Your Turn                                                        

It's time for lawmakers to let us vote on merit selection of judges

By ROBERT W. BERGSTROM

There is a reason why Illinois hasn't moved to nonpartisan merit selection of judges, though 32 states have chosen it to replace control by political party bosses. It's because — unlike Arizona and Missouri that could put merit selection on the ballot by petition — the Illinois Constitution says that the people can never vote on this issue unless it first passes through the needle's eye of a three-fifths vote of both houses of the General Assembly. And for 40 years supporters of keeping judicial jobs as political party patronage have been able to block that extraordinary majority.

One of the most flagrant examples was a session in which opponents of merit selection booed each civic association, newspaper and media outlet that favored the measure. They booed the Illinois Farm Bureau, the League of Women Voters, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association, both Chicago newspapers, WMAQ, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Quincy Herald-Whig, the Decatur Herald and Review and The State Journal-Register. One opponent said, "If it gets on the ballot, sure, it's going to pass," and then he urged a "no" vote.

Merit selection, frequently called "the Missouri plan" because in 1940 Missouri was the first state to adopt it, provides that in each judicial district a bipartisan nominating commission composed equally of lawyers and nonlawyers screens all applicants and names three nominees for each judicial vacancy. After a period for public input, the governor must appoint one of the three. In 1990 the American Bar Association celebrated the Missouri plan's 50th anniversary and lauded it as "the best method for selecting judges." The executive director of the Missouri Bar said, "The governor is almost insulated from selecting someone who is not qualified."

The abolition of appointment by political party would free our judges from the need to seek favor from political bosses — as witness the slating session of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in which one candidate was recommended as "an alderman's judge" and another candidate asked participants to ignore an adverse Bar Association report because "I was a doorbell-ringing precinct captain."

Abolition of appointment by parties would free our judges from courting political bosses

Merit selection would free judicial candidates from the need to raise an average of $30,000, more than half of it from lawyers who may appear before them. It would remove those political and financial pressures toward corruption and make unlikely future convictions of judges. Further, a study by the Fund for Modem Courts shows that merit selection provides more judgeships for minorities and women than party elections do.

The 1970 Constitutional Convention voted to approve merit selection, but the Cook County Democratic Party threatened to defeat the entire Constitution unless merit selection was made a separate proposal. Thereafter, despite the party's concentrated opposition, the merit proposal carried Cook County by almost 69,000 votes and lost statewide by only 145,000 out of a total vote of 1,880,000. Subsequent polling in 1987 showed that a majority of Illinois voters favored merit selection.

The only merit selection proposal now pending is the attempt of the Illinois State Bar Association's current administration to reject the gubernatorial appointment that is the standard in 32 states. Instead, the state bar recommends that the Illinois Supreme Court be the appointing agency.

The unpleasant little secret of this proposal is that it retains political party selection of the Supreme Court, the body that tells the lower courts and us what laws we must live under. It would not prevent the spending of almost one million dollars by candidates for Supreme Court vacancies — as occurred in 1992 — or closed-door clout-wielding in the Cook County Democratic Central Committee.

The last true merit selection proposal was sponsored in April 1994 by Reps. Lee Daniels and Judy Erwin and Sen. Dan Cronin. It would call for gubernatorial appointment, with a local option for circuits.

Herculean as the task has been of getting the General Assembly to allow the people a chance to vote on this issue, there is some hope. Speaker Lee Daniels and Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra have been legislative sponsors and champions of merit selection for many years.

However, if we are to have the right to vote on this in November 1996, the General Assembly must give its consent before May 1996. Perhaps this time they will allow us the right to choose. *

Robert W. Bergstrom, a former secretary of the Chicago Bar Association and a 25-year participant in the drive for merit selection, is the author of To Save the Illinois Courts: What Must Be Done, which has been published by the Union League Club of Chicago.