FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Judges Must Become Accountable to the People

In the summer of 2002, Americans nationwide were stunned by the announcement that the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had declared the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional. In a ruling so divorced from reality that even left-leaning South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle called it “plain nuts”, the Court determined that the words ‘under God’ constituted a breech of the Constitution’s 1^st Amendment.

The Pledge of Allegiance case exposed a phenomenon that conservative pundits and politicians have been warning about for years—the increasingly activist and political nature of our nation’s judiciary.

This case, and others like it, has dispelled the myth that the judicial branch is an objective and fair arbitrator of the laws. Activist judges now see their office as a mechanism to interpret law rather than judge the actions of a person against the standard of law. This newfound law-making authority threatens to undermine the separation of powers upon which our country was founded.

For instance, activist judges have stepped out of their role of merely judging a person’s actions against the standard of law and have now engaged in actual lawmaking by establishing court decisions and rulings that have the effect of laws under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. This type of activism goes on at the State and Federal levels.

The most recent example of this is the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s unilateral ruling against a state law defining marriage as a union between man and woman. In its judgement, the court arbitrarily declared that marriage (a legislatively defined institution) was “a right” that could not be denied anyone because of their sexual orientation.

Overturning the will of the people of Massachusetts and their elected representatives, four members of the Supreme Court not only struck down the law, they ordered the Legislature to craft a new marriage law that would include gay couples.

Another danger posed by an activist judiciary is the opportunity it gives special interest groups to twist the law for philosophical reasons, or even monetary gain. With states across the country facing severe budget deficits, trial lawyers know that the place to go for more taxpayer money is not the Legislature, where budget makers are accountable to the public—it is the courts, where certain judges are more than happy to overrule the people’s elected representatives.

In Arizona, for example, a single trial lawyer has used the courts to force the Arizona Legislature to completely revamp the state’s school construction system, costing Arizona taxpayers several billion dollars in just four years.

Activist judges are also the best friends of extremist groups who use technicalities in the law to their philosophical advantage. For years, the Forest Service has been repeatedly blocked from carrying out sensible forest thinning projects by judges sympathetic to the petty lawsuits of extreme environmental groups. These suits, which even former trial attorney Gov. Napolitano admits are “endless”, force the Forest Service to dedicate a significant portion of its budget to litigation expenses rather than forest health, leading to devastating wildfires like Rodeo-Chideski.

The answer to this growing problem is simple: judges must be accountable to the people for their rulings. It is time to make the judgeship an elected position.

Allowing the people to vote for their judges may sound like a radical concept, but in fact, it is the current policy in all of Arizona’s 15 counties except the two largest, Pima and Maricopa. While voters in rural Arizona, have the right to elect or dismiss a judge, those in Maricopa or Pima County have no voice in the selection process. In these counties, an un-elected board of lawyers and judges provides the Governor with a list of recommendations, from which she alone makes a selection—hardly a democratic process.

To remedy this injustice and restore, to the people, the accountability of their judges, I am sponsoring legislation allowing voters in Maricopa and Pima County to elect their Superior Court judges. Doing so will not only make judges more accountable, but it may also help restore our Constitutionally mandated balance and separation of powers.

The alternative is an increasingly powerful and unaccountable judiciary whose interpretation of the law is not in harmony with the beliefs and values of the public they serve.

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