Looking at Iowa AND A note on how we choose judges

Our legislators are considering a constitutional amendment being pushed by elder statespeople of both parties to eliminate our system of electing judges in favor of a system of retention elections in which voters would merely vote in favor of or opposed to keeping any given jurist on the bench. California and Iowa already have similar situations.

The Iowa Supreme Court has just overruled that Iowa Code section 595.2 [the state’s “Defense of Marriage” law]. This act was passed in an overwhelming and bipartisan manner during the tenure of former Democratic Governor [now Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack. The Court ruled that the law violates the state’s constitution.

I am not going to quibble about the law behind the ruling. I am not well enough versed in the Iowa Constitution or the arguments given to question it. I do note that coverage today indicates that the ruling was unanimous and I would suggest that since the justices all knew the election system that they have would not have made this ruling capriciously.

But I don’t know whether anybody here has wondered about the implications of things like today’s decision on elections here. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I am probably not the only one who will connect the two things this way.

We have already seen how a personalized campaign against a judge can result in removal for grounds more emotional than legal when we saw how in 1986 California voters ousted their chief justice Rose Bird and two associate justices whom they thought did not vote to allow enough criminals to be executed. Television commercials featuring children and other survivors of moral victims were shown across the state as big money was raised in the effort to remove them. It will be interesting now to see how voters in Iowa react toward their high court justices in the next elections.

Our system has worked well for the most part. People are probably correct in seeing problems coming up. We can look over the St. Croix to Wisconsin and look at their judicial elections going on right now and see some of the problems that happen there and might here. Maybe we should pause before we rush to change things here.

FYI: This ruling was by Iowa’s highest court was based on that state’s constitution and has no direct effect in any other state. Iowa has a time-consuming process for constitutional amendment and the absolute earliest any amendment could go to the voters would be in the 2012 election, so it would seem that this ruling will be in effect for some time. Iowa does not require residency for marriage, something which has kept the Little Brown Church in business. We will probably learn shortly whether our local authorities think that Minnesota will be entitled or obligated to recognize same-sex marriages performed there to residents of our state.