Over the past 10 years, a highly-coordinated, well-funded
campaign has been underway to fundamentally alter the composition of
America’s state courts. The campaign’s goal: exclude conservative,
rule-of-law judges from the bench. This campaign has been bankrolled by
George Soros, a hedge fund operator with a net worth of $13 billion,
according to the Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people.

This multi-million dollar campaign to reshape our courts encompasses
efforts to revise state constitutions, rewrite judicial recusal rules,
abolish democratic judicial elections, and impose a judicial selection
system that will transfer power from the people to a small, unelected
and unaccountable commission comprised primarily of legal elites,
typically representing powerful special interest groups, such as state
trial lawyers associations.

We cannot take this lying down. Your right to vote is at stake.

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.

Nevertheless, proponents of merit selection have continued their
campaign unabated. Indeed, the campaign now uses the Supreme Court’s
recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—a
decision that allows corporations and unions to make independent
expenditures related to federal races but does not permit corporations
or unions to make direct contributions to candidates—as its rallying
cry, arguing that the decision will precipitate a "flood of money” into
state judicial races.

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.