No Merit in Pennsylvania
January 6, 2010
The Philadelphia Inquirer editorializes on an unfolding judicial scandal in which two county judges “face a 48-count federal racketeering case for allegedly taking payoffs to jail teens.” According to the Inquirer, this scandal represents “clear evidence” that Pennsylvania voters should be stripped of their constitutional right to select judges in competitive elections.
Huh?
The logic here, such as it is, seems to be that voters aren’t sophisticated enough to keep potentially corrupt judges off the bench. But a “merit” panel, on the other hand, could somehow divine which judicial candidates are apt to lose their moral bearings on the court and would thus pick only demi-gods, not the crooked rabble chosen by voters.
Actually, I think the authors of Pennsylvania’s Constitution had it right. They understood that not all public servants are angels, and that the best way to keep them accountable was make them go before the people on a regular basis to keep their positions. Under merit selection, once a judge is on the court it is almost impossible to remove him/her, as the experiences in states like Tennessee and Missouri demonstrate.
The truth is, neither judicial elections nor “merit” selection are infallible and both systems can produce judges that are lazy, incompetent and even corrupt. Fortunately the legal system itself can charge and remove judges who are truly venal – such as the two in Pennsylvania if the allegations prove true. But it seems to me that making judges even less accountable through “merit” selection is a strange way to keep them honest.
Correction: Earlier PA post
December 3, 2009
Last week I did a short post commenting on an opinion piece by Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Debra Todd. In it, I mistakenly characterized a related blog post by JudgesOnMerit as an “opposing view.” David Caroline from JudgesOnMerit corrected me with the following comment:
PA Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Don’t Affect Court
November 25, 2009
Kudos to Justice Debra Todd of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for her opinion piece that appeared this week in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As AmericanCourthouse readers know, there has been a multi-decade effort to eliminate democratic judicial elections in Pennsylvania, led chiefly by Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts. PMC and others claim judicial elections politicize the courts - but Justice Todd, elected to the PA Supreme Court in 2007 as a Democrat, is having none of it…
“…while a candidate running for an opening on the Supreme Court does so as a Republican or a Democrat, a justice is not beholden to any party and the assertion of political control of the court is simply incongruous…[A] judge is elected to interpret and apply the law of the commonwealth in accordance with the Pennsylvania and United States constitutions. While the casual observer may believe that because we elect judges in our commonwealth politics control our judiciary, nothing could be further from the truth. Just as Lady Justice does not permit a voter registration card to tip her scales, it should be clearly understood that no political party controls the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.”
Thanks to JudgesonMerit for brining this to our attention. You can find their spirited, opposing view here.
Judicial Elections in Pennsylvania: A “Bad Taste”
November 11, 2009
The folks at Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts didn’t like Pennsylvania’s elections last week – in fact, those elections “left a bad taste” in their mouth. In a Philadelphia Daily News article yesterday, they complained that voter turnout was “appalling” and fretted that voters “feel unprepared to decide” who should sit on the bench. Even worse, those who did vote may have been swayed by “random or irrelevant factors.” Their solution: Let’s get rid of voting altogether!
If turnout alone is going to dictate how we pick our public servants, we’re going to have to start cancelling a lot of elections. FairVote is a civic minded group trying to pump up voter turnout. “In many cities,” the group notes, “mayors of major cities are often elected with single-digit turnout:”
“… turnout was only 5 percent of registered voters in a recent Dallas mayoral election, 6 percent in Charlotte, and 7 percent in Austin.”
Should we abolish democratic elections for mayor?
Congressional primaries also typically have low turnouts. FairVote reports “turnout was only 7 percent in a recent Tennessee primary, and was only 3 percent for a U.S. Senate primary in Texas.”
Should we start letting an unelected commission of “experts” choose who is going to represent us in Washington too?
The solution proposed by Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts predictably is that old standby: merit selection. I’d rather have a fair, fully-transparent, democratic election where even a small turnout of voters represented the state than allow a few lawyers and other unelected, unaccountable special interests select state judges behind closed doors.
Are Pennsylvanians Really Too Stupid To Elect Judges?
