Well, doesn't it always, if you consider how rarely the Washington Post agrees with election results coming out of my state.

Now, though, the Post wants to use teh DeLay case to tell us how to select judges.

Most states have some form of an elected judiciary, but the Texas system is particularly bad: All judges are selected through partisan elections. As then-Chief Justice Tom Phillips, a Republican, said in 2003, "Our partisan, high-dollar judicial selection system has diminished public confidence in our courts, damaged our reputation throughout the country and around the world, and discouraged able lawyers from pursuing a judicial career." The dispute over who will hear the DeLay case is a symptom of a larger problem.

Yeah, we can't have the peole picking judges -- it might give everyone the idea that the judicial branch is answerable to the people and not the other way around! Our system allows the people to serve as a check upon an out-of-control judiciary in a way that the people of , for example, Massachusetts cannot. Wrong-headed decisions may stand, but wrong-headed judges do not.

And as far as the quote form our former chief justice is concerned, he is pretty much alone in taking that position. I was at a meeting a couple of years ago at which he tried to push a non-partisan plan for electing judges for endorsement by a Republican group -- and was soundly rejected because it would taken power away from the people.

What the Post doesn't consider in this case is that we had a relatively unique situation -- a partisan prosecutor on a political vendetta against a leader of the opposing party, being heard by a judge who had in the past stated that he could not be impartial against a defendant whose opponents he had supported financially and who had made larger contributions to an organization that had actively opposed the current defendant. The totality of circumstances made it quite clear that the judges impartiality was subject to serious question. The subsequent challenge by the prosecution was merely a tit-for-tat by an unethical prosecutor who even admitted in his motion that he did not really believe the judge to have a conflict of interest.

No, there is nothing wrong with the current judicial system in Texas -- at least nothing that cannot be solved by dismissing all charges against Tom DeLay and disbarring Ronnie Earle and any of his staff involved in the bringing of the current charges.

Posted by: Greg at 12:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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