Report: Soros trying to end judicial elections to pack the courts with leftists
Spooky Dude doesn’t spend millions of dollars for no reason.
Most non-federal judges around the country are selected by voters in elections. But some states use a process called “merit selection” in which a committee – often made up of lawyers – appoints judges to the bench instead.
Soros has spent several million dollars in the past decade in an attempt to get more states to scrap elections and adopt the merit method. Supporters say it would allow judges to focus on interpreting the law rather than on raising campaign funds and winning elections.
What that would actually do is remove judicial accountability — that’s the point. As seen in Iowa in 2010, accountability can be a powerful deterrent to judicial activism. Can’t have that!
“The left can’t get their agenda through the legislatures anymore … so they think they can get their agenda through by taking over the courts,” attorney Colleen Pero, author of a new report titled “Hijacking Justice,” told FoxNews.com.
Pero’s report found that Soros, through his Open Society Institute fund, has given $45 million over the last decade to “a campaign to reshape the judiciary.” But that number is hotly contested by Justice at Stake, the group that got the most Soros money. …
In an analysis of the Open Society Institute’s tax returns from the last ten years, FoxNews.com found more than $5 million was explicitly earmarked for projects about either “merit selection” or “judicial selection.”
For example, OSI reported giving $90,000 to Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts in 2007 to “expand and grow a coalition in support of merit selection.” It also reported giving $50,000 to Justice at Stake in 2006 to support “public education regarding merit selection.”
OSI gave another $7 million-plus to Justice at Stake, or to partner organizations with specific directions to support JAS’s activities.
Dr. Evil hates democracy. When it gets in his way, he throws money around to try to thwart it.
Why doesn’t “Behind The Scenes Supreme Leader” buy his own country, so he can do whatever he wants and stay out of freedoms way.
“Merit-based”. The lawyers choose the judges who will then judge their cases. What could possibly go wrong?
No, wait, it’ll be a tight clique of law academicians who will make up the panel. Yeah, that’ll work out swell.
That Nazi Soros just cannot forgive the USA for having destroyed the Nazi dream.
He has a sort-of Reverse Stockholm Syndrome: He has done terribly well here, a refugee we graciously took in from a war torn Europe, yet he hates us and is entirely against us.
Merit selection operates like the politboro. You earn merit badges by snuffing out freedom and crapping on the Constitution, independence and democracy.
It’s much easier than having to “fix” elections. The system is so crooked from the start, the extra rigging is superfluous.
When do the gloves come off in this fight? Probably never, our side is not courageous enough to do anything but shadow box with the shadow party.
With due respect, I’m concerned that in this post, Mr. Preston, you’re oversimplifying an issue that doesn’t fall so neatly as you might think into either a conservative or liberal box.
I’m a conservative, a small-d democrat, and a federalist, and — as a Texas lawyer specializing in the handling of civil cases through trial for 30+ years — a very knowledgeable consumer of the results of Texas voting public’s choices in judicial elections. Texas’ constitution, as I’m sure you know (but some of your readers may not), has always kept Texas firmly among those states most committed to the notion of direct popular election of both criminal and civil judges at both the trial and appellate levels. On a statewide basis, have many hundreds of state-court judges in a series of courts that share geographic jurisdiction but only partially share jurisdiction over particular types of claims.
Thus, in Harris County (Houston), where I practice, there are 26 civil district courts and 22 criminal district courts (which handle, respectively, the most serious civil and criminal cases); 10 family district courts (who in turn appoint and supervise multiple “associate judges” whose recommendations typically guide the elected family district court judges; and two juvenile district courts. Then, at the county court level, there are four probate courts; four county civil courts-at-law (with concurrent civil jurisdiction on claims up to $100,000); and 15 county criminal courts-at-law (which handle mostly misdemeanor cases).
Below that, there are eight justice of the peace precincts, each of which have two justices of the peace, who hear the least serious misdemeanors and civil cases (up to $10,000).
At the top of our state’s organization chart for its judiciary, we split civil and criminal matters into separate top courts, each with nine members. Between them and the trial court level, however, we have fourteen intermediate appellate courts of varying sizes. Two of these intermediate courts of appeal are based in Houston, each with nine justices.
