ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701210020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO GENERAL ASSEMBLY
DURING his 12 years in the General Assembly, former Republican Del. Steve Agee pursued a reform agenda that included efforts to depoliticize the process by which judges are selected. Today, the Salem lawyer is an acknowledged candidate for the Virginia Supreme Court, and the fate of his candidacy will be determined by the system he sought to change.
If that's one irony, here's another: By backing Agee's bid despite his GOP affiliation, General Assembly Democrats would be helping to preserve the traditional method of selecting judges. They would be demonstrating that the process is not as vulnerable to partisan politics as critics like Agee (and us) have contended.
Democratic legislators from this part of the state, in particular, should seriously consider Agee's candidacy. Both he and the other known candidate, former Democratic Del. Bernard Cohen, appear well-qualified. Agee's selection would give the court two justices from Salem; even so, the Agee advantage over Cohen is geographical. Like retiring Justice Roscoe Stephenson of Covington, Agee is from Western Virginia. The selection of Cohen, a Northern Virginian, would upend the court's regional balance.
Had Agee been a stridently partisan, rigidly ideological lawmaker, assembly Democrats could not and should not be expected to support his quest for the Supreme Court. But Agee was a commonsense, moderate legislator who won high marks for fairness and openmindedness from colleagues on both sides of the aisles.
In form, the judicial-selection system remains the same: Judges are nominated by the majority-party caucus, which then maintains voting unity to ensure those nominees are selected by the full General Assembly. But the altered political dynamics of recent years hold out the possibility, however frail, that partisan considerations won't necessarily rule the day.
The most obvious example of change is power sharing in the state Senate, arranged after the 1995 election produced a 20-20 party-line floor split. Even earlier, when Democrats had clear majorities in both houses, many of them had begun relying on informal merit-selection procedures, such as bar-association endorsements, to reduce the political element in the selection of local judges.
Virginia still needs a formal, full-fledged merit system for selecting judges. Senate power-sharing is in place, after all, only until the next election. In the House, the Democratic caucus still reigns, and not all its members (at least until the GOP takes over the House) are committed to nonpolitical judicial selection. But some may be. Agee's candidacy for the state's high court is a test of that commitment among Western Virginia Democrats.
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