75% of Pennsylvanians say “Merit” Selection Could Make Judicial Selection “More Political”
June 10, 2010
Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts (PMC) – a group funded by billionaire hedge fund titan George Soros – is trumpeting a new poll that purports to show broad public support among Pennsylvania voters for replacing democratic elections with a “merit” selection system for choosing judges. But what the poll really demonstrates is the extent to which the “merit” selection crowd will go to manipulate polling data to suit its ideological ends.
PMC claims on their blog, for example, that 93% of Pennsylvanians “want the opportunity to vote on whether Pennsylvanians should change the way we select” judges. Sounds impressive. But in the PMC poll, respondents are asked this question only after three other “questions” (see #s 41, 42 and 43) describing recent judicial scandals in Pennsylvanians. In politics, this technique is called “push polling” – a device used to manipulate public opinion, rather than illicit it. Besides, who is going to say they don’t want the “opportunity to vote” on almost any question? Read more
JudgesOnMerit Discovers Sand in the Sahara!
May 7, 2010
OK, so someone must have hacked into the computers over at JudgesOnMerit and posted a parody. How else to explain the breathless headline – “Merit Lives!” – over a post bragging about the budding support for “merit” selection from “unlikely sources” such as … drum roll please … trial lawyers! Who knew!?
At the risk of playing the straight man to those jokers, I guess I should point out the obvious: The reason trial lawyers love “merit” selection is because it gives them a seat (or two or three or four) at the table when the doors close and the secret meetings begin and legal elites get down to the business of picking judges.
In some states, trial lawyers don’t just have seats at the table - they own the table itself.
Take Missouri, for example. In that birthplace of “merit” selection, four of the seven members of the state’s “merit” board have ties to the Missouri trial lawyer association. Up until recently, in Tennessee 75 percent of the “merit” commissioners by law came from legal special interest groups like the Tennessee trial lawyers association.
Maybe it just took Pennsylvania trial lawyers longer than their peers in other states to figure out that “merit” selection is a rigged game that puts them in the driver’s seat when it comes to picking judges.
8.7 Million vs. 14 (or 6)
May 6, 2010
The folks at JudgesOnMerit – another anti-election group financed in part by hedge fund billionaire George Soros – turned me on to a pro-“merit” selection editorial from a Pennsylvania paper called the Herald-Standard. The editors endorse legislation that would scrap the voting rights of Pennsylvania’s more than 8.7 million registered voters and turn the job of selecting judges over to a 14-member panel.
“Merit” panels are often criticized – including here on American Courthouse – as a mechanism for elites to elbow out the people when it comes to choosing judges – so, perhaps in deference to this criticism, the new Pennsylvania proposal comes with a twist. Eight of the 14 members will be chosen by the governor and legislators – presumably drawn from the usual collection of legal special interests like the state trial lawyers association. But six – a minority to be sure, but still … six – will be “ordinary citizens picked by lottery.”
Bingo! It’s your lucky day – you get to pick a judge! Read more
Same Old Tune in Pennsylvania
April 27, 2010
Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell made state headlines with yet another plea for the state legislature to pass “merit” selection legislation. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rendell has been lobbying for “merit” selection of judges for “two decades” to no avail. Despite Rendell’s stunning ineffectiveness, all of the state’s pro-”merit” forces were downright delighted to have the good governor crank up the music one more time.
Joining in on the chorus, for instance, was none other than Shira Goodman who “applaud[ed] the governor’s commitment and support of this cause.” She knows this tune by heart, after all. Her group, Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, has been singing the “merit” song for more than 20 years and still has nothing to show for it. Read more
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.