By Peter L. DeCoursey
Bureau Chief
Capitolwire
HARRISBURG (March 18) – Four former governors want the people of Pennsylvania to vote on whether statewide judicial officials should be elected.
Former Govs. Dick Thornburgh, Tom Ridge and Ed Rendell held a conference call to tout a constitutional amendment to replace statewide judicial elections with a panel that would recommend a pool of judges. The sitting governor would then pick the judge or justice who would then be confirmed by the state Senate.
Former Gov. George Leader, whose tenure was from 1955 to early 1959, also supports their cause, but could not be on the conference call.
While critics of the proposal say it will take the vote from Pennsylvanians when it comes to electing judges, Rendell pointed out it will require a constitutional amendment to occur.
“Voters have the right to make this decision for themselves” and recent polling showed that voters want to have the right to make this decision, Rendell said.
Ridge, Thornburgh and Rendell all said there was a significant problem with making judges campaign, since it involved fund-raising which raised serious appearance questions. Rendell also said the conviction of Justice Joan Orie Melvin for misusing government staff for her campaigns helped stir public interest in the issue.
Ridge and Thornburgh said despite the millions spent on TV ads, few voters make informed choices in statewide judicial elections and that few Pennsylvanians knew more about the judges they elected than their name, county and political party.
Rendell agreed: “Nobody knows who they are voting on anyway.”
Thornburgh has been working on this issue since 1967, when he secured a state constitutional amendment ballot issue, but voters turned it down. He then tried to move the issue again as governor, and then-Philadelphia District Attorney Rendell backed that effort.
“This is a cause that is long overdue,” he said.
While Thornburgh was governor in an era where few Republicans were elected as statewide judges, Ridge and Rendell both raised major funds to elect justices of their own party. During Ridge’s tenure, Justices Tom Saylor and Mike Eakin were elected, during Rendell’s years it was Max Baer, Debra Todd and Seamus McCaffery.
But while the Republican State Committee worked closely with Ridge and often deferred to him, Rendell had a more contentious relationship with his state party, and often got nominees he tried to stop.
In 2003, at a meeting with Democratic Party leaders, he objected to the slate of Baer for Supreme Court and McCaffery for Superior Court, asking leaders if they were really going to support “Mad Max and Shameless Seamus?”
Rendell said he had been a big fan of judicial merit selection for decades, and “my time as governor only reinforced my views.”
But Ridge, who at the time said the GOP slates of his tenure would also have been selected as merit selection, said that while the party did a good job then, that does not mean the current system is the best system for picking judges.
Analysts have noted the panel that would produce the nominees, from which a governor would select, would replace the party process, but that governors would continue to play a key role and the state’s Senate role of confirmation would be unchanged.
One reporter from National Review pressed the governors as to why they didn’t support a process where the governor would nominate jurists and have them confirmed by the Senate, as outlined in the U.S. Constitution? Supporters of judicial appointments have said that would give too much power to the governor, and having a committee produce five choices from which the governor would pick is sufficient.
Ridge also said the change would only affect statewide judges, since county and municipal judges are in many cases known to their neighbors, who can make more informed choices in those elections.
Asked about the chances for such a constitutional amendment in the General Assembly, Rendell said such a proposal fell one vote short in the House Judiciary Committee last session.
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