Tag: legislation

West Virginia will again consider adding an intermediate court of appeals

West Virginia is one of the few states that has no intermediate appellate court, meaning that its state supreme court faces a more congested, mandatory docket. Lawmakers have periodically proposed adding a new court, but without success.

The effort has begun again: the West Virginia Appellate Reorganization Act was introduced in the state’s senate judiciary committee this week.

Intermediate appellate courts cost money and demand infrastructure, but they also make a lot of sense from the standpoint of the administration of justice. Some lawmakers are optimistic that this will be the year.

More on the Pennsylvania plan to create partisan judicial elections by district

I was pleased to weigh in this week on the proposed Pennsylvania legislation that would shift partisan elections for its state supreme court from a statewide ballot to a regional one. (More on the proposal here and here.) As the Spotlight PA article suggests, my concern is not with creating geographic districts, but rather with the potentially explosive mix of districts and partisan races. That combination seems to me to especially invite special interest and dark money, similar to the notorious 2004 supreme court election in Illinois.

Interestingly enough, South Carolina is also considering a move to expand and diversity the geographic perspective of its supreme court, which is chosen entirely by the legislature. We’ll continue to follow both proposals here.

Making sense of the new PACER bill

There is plenty of room for constructive compromise, but it requires everyone to acknowledge that “free” PACER is not actually free.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Open Courts Act of 2020, H.R. 8235, by a voice vote. The bill would radically reform access to federal court records by requiring (among other things) that the courts’ PACER system be modernized and its contents made free to the public. The bill drew praise from open courts advocates, and furious pushback from the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO). Indeed, the Judicial Conference’s reaction was probably the most vigorous response I have seen from the courts in many years.

It is a rare piece of legislation these days that can simultaneously garner bipartisan support and solicit institutional panic from the judicial branch. So it’s worth examining closely. What we find is an opportunity for the court system to improve its transparency and its own performance, albeit not on the schedule or in the manner it would prefer. Continue reading “Making sense of the new PACER bill”

Salt Lake City federal courthouse to be named for Orrin Hatch

Congress can still agree on a few things, it seems. A bill to rename the Salt Lake City, Utah federal courthouse after retired Senator Orrin Hatch passed both houses of Congress unanimously this week. The bill has been sent to the President for signature.

Senator Hatch served Utah for 42 years in the Senate, and was a leading voice on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Much of that time overlapped with another old Judicary Committee hand, Joe Biden. It is a fitting tribute to name the Salt Lake City courthouse in his honor.

Electoral chickens come home to roost in North Carolina courts

Back in 2017, the North Carolina legislature repeatedly battled Governor Roy Cooper over the size and composition of the state’s courts. The Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill which would return the state to partisan judicial elections, a move criticized both by Democrat Cooper and by the state’s then-Chief Justice, Mark Martin (who favored a merit selection plan). Cooper vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode the veto. The legislature and Governor also fought over the size of the state’s Court of Appeals. Later, a series of undignified fights over the fate of individual judges and judicial candidates cast the state’s third branch in a political light that it never would have sought for itself.

The legislature’s changes seem to have had some of their desired partisan effect for 2020. As noted last week, Republican candidates at first appeared to sweep the state’s judicial races. Now the highest profile race, for Chief Justice, appears headed for a recount, with current Chief Justice Cheri Beasley (a Democrat) and current Associate Justice Paul Newby (a Republican) separated by just a few thousand votes.

There are also some cascade effects. Newby’s choice to run for Chief Justice meant that his Associate Justice seat on the court became vacant, and that open seat was sought by two Court of Appeals Judges, Lucy Inman and Phil Berger Jr. Berger, the Republican, won the Supreme Court seat, and his now-open seat on the Court of Appeals will be filled by Governor Cooper. In the end, the seven-member Supreme Court will still have a Democratic majority — either four (if Newby wins the Chief Justiceship) or five (if Beasley retains it).

So at the end of the day, Republicans may make some inroads into the state judiciary, but at the cost of further politicizing the third branch. Courts will have to work harder than ever to build public trust, not because of the quality of their decisions, but because legislators have seen fit to brand them with a (D) or an (R).

Until partisans on both sides end their efforts to undermine the courts in this way, I don’t want to hear a damn thing about declining judicial legitimacy. It is a frontal assault on a co-equal branch of government, nothing less.

 

On Biden, the Court, and what voters “deserve to know”

Joe Biden’s refusal last week to state whether he supports the Court-packing scheme advanced by several prominent members of his own party, and his insistence that voters “don’t deserve” to know where he stands on the issue, has drawn understandable scrutiny. Several commentators have attempted to dissect both the political cynicism behind the proposal and Biden’s strategy for declining to comment on it. (In particular, I recommend the first dozen minutes of this Commentary podcast as well as this op-ed by Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal).

I want to focus here on what the kerfuffle means for Biden post-election, since it seems very likely that he will win the Presidency next month. As Baker points out (behind a paywall, unfortunately), “even Mr. Biden—something of a procedural conservative—must be aware how grotesque the idea [of court packing] is. The prospect of a high court turned into an adjunct of the executive and legislative branches, staffed by black-gowned, forelock-tugging accessories to untrammeled political excess, must surely give him pause.”

Baker is right. Biden is too steeped in the Washington politics of the last fifty years to not be a traditionalist on this issue. Indeed, he has had three decades to reveal himself as a disruptor of court structure, both as a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as Vice-President. To be sure, he has spearheaded legislation that has changed court operations, and he bears heavy responsibility for setting the tone of current Supreme Court confirmations with his behavior during the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. But he has nevertheless conducted himself according to the standards of twentieth-century American politics: play hard, and don’t kick the game board over just because you think you’re losing.

