OPINION: Michigan State Senate makes mockery of judicial independence

Source: Detroit Free PressNov.mini storage 01--In Michigan (and most other constitutional democracies), the only thing that stands between the people and the excesses of whichever political party controls the executive or legislative branches is an independent, nonpartisan judiciary.But state Sen. Rick Jones has had about enough of that.Last week, Jones, a Grand Ledge Republican who chairs the GOP's Senate caucus, introduced legislation that would transfer jurisdiction over most lawsuits against the state from the Ingham County Circuit Court -- which has heard those lawsuits for more than 40 years -- to a panel of four Court of Appeals judges handpicked by the Michigan Supreme Court.Because Republicans hold a 5-2 majority on the state's highest court, the change would virtually guarantee that lawsuits filed against the state would be heard by appellate judges appointed by Snyder or one of his Republican predecessors.So, litigants with a beef against the Republican governor or the Republican-led Legislature would have to clear a skeptical audience of Republican judges before they were entitled to put their cases before a jury of their peers.If you want to see the separation of powers in all its majesty, boys and girls, you've come to the wrong state.A phony rationaleThe Court of Claims was established in the 1970s to hear litigation against the state. Jones says his purpose in shifting Court of Claims jurisdiction to the Court of Appeals is to cut costs and enable plaintiffs who must currently file suits against the state in Ingham County to file in any of four venues across Michigan."Good, commonsense reform is what we're doing here," he insisted during a brief floor debate in which Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing, denounced Jones' bill as "partisan rigging and shameless political protectionism."But Jones' rationale is horse twaddle, and he knows it.For one thing, the 150-170 cases filed each year in the Court of Claims account for just 2% of those managed by the Ingham County Circuit Court's nine judges. Jones' assertion tha迷你倉 moving Court of Claims jurisdiction to the Court of Appeal level will allow the Ingham court to cut a judge "and save $500,000 a year" is silly.And if Jones and his Republican colleagues were really interested in making the Court of Claims more accessible, they'd simply add it to the growing list of state courts that permit litigants to file claims electronically.What really concerns Republicans is the preponderance of Democratic voters in Ingham County, where most elected judges have ties to the Democratic Party, organized labor, or both. Even so, cases filed in the state Court of Claims are assigned to judges within the circuit by blind draw, just as other civil and criminal cases are.Jones' bill would circumvent even that element of chance by empowering whichever party has a majority on the state Supreme Court to dictate which judges are assigned to Court of Claims cases.Rigging the gameAny doubts about Jones' real motives were resolved Wednesday, when the Republican-led Senate adopted his bill -- on a straight party-line vote -- just five days after Jones introduced it. House Republicans and a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Snyder both indicated it faces a smooth ride to enactment.OK -- so maybe all this talk about the importance of an independent, nonpartisan judiciary has never amounted to much more than the wishful thinking of social studies teachers.After all, how independent can judges really be in a state where candidates for the highest court are nominated by the political parties and bankrolled by anonymous special interests, who exploit the parties' cash-laundering expertise to conceal both their identities and their motives?Social studies students will learn soon enough whose interests Michigan's judiciary is protecting.But in the meantime, couldn't Sen. Jones and his colleagues be a little more subtle? Or is rigging the fight in broad daylight what now passes for transparency in government?Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Detroit Free Press Visit the Detroit Free Press at .freep.com Distributed by MCT Information Services文件倉