May 12, 2009
The Philadelphia Inquirer is out with a slate of judicial endorsements, but not before trashing the idea that judges should be chosen by the people through democratic elections. Voters, the editors grumble, “may well apply the usual uninformed criteria” when deciding who to put on the bench. (And these are the same folks who sit around scratching their heads wondering why newspapers are losing readers in droves – to bloggers, no less – and filing for bankruptcy.)
Judgesonmerit.org – part of the national campaign bankrolled by hedge fund billionaire George Soros to let legal special interests pick judges – also has a post highlighting the “flawed election process” that permits mere citizens to determine who will control one-third of Pennsylvania’s state government.
So what “informed” criteria does the Inquirer use to persuade voters about the merit of the candidates it’s endorsing? Well, one candidate, the Inquirer tells us, is the “the city’s ‘only openly gay judge’ and strives to keep all bias from his courtroom.” Another is a “distant cousin” of a jailed former City Council member who is recommended in part because of his “charitable works.” Yet another “served as chief of staff to his City Council president father and ran a bank branch” before turning to the law.
These prospective judges may well be fine, upstanding citizens who would be a credit to the bench. But is the Inquirer’s reasoning really so superior that the paper’s readers should cower at the thought of approaching local polling places with their “uninformed” opinions? Is it really any less arbitrary than the biases an ordinary citizen would bring to the voting booth?
Ah, but the Inquirer’s choices have all been vetted by the Philadelphia Bar Association, which should be a “major deciding factor” in voters’ decisions. Now we get to the heart of the matter. “For now,” the Inquirer writes, “voters have the first and last word” on choosing judges. That ominous “for now” is a plea for an end to democratic judicial elections. In the perfect world envisioned by the Inquirer and judgesonmerit.org, groups like the Philadelphia Bar Association and other legal special interests would be given a privileged position in deciding who should sit on the bench. In fact, the Inquirer and judgesonmerit.org are so infatuated with the views of lawyers they want to remove voters from the process and turn the whole job of picking judges over to legal elites.
Unfortunately, from their perspective, to reach this nirvana of lawyer-selected judges they need to revoke the Constitutional right of Pennsylvanians to choose jurists democratically. They’ve been pushing that rock up the hill for about 20 years, so far with little success. So “for now” democracy reigns in Pennsylvania and the people still have the right to pick their public servants on the bench.
Eyes Wide Shut
May 4, 2009
Over the past decade, nearly 40 Pennsylvania hospitals, maternity units and other major medical facilities have shut down due to skyrocketing medical liability costs. In the past seven years, more than half of Pennsylvania’s 25,000 doctors have been sued. Yet strangely enough, Gov. Ed Rendell has proclaimed the state’s medical liability crisis is over. Gerald O’Malley – a physician and board member of Doctor’s Advocate – has an op-ed on Pennsylvania’s “non-crisis” that is well worth reading.
Rendell fiddles while Pennsylvania burns.
Pay-To-Play In Pennsylvania (And Elsewhere)
April 17, 2009
The Wall Street Journal lifts the rock on a sleazy “pay-to-play” racket involving Houston plaintiffs lawyer F. Kenneth Bailey and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. In 2006, Bailey made “repeated donations” to Gov. Rendell’s re-election campaign – and a few months later got a “no-bid, contingency fee contract to sue Janssen Pharmaceuticals on the state’s behalf.”
It gets worse. Bailey had already been turned away by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General after offering to file suit against Janssen. Gov. Rendell overruled his AG – for a major campaign donor.
It gets worse. Bailey has filed similar suits, representing the states of Mississippi, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arkansas. According to the Journal, Bailey’s firm contributed $75,000 to Mississippi AG Jim Hood; $50,000 to New Mexico AG Gary King; $20,000 to a PAC that ran ads for Louisiana AG Buddy Caldwell; and $60,000 to the Arkansas Democratic Party. Bailey also donated $85,000 to the Democratic Attorney Generals Association, which turned around and gave money to AGs Hood and King.
“It’s some racket,” the Journal writes:
“The plaintiffs attorneys come up with novel legal theories under which to sue companies or entire industries. They then solicit state AGs (or cash-hungry Governors like Mr. Rendell) to retain them to bring cases on behalf of the government on a contingency-fee basis.
