“Murky” Mutterings in Missouri
April 15, 2010
“Large amounts of money, some with murky origins, are pouring into a campaign aimed at changing the way judges are selected in Missouri,” ominously intones the Kansas City Star. What exactly are the “murky” backers of this campaign trying to achieve? Are they trying to sidestep the people by giving powerful special interest groups the right to control the judicial selection process? Do they want to keep the public in the dark by making judicial choices in secret, behind closed doors, with no accountability to the people? Are they aiming to game the system so that all judicial candidates come from the same political party?
Actually, that’s the system Missouri already has. It’s called “merit” selection – and in Missouri it means judges are chosen by a tiny group of elite lawyers, who meet in secret to choose judges with no public record of their deliberations. The system is so harshly partisan that 20 of the last 21 nominees to the state’s Supreme Court have either been Democrats, Democratic-contributors or members of the state trial lawyers association.
This “murky” campaign, condemned by the mainstream media, is trying to give the power to pick judges back to the people by replacing the secretive “merit” system with democratic elections. If the press thinks elites do a better job of picking judges than ordinary citizens, they ought to just say so. Instead they try to scare people about the intentions of groups that merely believe that humble citizens should have as much right as elite lawyers to decide who will control one-third of their state government.
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Judicial Elections, Mississippi
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