Justice System Politics Under Fire
Election of Judges Has Become an Increasing Concern
The political system in the United States was founded on the concept that the citizens of the country would best be able to elect who should represent them in the government. However, in the justice system, politics have become an increasing disruption to the process they are established to uphold.
One of the most unique aspects of justice in the United States is practice of electing the judges who are relied on to objectively supervise the judicial process. This is a practice that is almost completely foreign to the rest of the world. In a recent article in the New York Times, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was quoted as condemning the practice, saying at a recent conference at Fordham Law School: “No other nation in the world does that because they realize you’re not going to get fair and impartial judges that way.”
This same article outlined, as an example, a 5 million dollar political campaign in Wisconsin that unseated State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler on false charges of racial favoritism that led to free a black rapist. While the elections are supposedly run as non-partisan, the Wisconsin State Journal uncovered a bitter telephone campaign between the Wisconsin Republican Party and the Democratic Judicial Campaign Committee. It did not go unnoticed that Butler’s loss to Michael Gableman gave the state Supreme Court a definite conservative shift in policy.
When all of this is coupled with the recent subpoena of Karl Rove by the House Judiciary Committee and the attempts by the Republican administration to block Rove’s testimony on the basis of “executive privilege,” there seems to be a concerning shift in justice in the United States. A shift where decisions are bartered upon party lines. While this may or may not be indicative of the system as a whole, the fact that the more troubling examples of this problem come from State Supreme Courts and from the White House itself does lend a certain gravity to the situation. On top of this, it begs the question as to how objectivity is being protected within the justice system when politics play such a large role in decisions.
By allowing a judge or, in Rove's case, a witness's political affiliation to have any bearing on their responsibilities, as a citizen, to submit to the law, the United States is setting a dangerous precedent. The Constitution calls for checks and balances within the government to allow for greater objectivity in the system, but the political machines of today have begun to manipulate those boundaries. If the nation is truly concerned with objective law it would seem approriate that appointing its administrators should be the first thing to be straightened out.
