Several Arizona judges who are facing retention elections this year were given negative performance ratings by the state’s Judicial Performance Commission (JPC), a state agency that is designed to collect and issue performance reviews of sitting judges.

You may recall that Arizona is a “Missouri Plan” state, which means that it allows lawyers who appear before state judges an outsized influence over which candidates will be nominated for office. Arizona’s JPC, which is responsible for rating judges after they are on the bench, likewise gives lawyers a disproportionate influence over the ratings, with attorneys constituting 25 percent of the commission’s members.

As it turns out, the JPC decided to issue negative reviews of several incumbent judges this year. Seizing on the opportunity, former Arizona-bar president Mark Harrison (who also just happens to be the chairman of Justice At Stake, a George Soros-funded group that favors such lawyer-dominated commissions), was quoted as saying (although not in his capacity as JAS’s chairman):

Even if a judge is retained in the face of negative votes, that judge is on notice that he or she better shape up and address the problems that have been identified in the process.

I haven’t been following Arizona’s judicial elections closely, so I don’t know whether the commission’s criticisms have any merit. But as I’ve noted before, the left’s double standard on retention elections is fascinating. On the one hand, it’s okay for the chairman of the board for a trial-lawyer-connected special-interest group to say that judges who receive a negative review should “shape up” or face voter accountability. At the same time, it’s somehow a dire “threat to judicial independence” when citizen groups try to advocate accountability for themselves.