Kemmeter column: Voters get to narrow justice candidates Tuesday
By Gene Kemmeter
Voters throughout Wisconsin will go to the polls Tuesday, Feb. 18, for a statewide primary to narrow the number of candidates for a justice of the Supreme Court from three to two.
Can you name two of the candidates? I’ll bet you can’t. You can probably name the incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, because his television ads are circulating on the airwaves. He was appointed to the court by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 to serve the unexpired term of David Prosser, so he carries the term of “conservative,” a moniker that produces a great deal of financial support.
The challengers are Jill J. Karofsky, a Dane County circuit judge, and Ed Fallone, a Marquette University Law School professor. They are called “progressives” or “liberals” by the “conservatives,” titles that are not terms of endearment in this political climate. Karofsky was elected to her Dane County post in 2017, and Fallone has been at Marquette since 1992.
If you want to know more about the incumbent and the challengers, you’ll have to research it on your own, but be leery when doing so on the internet. Make sure it’s a reliable source, because there’s a lot of crackpot sites that try to resemble reliable sources so they can promote their candidate.
The top two finishers in Tuesday’s election will face off in the April 7 election, a date some politicians tried to get changed because it’s the presidential primary election and they feared it would bring out too many voters from the opposing party.
Should we really elect the justices to the Supreme Court, or even the Wisconsin Appeals Courts? Candidates usually refuse to answer questions about individual or theoretical cases, saying they might have to issue a ruling on a case with similar characteristics, so they don’t want to form a prejudicial mindset beforehand. That leaves voters in the dark about candidates’ thinking.
Electing judges for Circuit Court at the county level, where the voters know the candidates, usually produces someone who is fair, impartial and competent. But it doesn’t work so well at the next levels, where election outcomes have had a bad aroma because of excessive spending and accusations of unethical campaign tactics.
Reformers, including retired U.S. Supreme Court justices, have long campaigned for states and the nation to set up a system for appointments to the upper echelon judicial positions. They’ve suggested that the American Bar Association make a list of recommendations because that group knows the attorneys they regulate.
Congress used to follow that proposal for federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, but politicians pushed it aside because too few of their like-minded believers weren’t included on the recommendations. So they scrapped it and replaced it with “majority rules” mentality.
The system definitely needs some corrections, and those corrections need to be in the form of law instead of a standard operation procedure. But don’t expect any solution soon. We’re not in an era of bi-partisan legislation where politicians act for the good of the country instead of themselves or their party.