Voting on Judges

Oh, and I'm particularly interested in our lawyers on here (I'm looking at you BrockSamson!!!) and your thoughts on it.  Not that everyone elses thoughts don't count.  Cause they do.  I'm just curious. 

Those are behaviors.  What about them ruling on something that you don't agree with. 

Shouldn't judges essentially be apolitical?

I think the bolded part is the point that he's trying to make, and one that I agree with as well.

Politicians pander too much as it is, do we want the judiciary going down the same path?

That is exactly the point I'm trying to make.  voting on them exposes them to political pressures that I believe they should be quarantined from.

Let's throw a wrench in here.  If you appoint rather than vote, how to do you keep the appointment from being political.  If in the end the placement of judges whether appointment or voting is likely to be political, I would rather have my voice heard through voting.  Especially when talking about the supreme court (either local or federal).  I also think there should be term limits.  But that's just me.

I couldn't agree more.  Thank you for putting in words what I couldn't.

I will weigh in.  I guess it is appropriate since it is my state that has done this. 

I agree that it sets a bad precedent.  I agree that it has the opportunity to make judges think about their decisions on a "what will the public think" scale - which is not their job.  Their job is to rule on the merits of the case (or in this case the constitutionality of the statute) and hand down that decision. 

I am amazed at the number of people that I have talked to over the past week that just don't get that. 

To be clear, to Celeste's point, judges are not "elected" per say.  They are appointed by the governer after a long process.  First, a non-partisan group of legal experts will recommend a list of candidates (I think it is narrowed to 30) and then the Governor of our state picks the judge(s) that he or she believes are the right choice.  There is no confirmation process through the legislature.  Ostensibly, if they made the list from the non-partisan committee, they are good to go. 

Every 6 years the supreme court judges come up for retention (appelate and district court judges are up more often).  In Iowa there are 7 of them.  Three were up this year, 3 will be up in 2012, and 1 will be up in 2014.  A simple majority gets them ousted.  The man whoi engineered this campaign has stated that he has not decided if he will proceed with trying to oust the remaining 4 judges. 

To me this seems out of wack for not only the above reasons, but because we take such great care to select our judges in a non-political way and then let a simple majority of people that are mostly wrongly informed or not informed at all make a decision.  Thus my FB post yesterday of "Iowans are stupid". 

As Dave said, I don't want to get into the gay marriage debate (though I am glad to do that in another thread), but it was amazing to me the number of people that I talked to that said things like "Those are the judges that changed the law to allow gay marriage".  This statement isn't at all true.  These judges ruled simply that a statute (Iowa's Defense of Marriage Act) that said that only a man and a woman could get a marriage license was unconstitutional due to the way that the Constitution for the State is written.  You can't even challenge that.  Read the constitution of our state and find me a place where it sets out marriage as a right to only a certain group.  One of the judges (that was appointed by our very Republican Governer at the time) said - "If you want to outlaw gay marriage you have to change the constitution.  The law cannot be written with the constitution that we currently have".

The fact that people in our state - and I am guessing most states - can't seperate their beliefs from the actual facts of a case is the best reason ever to not allow citizens to do judicial retention voting.  Did removing these justices re-institute the law they found unconstitutional?  Nope.  Is a new panel of judges going to re-hear the case?  Nope.  Should they?  Nope. 

BTW, as an aside, the reason that this case was heard by our Supreme Court was becasue a Polk County (the county that Des Moines is in) judge originally found the statute unconstitutional and it was appealed by the county (they refused to issue marriage licenses to a group of gay citizens).  The judge that ruled it unconstitutional was also up for retention this year.  He won his retention vote 63% to 37%.