Hijacking Justice: How Judicial Elections Are Replaced by Liberal Special Interests | The Heritage Foundation

Hijacking Justice: How Judicial Elections Are Replaced by Liberal Special Interests | The Heritage Foundation

A groundbreaking study released by the American Justice Partnership, Justice Hijacked: Your Right to Vote Is at Stake, reveals that Soros’s Open Society Institute has invested at least $45.4 million in earmarked funds in its campaign to reshape the judiciary....

Merit Selection

This multi-million-dollar campaign to reshape America’s courts encompasses efforts to revise state constitutions, rewrite judicial recusal rules, abolish democratic judicial elections, and impose a judicial selection system known by its proponents as “merit selection.”

Under “merit selection,” the power to select judges is transferred from the people to a small, unelected, unaccountable commission comprised primarily of legal elites, typically including representatives of powerful special interest groups, such as state trial lawyers associations—whose politics, not surprisingly, are more liberal than the general public.

Promoted as a method to keep “politics” out of the judicial selection process, the merit committees in many states are extremely politicized and have fueled several high-profile political controversies in the past few years. Such confrontations have prompted scholars to question whether the merit selection system serves any of its stated purposes....

Backroom Political Deals

Ironically, the same opponents of judicial elections who loudly protest about contributions negatively affecting the independence of the judiciary—a claim for which they have yet to provide any concrete evidence—are receiving and spending tens of millions of dollars to not merely influence judicial elections but eliminate them and turn judicial selection over to special interests and backroom political deals. This does not remove politics from the process but rather moves politics outside of public view.

The well-funded proponents of so-called merit selection engage in a kind of political self-dealing, promoting selection by interest groups who are more closely aligned to their liberal agenda. Those who are concerned about the influence of money in judicial elections should pay more attention to the money spent by those seeking to use “merit” selection not to eliminate politics but to embed interest group politics formally into the selection process, thereby tilting judicial selection in their political favor.

Soros Money against America again.