IMHO, the Imperial Presidency, the Imperial District Judges with their nationwide injunctions, and the Imperial Bureaucracy are the result of Congress abdicating its responsibility. Our elected Congress wants others to do the jobs they are supposed to do so they don't have to stick their necks out. This has evolved over time and the dynamic needs to change.
I had been planning on crafting an essay titled “The Imperial Judiciary.”
The unifying theme would be the problem of how to install judges. “Judicial selection” may sound like a technical, antiseptic matter, but this kind of thing has been the subject of much heavy politicking in Israel, Poland, (elsewhere, I am sure) … and in the United States.
The data I know about best pertains to the selection of judges in state court systems. The state of Georgia was the first state to ever implement /electoral process/ for selecting judges. That was early in the 19th century, and the motivation, it seems, was to take the business of selecting judges of the clique of elites who would just end up appointing their friends to the bench. Instituting election processes would, it was hoped, go some way toward breaking the monopoly of the elites over the state court system.
Other states ended up instituting election processes, but, to this day, elites complain that subjecting judges to electoral processes unnecessarily infuses the business of selecting judges with “politics!” (Can’t have that.)
In all of this, I really appreciate Alfred Kales who, in 1913, proposed what later became known as the Missouri system: Subject judges on the bench to periodic thumbs up/thumbs down “retention elections.” Judges might be initially appointed, but thereafter they would be subject to some degree of electoral accountability.
We see great diversity in the selection and retention of judges across state systems. Interesting. No one method for selecting and retaining judges dominates.
IMHO, the Imperial Presidency, the Imperial District Judges with their nationwide injunctions, and the Imperial Bureaucracy are the result of Congress abdicating its responsibility. Our elected Congress wants others to do the jobs they are supposed to do so they don't have to stick their necks out. This has evolved over time and the dynamic needs to change.
Right on.
I had been planning on crafting an essay titled “The Imperial Judiciary.”
The unifying theme would be the problem of how to install judges. “Judicial selection” may sound like a technical, antiseptic matter, but this kind of thing has been the subject of much heavy politicking in Israel, Poland, (elsewhere, I am sure) … and in the United States.
The data I know about best pertains to the selection of judges in state court systems. The state of Georgia was the first state to ever implement /electoral process/ for selecting judges. That was early in the 19th century, and the motivation, it seems, was to take the business of selecting judges of the clique of elites who would just end up appointing their friends to the bench. Instituting election processes would, it was hoped, go some way toward breaking the monopoly of the elites over the state court system.
Other states ended up instituting election processes, but, to this day, elites complain that subjecting judges to electoral processes unnecessarily infuses the business of selecting judges with “politics!” (Can’t have that.)
In all of this, I really appreciate Alfred Kales who, in 1913, proposed what later became known as the Missouri system: Subject judges on the bench to periodic thumbs up/thumbs down “retention elections.” Judges might be initially appointed, but thereafter they would be subject to some degree of electoral accountability.
We see great diversity in the selection and retention of judges across state systems. Interesting. No one method for selecting and retaining judges dominates.