Newly elected Governor Bruce Rauner of Illinois used his recent State of the State address to announce that his judicial selection policy will be shaped by liberal lawyers. As he put it:

And, in time, we should take another step towards trustworthy government by prohibiting trial lawyer donations to elected judges, and move toward merit-based judicial reform as supported by the American Bar Association.

I agree with Governor Rauner’s desire to diminish the ability of trial lawyers to capture the judicial branch. But, insofar as he plans to pursue so-called “merit-based” selection, the solution he has offered is likely to make the problem even worse. Conservatives should be especially outraged that he would explicitly rely upon the American Bar Association to help him shape matters relating to the judicial branch.

What Rauner calls “merit-based judicial reform as supported by the American Bar Association” is more colloquially know as the Missouri Plan, after the first state to formally adopt it. In short, a lawyer-dominated commission interviews candidates and picks a list of judicial nominees from which the governor must appoint. The Missouri Plan is used in about a dozen states. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on this topic a few years ago, Soros’s Open Society Institute has spent more than $45 million promoting this method of selection across the country.

And no wonder, since that method of selection has systematically pushed state courts into the arms of the left and their boosters in the tort bar. One of the Missouri Plan’s original architects was Harold Laski, a famous British Marxist upon whom Ayn Rand based the villain in The Fountainhead. As I have explained here and here, this method of selection was (like other progressive programs) designed to give “experts” — in this case, the left-leaning lawyers who dominate the organized bar — the bulk of the decision rights in the selection process. Vanderbilt law professor Brian Fitzpatrick has persuasively shown in his scholarly study of the issue that this is precisely what has happened.

I have never endorsed judicial elections over the federal method, or vice versa. I have seen both methods work well at the state level. But this half-baked plan of Rauner’s is most likely to please trial lawyers and the Soros-funded activists who celebrate every time a Republican mindlessly endorses their project. Let’s hope he comes to his senses.