Judicial terms are generally four years, with half of the state’s judicial seats being elected in each even-yeared general election.
As a consequence of this, Houston voters, for example, have to choose among literally hundreds of judicial candidates for many dozens of judicial positions. A very large number of those voters couldn’t even tell you the difference between the various courts — so they certainly aren’t making informed choices on all, or most, or even very many of the individual candidates.
The result of this extreme democracy has been mixed, at best, in anyone’s estimation. In county-wide races that don’t include Republican voters from adjoining suburban counties, Democratic judicial nominees have become very competitive in Harris and Dallas Counties. With a few exceptions — typically involving nominees who had “odd” surnames that triggered some sort of strong negative or positive reaction, or relied upon confusion with someone similarly named — each party’s county chairmen have become de facto judge-makers, and there have been very few genuinely contested judicial primary elections in either party.
The Dems, of course, are entirely committed to rainbow coalition identity politics in who they choose to run. You can literally go through the Dems’ 2008 judicial nominees in Harris County — almost all of whom were swept in by Obama’s strong turn-out in Harris County — checking off the groups and interests being so represented.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the state outside its major metropolitan counties, and on state-wide or multi-county elections, we’ve very nearly returned to the system that preceded Bill Clements’ terms as governor near the end of the last century: I.e., Texas is again (on the whole) a one-party state, now with the GOP in control instead of the Democrats, so judges tend to retire before their terms end for the specific purpose of allowing the (GOP) governor to appoint a successor who can then run (probably unopposed) as the incumbent in the next general election. In those counties, we have for all practical purposes a judiciary hand-picked by the state’s governors, to the general satisfaction of most citizens.
I was an involved witness as Texas transformed its appellate courts in the late 1980s and 1990s. The election of my friend and former colleague Tom Phillips — the long-serving and hugely influential Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court — may be the single best example of the salutatory effect of direct elections, even partisan elections (Phillips ran as a Republican): His election heralded, and started, the demise of the “60 Minutes court” that was so widely, and justifiably, mocked as being completely enthralled to plaintiffs’ personal injury contingent-fee lawyers.
But especially in the cities that host its biggest and most important cases, the quality and nature of the Texas trial court bench is remarkably inconsistent. And there’s no doubt whatsoever that that’s a product of Texas’ adherence to direct election of essentially all of its trial and appellate court judges.
Beldar, I may not always like the results — in fact, often I don’t — but I’m in the corner of electing judges rather than having them all appointed by unaccountable boards based on “merit” standards that don’t always have much to do with the quality of a jurist’s mind. And I’m always in the corner of exposing whatever Soros is up to, because he is always up to no good.
I agree democracy needs to be involved, but there are multiple ways to skin that cat. The simplest — direct democratic election of every judge every two years — isn’t working very well or very consistently even in a state as conservative as Texas.
There’s no such thing as an “unaccountable board.” Board members get picked, and ultimately they get picked by, or per a scheme devised by, elected officials. But I’m not in favor, in general, of trying to delegate the selection to some kind of board or panel or committee precisely because it does make accountability more indirect.
The justification for systems in which state governors fill all judicial seats is that that makes the governors accountable, just as the POTUS is accountable for federal court nominations. Add a retention election to that — not a partisan election in which each party puts up a whole slate for every judgeship, but one in which unsatisfactory incumbents can be booted by a sufficiently aggravated public — and I think our state-court benches would be better off than we are now.
And you and I certainly agree on the likely perniciousness of anything Soros supports.
BTW, and FWIW, I think Perry’s record in filling mid-term vacancies is one of his strongest selling points as an effective state governor, and the same was true of Dubya before him when Dubya was governor.
The voters apparently agree, as they have overwhelmingly elected Perry’s and Dubya’s mid-term appointees to full terms in their own rights — except, that is, in places like Houston and Dallas, where urban concentrations permit the Dems to be competitive even when they haven’t been able to elect a Democrat to any statewide office since 1994.