Although to be fair, the behavior as described by the article is a blatant ethical violation, and the circuit governance bodies do have some capacity to sanction judges who violate the requirement of impartiality as blatantly as this.
It's possible to be democratically selected, and still have a life-term so you can be insulated from politics. The arbitrary way that the president can select all federal judges for the entire country (to my understanding) not only skews the judicial system, it adds a whole new dimension the the presidential election which really seems to distort what the job is actually intended to be.
For example, it was the sole reason a lot of people voted for Trump: because at this moment in history there happened, through sheer chance, to be this hugely disproportionate opportunity for a party to grab power that will last a generation. Just because a bunch of people retired around the same time. And this momentous opportunity completely hinged on what would already be the most important single election in the land. That doesn't feel remotely like what the founding fathers intended.
It wasn't sheer chance. It was Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell subverting the Constitution with a coup, refusing to even let the Senate consider whether to approve Presidemt Obama's nominations. And now that Mcconnell has eliminated the principle of upholding the Constitution, we can expect the same from every Senate for at least a generation, and judges will only be appointed when the President and the Senate are the same party.
Judges should be accountable, like everybody else. Impeachment mechanism should have real strength - it doesn't seem to have it now. Cases of impeaching judges for sufficiently erroneous rulings should be quite possible.
Accountable to the law? Absolutely. That sort of removal could be done by a judicial council or some other construct of internal professionals - just as a lawyer can become disbarred. "Tough on Crime" is anathema to actual justice.
The country is the country of people, they establish all the mechanisms. Including law.
The "country of people" legally is written in founding papers, but here we're questioning on the level of founding papers. Constitution offers a mechanism to change it as a whole; but there currently are other mechanisms too. Working judges impeachment should perhaps be practical - or it should be clear why not.
Impeachments of judges (up to and including the supreme court) is something that is probably possible, it seems to be covered by general laws around mid-term removal from office - it just hasn't been thoroughly exercised in the US since nobody wants the headache of trying to counter all the lawsuits associated with it.
No, no, no, absolutely not. Elected judges are a horrible idea and any jurisdiction with elected judges is immediately suspect as far as criminal sentencing. Every time I visit a state/county which elects its judges, I see billboards for "Re-elect Judge So-and-so - tough on crime!" and wonder how anyone could possibly think the justice system there is working correctly and fairly.
Even sheriffs shouldn't be elected, never mind judges. How this ever became an accepted practice in America is beyond my comprehension.
Because incentives easily misalign with imperfect information and because first past the post systems transform things into majority rule.
i.e. a judge's job is to interpret the law for a case, so you don't want to impair that with other incentives. i.e. the best judge is a program that, supplied the law and supplied the evidence, provides a judgment that most precisely approximates the law's intent in this situation. This can be very far from the people's present intent.
So if you give the people too much power over the judge, they will transform law-execution into present-intent-execution, something we do not desire.
If law were totally unambiguous and evidence were totally unambiguous, we might be fully constrained. An elected judge would still be unable to appease the crowd. But we know something: law is ambiguous and evidence is also ambiguous. We need the human here to disambiguate and match against statement and then intent. And adding political necessities to that process hurts it.
> they will transform law-execution into present-intent-execution, something we do not desire.
Are you assuming present-intent is clouded with short-termness?
In general, people want government officials (like judges, here government is in a large sense) to do what they, people, want. Maybe not immediately - though it's a complex questions, with assumptions and counterarguments, but not clearly leading to your conclusion.
We also see that modern state - where laws are complex and judges have leeway to interpret them how they present-intently want, has drawbacks. That's the problem which we face - and want to fix. How's your problems bigger than this one?
> We need the human here to disambiguate and match against statement and then intent. And adding political necessities to that process hurts it.
We somehow don't have mechanism to ensure the intent of a judge is as we expect it to be. Sometimes honestly - I can imagine e.g. a conservative judge who really never imagined a marriage for couple of the same gender (not a very good example, sorry).
For the same reason that it's insane to have two wolves and a sheep vote on what they are having for dinner.
You elect representatives, who set the law. The job of a judge is to enforce that law impartially. Looking at the track record of elected officials, it should be pretty clear that impartiality is not something that elections select for.
Almost every state has elected trial court judges. They may be initially appointed, but ultimately they must face an election in all but a few states. Though their terms are much longer than other elected officials.
> Justices chosen by voters reverse death penalties at less than half the rate of those who are appointed, a Reuters analysis finds, suggesting that politics play a part in appeals.
I don't know about 'want' but it's going to happen.
The branches of the US government are meant as a check against power mongering by the other two branches. We modified other attempts at doing so, and others have done the same with ours.
Normal court cases may not be about politics, but appellate and supreme court cases often are. I can appeal a ruling around a law by putting the law itself on trial, invalidating all or parts of it. If Congress doesn't like it, they can come back and try to change the state or federal constitution to put it back, but that is so difficult that only some very big items make it through.
Where a lower court judge can make a mess is by generating more appeals than we (the People, or the Defendent) can afford to pursue. I think it would be disingenuous to say that isn't also political. I don't see how a judge who favors one side of an unresolved policy dispute can avoid generating extra work for the higher courts. However, they may piss enough people off that the resources are allocated to settle this once and for all, legislatively or judicially.
It isn't a binary choice between politicians choosing judges, and elections for judges. Both these approaches have the effect of politicising the matter. In England, the legal system has its own (somewhat arcane) solution for appointing judges.
Personally I strongly favour this approach. Judges should not be overtly political, and the process for their appointment should be closer to the way we certify doctors than to the way we choose politicians.
The English system doesn't provide an ironclad guarantee against political meddling, but there's always a tradeoff there: we want both accountability and independence, and these are opposing. (Also, I'm English, for what that's worth.)
That sounds interesting. My main point was just that right now, a huge amount of judicial power is bundled under a single big presidential election, instead of being allowed to have more political granularity like Congress. Imagine if the president got to nominate congresspeople. Think about how broken that would be.
Considering the quality of presidential candidates recently, I don't think making Judge an elected position would decrease the political influence over the courts.
I strongly disagree with this - I support a lot of choice in democracy but I am concerned with the general existence of elections for local posts. I think a significant proportion of the population just blanket votes D or R and so you can get some really shady folks elected into these posts if they end up getting party endorsement.
