Chief Justice William Ray Price of the Missouri Supreme Court sounded a warning to the people of the state last year.
“We have been taught to honor a fair and impartial judiciary that carefully decides cases on their own facts and in accordance with the law,” he said in a speech to before the state bar. But Missouri has become home to aggressive special interests, he said, who are “vocal and committed and know no limits to the extent that they will fight or spend money to get their way....”
“... They want a judicial system in which judges are ‘dependable,’ where judges can be counted on to decide cases on an ideological basis without regard to facts,” he said.
“... (W)e need to focus the attention of the people of Missouri on the fact that, when they need a lawyer or when they must appear before a judge, the courtroom should not already be tilted against them by some special interest, no matter how rich, no matter how powerful.”
Mr. Price, who was appointed to the court in 1992 by then-Gov. John Ashcroft, is the court’s longest-serving member. In a speech on Thursday, he announced specific measures to protect Missouri’s courts from becoming corrupted by special-interest cash.
The merit selection plan covers judges on the Supreme Court, appellate courts and trial courts in urban areas. From now on, the Supreme Court will allow members of the public to nominate lawyers for these positions.
Candidate interviews by nominating commissions will be opened to the public, instead of being held in private. At at the end of the selection process, when the nominating commissions submit three names to the governor for selection, the vote counts will be made public.
These new rules turn the tables on a small number of determined extremists who have been trying to subvert the non-partisan merit selection process. They have attempted to use their personal wealth and political connections to stack the bench with judges who are more “dependable.”
They unsuccessfully pushed a constitutional change that would have given appointment power exclusively to the governor and the state Senate. They also spent more than $1.7 million in an attempt to eliminate the appointment process altogether in favor of partisan elections for judges. That effort failed, too.
The critics have cried for more “transparency” in Missouri’s system of selecting judges. But more than $700,000 of the amount they raised in the current election cycles was contributed by an organization called “Better Courts for Missouri.” It does not disclose its contributors.
These “reformers” would reduce the public’s role in the process, guaranteeing that big money and partisan politics would control judicial selection. All the horse trading would take place behind closed doors.
Chief Justice Price and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have opened the appointments process to the bright light of day.
“These changes will allow the people of Missouri to see for themselves how our nonpartisan merit selection plan works and why so many of us think it is crucial for justice in Missouri,” he said last week.
The Missouri Plan, first adopted in 1940 and since emulated in part or in whole by 34 other states, has worked for this state’s citizens for 70 years. Now it will work even better.
