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A Simple Plan to End the Supreme Court Confirmation Wars for Good

posted by on Thursday April 13 2017, @02:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the proven-solutions dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) decision to prevent a president of the opposite party from nominating anyone to the Supreme Court, it's doubtful that any justice will ever be confirmed again when the presidency is controlled by a different party than the Senate. That means America will lurch back and forth between extended periods with a understaffed Supreme Court, followed by massive shifts in the law as one party fills a backlog of vacancies.

[...] Several states have shown that there is a better way [than what, it appears, will happen at the federal level from now on].

The Missouri plan

As America struggled through the Great Depression, Missouri's courts were a den of partisanship and corruption. As former Chief Justice of Missouri Michael Wolff explains, judges were "selected in elections in which nominees were chosen by political parties under a patronage system." In much of the state, judges were selected by a single machine party leader, "Boss" Tom Pendergast. Throughout Missouri, "judges were plagued by outside political influences, and dockets were congested due to the time the judges spent making political appearances and campaigning."

Frustrated with their politicized judiciary, the people of Missouri passed a ballot initiative replacing the state's corrupt process with a non-partisan coalition--at least for the state's top judges.

When a vacancy arises on the state's supreme court, a seven person commission consisting of "three lawyers elected by the lawyers of The Missouri Bar . . . three citizens selected by the governor, and the chief justice" submits three candidates to fill that vacancy to the state's governor. The governor then has 60 days to choose among those three names. If the governor fails to meet this deadline, the commission selects one of the three.

Finally, after a year of service, the newly appointed judge must survive a retention election, where a majority of the electorate can cast them out of office--though this only happens rarely.

This method of judicial selection, as well as variants upon it, was adopted by many states since its inception in Missouri.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:01PM (#493603)

    Ross Douthat laid out the argument for why Mitch McConnell just had to pull both of his shenanigans (refusing to even consider Garland, and shoving Gorsuch through) in his column yesterday. And his argument was, in a nutshell, that it was all Justice David Souter's fault.

    Frankly, I'm getting mighty tired of Republicans blaming all their woes on someone else. Now that they have full control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government, it is well past time for them to step up and start taking responsibility for their actions. Come on, guys! Put your big-boy pants on and actually start governing!

    See, when Souter was appointed, the conservative wing of the Republican Party thought that he was a right wing ideologue pretending to be a fair and principled jurist. When he got onto the court, that wing of the Republican Party discovered, to their horror, that they had put into power a fair and principled jurist, i.e. he was exactly what he'd been saying he was all along....

    Ah, yes. David Souter. "B-b-but, we didn't want you to be a fair and impartial judge! We wanted you to ram our agenda through the courts!"

    And this, to Mr Douthat and the people he claims to speak for, is a problem that demanded the solution of pushing through the most right-wing ideologue they could get their hands on by any and all means necessary.

    And this, right here, is my one last glimmer of hope for Justice Gorsuch. I am hoping that he will actually decide to be an impartial jurist and not just another partisan hack. It would serve the Republicans right if they got hoisted on their own petard. We will have to wait and see.