Bar president urges Chamber to oppose judicial elections

A local attorney and president of the Missouri Bar urged the Columbia Chamber of Commerce to oppose a measure that would change Missouri’s judicial selection process.
ShowMe Better Courts, the nonprofit organization pushing the change, submitted thousands of signatures from its initiative petition to the secretary of state’s office last week. If enough signatures are verified, the petition would place a ballot proposal before voters this November to have all Missouri judges run for election and reduce their terms to eight years from the current 12.
The group says that the current system, in which the governor selects judges from nominees submitted by panels of lawyers and governor-appointees, gives too much power to special interests. Some judges in rural counties are already chosen by voters, but those in urban and suburban areas, as well as those on the Supreme Court and appellate courts, are chosen through the nonpartisan selection process.
Skip Walther, who was elected Missouri Bar president last fall, asked the Columbia Chamber of Commerce on May 6 to formally oppose the proposal to elect judges. The Chamber board of directors recently started advocating positions on political issues and made unprecedented endorsements of City Council candidates before the April 6 election.
During a presentation to the Chamber’s Government Affairs Committee, Walther said the current merit selection system “minimizes politics as far as it can be minimized. … It’s kept politics out of the courtroom for 70 years.”
Currently, 50 percent of trial judges in Missouri and all of the appellate judges are chosen through the merit selection system, Walther said. Half of the trial judges, including circuit court judges in Boone County, are elected. Last fall residents of Greene County, where Springfield is located, voted to change from elected judges to the merit selection system. Walther pointed out that the Springfield Chamber of Commerce endorsed merit selection.
Bob Roper, co-chairman of the committee, said after the presentation that the Chamber will consider whether to take a position on the proposition after Aug. 3, the date that the state is scheduled to determine whether there are a sufficient number of valid signatures to place the issue on the November election ballot.
Walther said it’s his opinion, and the opinion of many lawyers in states that elect appellate judges, that campaign contributions, which run into the millions of dollars in some state Supreme Court races, have a significant impact on judicial decisions.
Walther also argued that merit selection is better for businesses in Missouri because allowing campaign contributions to have an effect on who seeks judgeships, who wins and how they make decisions once they’re seated would make the system more unpredictable.
“It’s good for business that we have predictability in the selection of our judges,” he said. “The Bar believes (merit selection) is the best system to ensure judges are not subjected to political pressures.”
ShowMe Better Courts Executive Director James Harris said after submitting the petition that judges should not be any different from many other public officials.
“We elect our school district members, our fire district members,” he told Missouri.net. “Judges are no different from anyone else who’s in a position of trust.”
Harris said his group has submitted a quarter-million signatures, about 100,000 more than necessary.
Matt Blunt was critical of the merit selection system when he was governor and Harris was an aide. Rob Monsees, a Chamber committee member and director of the NanoTechnology Enterprise Consortium in Columbia, was Blunt’s deputy chief of staff for policy. Monsees said during the Chamber committee meeting that Blunt believed that the judicial selection commission wasn’t doing its job properly and failed to nominate the most highly qualified candidates.
Harris said one of the ShowMe Better Courts petition signers is Boone County’s congressman, U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, according to a report in the St. Louis Beacon.
Harris called charges from some attorneys and judges that his group is trying to buy the state judiciary system “ludicrous,” according to a report from the Kansas City Star.
“I think it’s ludicrous, or hilarious, (that) a bunch of robber barons, people who make tens of millions of dollars, some of these folks, to sit there and say some small-business people, farmers, doctors, business people want to manipulate whatever,” he told the Star.