Judicial appointments

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney must stand on his record as governor of Massachusetts, just as Democrat Barack Obama will have to run for re-election on his first-term performance.

So some critics have now turned their attention to Mr. Romney’s record as governor as it pertains to reforming the Bay State’s judicial appointment process.

“Mitt Romney marched into the Massachusetts State House in 2003 as a self-declared reformer, pledging to fix a judicial nominating system he decried as riddled with patronage and back-room deals,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday. “Three years later, Romney changed course. He effectively took over the independent judicial screening commission he had unveiled with such fanfare. And as he geared up to run for president in 2008, Romney dismissed members of the commission who were resisting his choices for judgeships.”

Many of his reforms failed. Others – such as an effort to blindly screen candidates without knowing their identities – were criticized as unfavorable to women. In the end, a man who was intent on changing the system ended up breaking the judicial appointment logjam by using his gubernatorial prerogative to appoint as judges people with political connections, or who shared his pro-business positions.

There is a lesson here.

Nevada voters have twice previously turned aside efforts to replace the state’s system of electing judges with some sort of an appointment process. They’ll likely be asked to pass judgment again on the same topic in the next few years.

Opponents of judicial elections make some reasonable points. But the Romney experience demonstrates, once again, that an appointment system does not remove politics from the process of deciding who sits on the bench – no matter how well-meaning the governor and no matter how many “review panels” are set up to launder the politicians’ hands.