Sunday, August 12, 2007


Aug. 12, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
Under Missouri's famous and often emulated system for choosing nominees to the state's top courts, a 'nonpartisan' commission made up of lawyers, gubernatorial appointees and a judge evaluates candidates and chooses three for submission to the governor, who picks one to fill the court vacancy. Today the chairwoman of the commission is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Laura Denvir Stith.

This system was devised in the early 1940s in answer to excessive political interference by Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, who was trying to unseat a Supreme Court judge. Since then about half the states in America have copied the Missouri Plan. But from time to time critics arise, never simply because of the technique itself but because they believe current judges are making unacceptable decisions. They imagine a different method that would produce judges more to their liking.

So it is now, as Gov. Matt Blunt and other conservatives mount another attack on the Missouri Plan. They think it has produced too many 'activist' judges.

At the moment, Blunt is considering the judicial commission's latest group of three nominees from which he will name a new member of the Supreme Court to replace retiring Judge Ronnie White.

A leader of the opposition, presumably reflecting Blunt's opinion, said the panel 'exceeded even our lowest expectations,' proving the current Missouri Plan must be updated.

This opinion is not shared by most lawyers and judges, past and present, who believe the nominees have solid records, particularly the Republican among them, a partisan colleague of the governor. Why would he not be happy with this person, one wonders.

Since the three nominees' names were sent to the governor, officials from his office have conducted an extraordinary exchange of correspondence with Stith requesting additional information about the nominees with no possible purpose but to second-guess the commission's nomination process. Since the governor has the final responsibility for making the appointment, nothing on the face of these requests is out of bounds, but it's fair to say the unusual probing is as much to discredit the system as discover the qualities of the nominees -- all of whom have very public track records as lower court judges.

The Missouri Plan pattern has been to turn over most of the winnowing to the judicial panel, which spends a lot of time interviewing the candidates and evaluating their records. But of course it's fair for politicians to second-guess the Missouri Plan itself by re-evaluating and criticizing the quality of its nominees. No doubt Judge Stith is not happy to be caught out on the battleground, but she has an obligation to participate and is doing so graciously in response to the rat-tat-tat of requests from the governor's chief of staff and legal counsel.

Indeed the governor's men are couching their requests in the most gracious language, but a careful reader can sense the intellectual warfare going on. It's a battle to the death staged in a political drawing room.

Most disappointing will be if Gov. Blunt unfairly finds fault with the three nominees in his attempt to discredit the system that chose them. This would damage their careers as part of a political battle to throw out a credible court selection system that excludes political manipulation as much as any system could, certainly more so than the alternative methods the critics suggest. Perhaps they can come up with a few benign improvements to the plan, but so far it's clear their main goal is simply to throw it out altogether.

The Missouri Plan is designed specifically to mitigate the kind of political interference today's critics seek to exert. That, of course, is the reason to keep it.

Henry J. Waters III, Publisher, Columbia Daily Tribune

It's very hard to take yourself too seriously when you look at the world from outer space.

-- Thomas K. Mattingly II, Apollo 16 astronaut

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