The extremists in his party disagree, and are embracing the vision of converting the Court into an arm of the progressive movement by brute political force. This  development should concern all who believe in preserving the delicate balance between court independence and interdependence, and indeed the proposal is playing very poorly with most voters. (Perhaps in a nod to this reality, Biden himself finally stated that he was “not a fan” of court packing in a radio interview on Monday.)

Progressive extremists will certainly put pressure on a Biden Administration to force the court-packing policy into existence, especially if Democrats win the Senate in November.  And of course Biden, like any President, would feel some compulsion to support the legislative agenda from a same-party Congress. But some of the more senior legislative members of his own party recognize the inherent dangers (political and structural) of court-packing, and would likely try to to slow down any movement, especially in the Senate. Moreover, there is no significant reason to believe that his White House would simply be a vessel for extreme progressives. Biden is a wily veteran in Washington. No matter how he may project on the camoaign trail, he surely knows how to wield the levers of power behind closed doors.

Bottom line: A Biden Administration will not support court packing and will try to deemphasize it. Look for Biden to lean on Nancy Pelosi, and others who have been burned by aligning themselves with their intraparty radicals, for assistance in tamping down the extremism. Biden’s position may prove to be a last stand, depending on the growth of the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and court-packing may remain as an issue in 2024. But a lot will happen between now and then, and the short-term likelihood of this terrible policy proposal coming to fruition is probably slimmer than it appears.

Jurisdiction stripping is back, this time from the left

Here’s something I wrote about federal judicial accountability:

Many commentators have praised Article III’s guarantees of life tenure and freedom from salary cuts as essential tools to preserve judicial independence. Far less frequently have the commentators explored the impact of these guarantees on judicial accountability. Rather, until relatively recently, the prevalent assumption (dating back to the original Federalist debates) has been that “the perceived need for judicial accountability to counterbalance life tenure, nonreducible salaries, and judicial review, began and ended with the impeachment mechanism.” A reexamination of that assumption, however, has been sparked in the early twenty-first century both by academic commentators and some in Congress. The last ten years alone have produced a host of creative— sometimes outrageous—alternatives to promote federal judicial accountability through (in most cases) a combination of executive and legislative power and populist sentiment. Some such proposals are effectively substance-neutral, most notably replacing life tenure with fixed, lengthy judicial terms. Other proposals, however, are aimed at the substance of judicial decision-making, among them several schemes to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases. Prominent politicians have even occasionally threatened impeachment—or worse—for federal judges as a punishment for decisions they did not find appropriate. Contributing to the tenor of politically “accountable” judges is a federal judicial appointment process that has become increasingly partisan in the last two decades.

This paragraph was part of the introduction to an article I co-wrote twelve years ago, and yet it feels surprisingly fresh. The difference is that while many of the efforts to subject the court to populism and political sentiment a decade ago came from conservatives, today those same views are being embraced by the liberal establishment. Countless bad ideas — Court packing, term limits, and the like — continue to emerge, with the most recent being the rediscovery of jurisdiction-stripping. Bloomberg Businessweek explains:

Some liberal proponents believe jurisdiction stripping could help Democrats shield bold future legislation from damaging court battles. In theory a Democratic Congress could pass a health-care plan or a Green New Deal with a provision stipulating that the legislation lies outside the bounds of Supreme Court review.

Under variations of the jurisdiction-stripping proposal, Democratic lawmakers could also limit the ability of lower courts to review legislation or could confine legal challenges to geographic regions where courts are generally sympathetic.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. Today’s politicians, unable or unwilling to do the hard work of compromise and dealmaking, are leaving the courts to make sense of hastily written and sloppy laws. When lawmakers don’t like the results, they propose extreme “fixes” which would deny the courts the ability to do even their core adjudicative work. This is wrong, whether it comes from the right or the left, and is symptomatic of how awful our political class — and their academic enablers — have become.

Judicial Conference to push for legislation and funding to assure safety of federal judges

In the wake of the horrific shooting of Judge Esther Salas’s son and husband at her New Jersey home last month, the Judicial Conference of the United States has resolved to seek aggressive legislation and funding to better protect federal judges and their families. The Judicial Conference’s press release, which lays out its proposals, is here.

Let’s hope that Congress acts quickly to provide the necessary resources.

A renewed effort to create regional judicial elections in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania state senator Ryan Aument reintroduced legislation this week to elect the state’s appellate judges by region. The goal is to assure fairness of geographic representation within the court system:

Aument noted that a cursory review of Pennsylvania’s Superior Court and Commonwealth Court judge compliment in 2018 when this proposal was first developed shows that more than half of all the members of those courts were from only two of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, which only represent 21% of the state’s population.

He also pointed out that five of the seven Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices, or over two-thirds of the justices, were from Allegheny or Philadelphia counties, leaving 79% of the state’s population unrepresented on Pennsylvania’s highest court.

I understand the goal of the bill, but it misses the larger point that Pennsylvania’s judicial election structure itself is highly flawed. As I noted earlier this year, “geographic representation could be achieved much more fairly and efficiently through a commission-based appointment system than through the messy (and litigation-begging) process of drawing election districts in the legislature.”

Federal courts ask Congress for coronavirus assistance

The federal judiciary has asked Congress for $36.6 million in supplemental funding to work through the coronavirus pandemic. The money would be used for cleaning courthouses, enhanced medical screening, information technology updates, and other IT infrastructure, among other things. The judiciary is also seeking new legislation to toll certain bankruptcy deadlines, add new temporary judgeships, and protect litigants and detainees from unnecessary coronavirus exposure.

The letter setting out the requests is here.