Still speaking at age 83 about “the common good” and “impartial justice,” former Gov. Al Quie remains as eager as ever to translate noble theory into practice. Hence his decision last year to gather a group to whip up a plan to preserve the integrity of Minnesota’s judiciary.
Nobody asked Quie to take on this task; nobody needed to. Days after moving into the governor’s mansion back in 1979, Quie launched Minnesota’s first merit selection process for appointing judges. By relying on a nonpartisan screening commission to identify qualified judicial candidates, Quie shook off the gubernatorial tradition of handing out judgeships to political allies. Ability replaced allegiance as the standard for judicial appointments — a policy state lawmakers eventually wrote into law.
For years, the system has worked well: Minnesota’s court system stands among the most admired in the nation. Governors have labored to choose judges without so much as a glance at party rosters. And in the rare instances when a judge has proved inept, voters have usually had the chance to consider ejecting the incumbent in favor of a compelling challenger.
Every Camelot eventually crumbles, and court-watchers like Quie now have new cause to worry that the golden age of Minnesota justice may soon be under siege. Their fears spring from a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that scrapped Minnesota’s rules barring judicial candidates from voicing views about political or
legal matters.
The upshot, many people fear, could be the sort of pandemonium already common in states where judicial contests resemble political slugfests — where challengers mock incumbent judges for cleaving to the Constitution instead of
the popular will.
Such big-buck, bench-buying judicial elections may make big donors more comfortable about the prospect of appearing in court. But it’s hard to see how they serve the cause of equal justice — or that sacred thing Quie calls the
common good.
They don’t, and Quie is insistent that Minnesota’s court system shall never tumble into the kind of tawdry political free-for-all that has claimed judicial elections in so many other states. The surest way to avoid it, he thought, was to
gather the state’s wisest minds to contemplate how its judge-selection process might be refined to hold politics at bay.
The group he convened — the Minnesota Citizens Commission for the Preservation of an Impartial Judiciary — conducted hearings around the state and then sifted through its findings for the best way to keep judicial elections
clean.
The commission announced its conclusions last week, and the plan’s wisdom is evident in its simplicity. The group proposes maintaining a merit-selection system for initial appointment of judges. After appointment, judges’ performance would be examined by a new evaluation commission that would issue ratings — “qualified” or “not qualified” — that would appear alongside judges’ names when they stand for reelection.
But the elections the Quie commission envisions would have little in common with those conducted now: Instead of contested judicial elections — which hold great potential for turning into political dogfights — the group recommends up-ordown retention elections. Though voters could still decide to oust a sitting judge, the vacancy would be filled by the state’s merit-selection system.
The independence of Minnesota’s judiciary is one of this state’s uncounted blessings. It will be missed once it’s gone. The Quie commission — empowered only by its own good sense — can preserve the gift.
