Sniping from the shadows
Another chapter has begun in the continuing saga of a misguided few who are trying to tear down Missouri’s celebrated non-partisan plan for selecting judges.
Under the existing system, applicants for open seats on the state’s appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, and for trial court seats in urban counties undergo a review process. They submit an application outlining their professional qualifications. They are interviewed by a panel of lawyers and citizens. The panel narrows the applicants to three and submits those candidates to the governor. The governor chooses one for the job.
Voters may vote to retain or remove any newly appointed judge in the first general election following his or her appointment. After that, trial court judges must stand for retention every six years, and appeals court judges every 12 years.
A mysterious group called Better Courts for Missouri has begun an initiative effort that would ask voters to amend the state constitution and return judicial appointments to the province of back-room politics. The governor would be given almost unfettered power to appoint political pals to judicial posts. He would need to win over only a few key state senators. The public would be left out of the process.
This is the latest in string of efforts by conservatives in recent years to change the Missouri Plan. They failed to get the Legislature to cooperate, even with large Republican majorities in both houses and strong support from then-Gov. Matt Blunt.
Now they expect to raise and spend $900,000 to gather signatures on petitions in hopes of putting the question on the ballot in November 2010.
Who is Better Courts for Missouri? Answers are hard to find.
The organization’s website offers no phone number or office address, just a post office box and a generic e-mail address. There’s no list of directors, supporters, boards of advisors or contributors. The group’s latest committee report to the Missouri Ethics Commission showed it was founded in May and had $28.05 in the bank as of July 14.
The group’s public face is James Harris, a lobbyist, former protege of Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder and one-time political operative for Mr. Blunt. He oversaw Mr. Blunt’s politicized fee office operations, as well as appointments to state boards and commissions and was the subject of controversy over his acceptance of gifts from lobbyists.
He won’t say who’s paying him or reveal the names of anyone who’s behind the organization.
Before any voter signs a petition, for any cause, he or she has the right to know who’s behind the effort.
The Missouri Bar stands solidly behind the non-partisan court plan. Its officers and members of its board of governors are from all parts of the state. They have all kinds of political leanings, have engaged in a wide range of community service and represent clients of every stripe — from people injured in accidents to small businesses to major corporations.
Their telephone numbers are listed. They don’t hide in the shadows.
Destroying Missouri’s non-partisan system of selecting judges is cynical and a profoundly bad idea — one that would cut the public out of the process and make every judge beholden to a handful of politicians.
Let me get this straight. You’re saying an executive picking judges with confirmation from the senate is cynical and a profoundly bad idea.
You do realize this is how judges are selected at the federal level, right? Are you saying that a process that favors lawyers picking their own is a better process than that of letting duly elected state officials pick people for the job with the consent of other elected officials?
Talk about cynical.
Letting lawyers select the three judges is the problem. Letting lawyers have any influence is a problem. If this were a noble profession, then perhaps there would be some ground to stand on.
I think to get a sense of the fairness of the current system, we need to know the party affiliation of the judges that have gone through the current system. If it’s 50-50, then perhaps we should let the existing system stay in place.
Now you might wonder why political affiliation is important. Consider this. Judges these days have a tendency to make their own law rather than rule on existing law. This type of behavior is fertile ground for corruption, political influence, and downright destructive consequences. The public needs a check in place to ensure that our judges have balance.
Trial lawyers are one of the biggest lobbying groups in the state and the country. Guess which party they support? If one party is picking all the judges, guess what that does?
Hmm, you are against, “A mysterious group called Better Courts for Missouri..” yet are for another mysterious group- “Under the existing system (the candidates)…are interviewed by a panel of lawyers and citizens.”
I would rather have the Governor, of either party, make the picks. Then, at least there would be some accountability.
Furthermore, this is all I need to know: “The Missouri Bar stands solidly behind the non-partisan court plan.” Is the Missouri Bar a non-partisan group or do they and their members give an overwelming amount of their money to your pet liberals candidates and causes? Correct me if I am wrong but I have never seen a PD article on the Bar. Is the Bar off limits? How come lawyers are not regulated like every other professions? Are they beyond reproach? We do know the trial lawyers give enormous amounts of campaign cash to Democrats. So forgive us if we don’t believe the lawyers have our best interest at heart and you give them a pass because they are politically correct.
You say people “have the right” to demand to know who is involved before signing a petition. Please cite where in either the Missouri or U.S. Constitution that right is enumerated?
It is high time we take one-third of our state government away from an elite group (lawyers) and return it to the people. I support this effort and will contribute to it. This is not at all like the corrupt Illinois system and will allow direct input from our elected officials who are more in touch with the people than a committee of liberal lawyers who serve their own self-interests by selecting only left-leaning judges.