“The biggest losers here are the cause of justice and the principle of prosecutorial neutrality. When outside lawyers are hired to do the government’s business, and then given a financial stake in the outcome, it creates irreconcilable conflicts of interest. The state delegates key decisions – about whether and whom to sue, what legal theory to pursue, whether to settle and what remedy to propose – to private lawyers motivated by profit rather than the public interest.”
One Man, One Vote, One Time
January 8, 2009
They’re baaack! Our friends over at Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts are once again using their JudgesOnMerit blog to push to take the power over who chooses the state’s top judges from the more than 8.7 million voters and hand it over to a 14-member committee dominated by legal special interests. In the new post, Shira Goodman takes a not so thinly veiled swipe at Temple Law Professor Marina Angel, who has fought tirelessly to protect the constitutional right of Pennsylvania voters to determine who will control one-third of the state’s government. Professor Angel is more than capable of defending her position and I look forward to her retort, but I have to say it’s more than a little ironic that Ms. Goodman wants us to believe that it’s actually her group that “trust[s] the people of Pennsylvania” and wonders why her “confidence in the public is not shared.”
So let me get this straight: Supporting a vote on a constitutional amendment that would abolish the franchise when it comes to judicial selection represents “trust” in the voters? But fighting to protect the right of every Pennsylvania voter to choose his/her own judges in democratic elections suggests a lack of confidence?
Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts has been pushing this Orwellian logic with little success for about 25 years. Along with Professor Angel, I hope the state legislature continues to reject this “one man, one vote, one time” version of democracy.
Judicial Elections or Potato Chips?
October 30, 2008
As expected, our friends at Judges on Merit (or as I like to call them, Judges for No Accountability) are hyperventilating again about the impact of campaign contributions on judicial races – the answer to which, in their mind, is to get rid of elections altogether. It’s bad enough that Michigan Supreme Court candidates have raised $2 million, but third parties have also chipped in $2 million for a total of $4 million – about what Barack Obama spent on his 30 minute infomercial last night.
The blog quotes a spokesman from the Michigan Campaign Finance Network concerning the “peril” that contributions have “considerable potential for conflict of interests and it certainly creates a troubling appearance.” No evidence of any actual impropriety can be found, but so what? Better to strip people of their constitutional right to elect judges and turn the job over to a “merit” commission, just to be safe.
But wait a minute. Wouldn’t putting a single special interest group (lawyers) in control of the entire judicial selection process also create a “troubling appearance?” And is $4 million for a campaign really scandalous enough to justify abolishing elections? In his column today, George Will reports that the $5.3 billion spent on the presidential and congressional elections in the 2008 campaign cycle is a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips.
Will Judges on Merit come out against democratic presidential and congressional elections next? Or just against potato chips?
Opponents of Democratic Judicial Elections Keep Pushing The Rock Up The Hill In PA
September 19, 2008
For about 20 years, a group called Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts (PMC) has been lobbying to abolish democratic judicial elections in the state by revoking the right of 8.3 million Pennsylvania voters to decide who will sit on their courts and turn the job over to a 14-member committee dominated by lawyers.
Proponents of this scheme gathered in Harrisburg this week to announce their intention to reintroduce their plan in the next legislative session set to begin in January. Perhaps cognizant that two decades of failure suggests some modification in their approach, PMC’s Shira Goodman conceded that the bill might be revised to allow a few more “public members” to join the lawyers on the panel.
Of course, Pennsylvania already has a procedure to ensure that the voice of every “public member” can be heard: It’s called an election.
Temple University Law Professor Marina Angel cut through the fog of political posturing and goo-gooing that PMC and others use to justify the anti-democratic nature of their plan:
This is a split between people who believe in the franchise and those that don’t.
Or, a split between people who believe voters are qualified to decide who will control one-third of Pennsylvania’s state government and those who don’t.
Professor Angel also skewered the proposal for exempting any judicial nominating panel from complying with the state’s Right-to-Know Law. Ms. Goodman said the proposed commission needs to meet in secret “to make sure judicial applicants are comfortable with the process,” but she allowed that some meetings might be opened to the public. Since when did it become necessary to see to it that our public servants “are comfortable with the process” by which we choose them? I’m sure there are many days when Barack Obama and John McCain aren’t “comfortable with the process” of getting elected president and would gladly turn the decision over to some secret tribunal controlled by their favorite special interest groups. But that’s not how democracies select their leaders.