitutional amendment that will abolish democratic judicial elections and replace them with a “merit” selection scheme that would give legal special interest groups the upper hand when it comes to picking judges. Voters rejected a similar plan in 1988, reports a Las Vegas Journal-Review editorial. So Justice at Stake – the campaign group bankrolled by billionaire hedge fund titan George Soros – has launched a sophisticated lobbying campaign aimed at getting Nevadans to give up their right to vote for judges.
Nevada Chief Justice James Hardesty, for example, objects that 64 percent of judges seeking re-election in 2008 ran unopposed – “the worst form of rubber-stamped democracy” that “leaves the voter with no power at all,” as he put it. The “merit” selection solution: Have 100 percent of judges run unopposed and eliminate voter participation entirely.
The Las Vegas Journal-Review editorial neatly shreds this proposal:
“Their claim that approval of the ballot question would remove politics from the process of selecting judges is pure folly. All it would do is empower a group of mostly unelected citizens to substitute their judgment for the electorate’s ….”