The Missouri Plan is a much better system of selecting judges than what is used in the federal system.
It involves practicing lawyers elected by their peers, citizen reviewers appointed by the governor, the governor himself makes the final selection from a panel of three, and if the public is not satisfied they may vote to throw the judge off the bench, with most judges up for voter review every six years.
The lawyers who sit on the judicial commissions come from all areas of practice and are elected by bar members from all areas of practice.
There are trial lawyers who contribute large sums of money to Democratic candidates and causes. There are conservative lawyers who contribute to Republican candidates and causes. In my experience most lawyers are not substantial contributors to either party or especially politically active.
Lawyers are regulated by the Missouri Supreme Court.
The purpose of the Better Court for Missouri initiative is not to take “one-third of our state government away from an elite group (lawyers) and return it to the people.” In fact it would cut the people out all together, stripping away their veto power and elevating the authority of political hacks and power brokers to dispense goodies behind the scenes. It’s an effort by a small but powerful group operating from the shadows who are frustrated that the Missouri system has insisted on elevating mainstream, judicious, widely admired lawyers for judicial office, and has prevented a conservative (or liberal) elite from packing our courts with judges who meet a narrow ideological litmus test.
Mr. Roth - While it is technically true that the public can vote a judge out, it is little more than a technicality. Practically speaking, even the most informed people know almost nothing about any particular judge. And because the performance of a judge is almost impossible for the public to consider, judges get a pass. I am one of the most informed voters that I know, and have no idea who any of the judges are. Because of this, I vote no on every single one, because I believe it is their responsibility to communicate to the voters why they should be retained. But obviously, I am in the minority.
In the November ‘08 election, voters considered 42 judges for retention. Not a single one failed to be retained, with the closest race being a nearly 10 point margin of victory. In November ‘06, voters considered 53 judges for retention, and retained them all, with the closest one winning retention by a 20 point margin.
This leaves us with several possibilities: (1) Our system has produced an incredibly exceptional crop of judges, such that in considering nearly a hundred of them, the public chose to retain every single one by a wide margin; (2) The public has such a high regard for our courts and for the legal profession that, although they don’t have much information about the particular judges, they deem any representative of this excellent system to be worthy of retention; (3) Our system has failed to provide the public accountability which you claim here, and in fact is a license to the legal profession to rule the courts with a free hand.
So seriously, Mr. Roth, which do you think it is?
And as regards your statement that “Lawyers are regulated by the Missouri Supreme Court” .. well, sort of. Anybody who has been shafted by an attorney will tell you that misconduct is defined so narrowly, and judged so technically, that it is practically impossible for an ordinary individual to obtain any recourse. Two examples:
1. I was once a beneficiary of a trust fund. The attorney whom the deceased appointed as trustee loaned the money in the trust to one of her other clients to use in his real estate investments. Those investments were fraudulent, and he was convicted in federal court. The attorney was an unnamed co-conspirator in the indictment. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel found no ethical violation in what she did.
2. A warrant for my arrest was recently issued by a municipal court, because the police department made a mistake in looking up property ownership records. After much telephoning, I found that municipal courts in Missouri are almost entirely unregulated, with the only recourse being to the Missouri Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline of Judges. So if one of our speeding ticket factories decided to simply start writing bogus tickets and issuing warrants, it would only be through a prohibitively costly and lengthy process that any individual wronged party could have his situation rectified. Fortunately, I was dealing with an honest municipality, and the error was promptly corrected. But I can think of several places around here where I would not have been so fortunate.
PS - According to an article in last year’s Wall Street Journal, “three of the judicial commission’s seven spots are held by trial lawyers with specialties in medical malpractice, personal injury and product liability.” But this understates the problem: In fact, ALL THREE of the attorneys on the commission work for plaintiff personal injury practices. Considering the great many practice areas in the legal profession, is it not incredible that our entire judicial selection process is guided by the representatives of but one? Is it not incredible that with all the lawyers practicing family law, defense litigation, trusts and estates, criminal prosecution and defense, corporate law, and so forth, that not a single member of any of these other important practice areas was placed upon this commission?
This article called our retention elections “uncontested pageants” and noted that “No appellate court judge has ever lost a retention election in Missouri.”
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120596897660350203.html
Give the premis no system is perfect I prefer this system to the one in Illinois where judges run for election. Talk abbout a circus in that state.
This is a Democratic Republic. Using your logic, Our entire system ought to be selected by elites. School Boards should be picked by the teachers. The fire boards by the fire fighters, etc. The people have zero input into the current system and once they’re in, it is impossible to remove a judge. Name one who has been voted out in the last five years. By electing a governor who would select judges I would like, I have more input than hoping a bunch of liberal lawyers who probably view John McCain as a conservative would pick a true conservative.