THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 16, 1996 TAG: 9601160013
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 45 lines
Picking judges will no longer be monopolized by the Virginia General Assembly's Democrats. That's good news - and a consequence of last November's elections, when all of the legislature's 140 seats - 100 in the House of Delegates, 40 in the Senate - had to be filled.
A Senate split 20-20 between Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously last weekend to change the judge-selection rules. Before this change,the Senate Democrats' caucus chose judges. The Democrats, being in the majority, shut Republicans out of the process. The privilege of recommending candidates for the bench is now lodged with senators representing the districts in which judgeship openings occur.
No longer will fights over judgeships be settled solely by a single party's caucus. The reform is welcome and, happily, popular across the political spectrum.
Sen. William F. Parkerson Jr., a conservative Democrat from Chesterfield County, and Sen. Joseph V. Gartlan Jr., a liberal Democrat from Fairfax, typify the breadth of the reform's appeal. For years, Parkerson had pushed for changing to a less-partisan procedure for choosing judges. Gartlan played a leading role in writing the reform that the Senate embraced.
The new rule smacks of fairness. Will it serve the public interest, too, by improving the quality of the Virginia judiciary? There is no way yet to know. The clubby naming of judges has produced in Virginia a judiciary whose membership ranges from sorry to superb but probably is better as a group than state judges elected by the voters.
Empowering all Virginia senators to recommend nominees won't necessarily improve the quality of justice. The reform neither banishes cronyism or political-trading nor installs heavily meritocractic selection in their place. But the change does expand the pool of potential judges to include Republicans previously denied consideration. And it gives voters another standard by which to measure their senators' fitness at election time. Senators recommending turkeys for the bench will court voters' disdain. by CNB