Trent England of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs recently published an informative piece discussing the record of Oklahoma’s judicial nominating commission. As I have previously documented, Missouri Plan judicial selection allows lawyers – who lean hard left – to dominate the process for picking judges at the state level. Oklahoma, for instance, has a Judicial Nominating Commission in which more than a third of the commissioners are selected by attorneys themselves. This has, predictably, left the red state of Oklahoma with a decidedly blue supreme court. On issues ranging from abortion to Ten Commandments displays to the death penalty.
Proponents of this form of judicial selection like to style it as nonpolitical “merit selection,” but that’s not really right. England explains:
The trouble is, any judicial selection process (short of choosing judges by lot) will involve politics. The Judicial Nominating Commission simply hides the politics behind a veneer of professionalism. In fact, the current process elevates the interests of attorneys above those of the broader public.
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In the federal system, citizens know why we have the judges we have. To put it another way, we know who to blame: current and past presidents. We know that future presidents will determine, with the Senate’s check, the direction of the federal courts. In Oklahoma, none of this is clear. How many citizens know anything about the Judicial Nominating Commission, not to mention its 15 individual members? If we want to change the direction of the judiciary, what can we do?
The Judicial Nominating Commission empowers a small special interest group, hides the politics inherent in judicial selection, and renders the people almost powerless when it comes to one of the three branches of our state government. After nearly fifty years, it is time to reconsider how we appoint judges in Oklahoma.