The cuts “will seriously compromise the public’s access to their courts and our ability to provide equal access to justice throughout the state,” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said, according to a San Francisco Appeal article. They “are both devastating and disheartening,” she said.

San Bernardino County Presiding Judge Ronald M. Christianson said the latest cuts will have major repercussions, according to a Press-Enterprise blog. “I think it’s fair to say that our court is going to be a smaller court, with services reduced, longer lines, and delays in processing cases,” he said.

Brown announced a revision of the California budget including a $300 million cut for trial court funding, a delay of $240 million in spending for trial court construction and a $4 million savings by requiring court employees to increase their contributions to pension funds.

California already has seen four years of court funding cuts totaling $653 million.

LoBasso explains how the system would work, with a nonpartisan commission of both lawyers and non-lawyers selecting judicial nominees. Pennsylvania’s governor would in turn select the most qualified candidates.

He points to soaring judicial election spending around the country as  posing potential conflict of interest issues, especially when campaign donors are lawyers who later appear in court before the jurist they helped to win an Election Day victory.

LoBasso also quotes the Urban League as saying the proposed system offers opportunity for candidates who are not wealthy, and for candidates of greater diversity, to attain the bench. He reports support for the proposals by Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, a watchdog  and JAS partner group.

To learn more about the debate over merit-based systems versus judicial elections, see the JAS issues page on the topic. To learn more about the legislation in Pennsylvania, see Gavel Grab.

A veteran Supreme Court litigator, Goldstein suggests in a post at SCOTUSblog, which he founded, that “the facts reported by Toobin don’t seem to support his conclusions about the Chief Justice,” John Roberts Jr.

Toobin asserted that Chief Justice Roberts personally “orchestrated” Citizens United in 2010 (see Gavel Grab) and that in pushing to broadly change existing law, “the real question for him, it seems, was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party. Roberts’s choice was: a lot.”

Goldstein examines the court’s key steps in deciding the case as reported by Toobin, and questions whether Toobin may have overreached in arriving at his conclusions about Chief Justice Roberts’s role.

“Elections are the worst way to select judges,” Rosenthal writes. “The process leaves judges beholden to party bosses, wealthy donors, and the whims of the very, very few people who actually bother to vote.”

Rosenthal was reacting to a Detroit Free Press column by the task force’s two leaders, state Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly and senior federal appeals Judge James Ryan, that was the subject of a Gavel Grab post earlier this week.

The task force’s top recommendations were disclosure of all funding sources in Michigan Supreme Court elections, and elimination of the partisan nomination process for candidates for the high court so that it matches the current nonpartisan election system.

Conservatives contended Tracy Thorne-Begland’s support for same-sex marriage and his challenging the military’s now-defunct “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy made him unsuitable for the judgeship (see Gavel Grab). A former fighter pilot who was discharged honorably from the Navy, Thorne-Begland (photo) is a Richmond prosecutor.

The editorial decried how Thorne-Begland’s nomination “was sabotaged by an ugly campaign of homophobic bigotry led by Virginia Republicans. In a vote at 1 a.m. Tuesday, the GOP-dominated House of Delegates, with an avowed homophobe leading the charge, killed his candidacy, thereby ensuring that Virginia state courts remain free of openly gay judges.”

A New York Times article was headlined, “Gay Prosecutor is Denied Virginia Judgeship Despite Partisan Support.” The article placed the Virginia battle in a national political context, saying “The rejection comes as the country is in the midst of a roiling debate over same-sex marriage that has placed the civil rights of gays and lesbians in the national spotlight.”

One of the most probing commentaries came from Dahlia Lithwick in Slate. She likened Thorne-Begland’s advocacy to challenge discriminatory rules to past civil rights and women’s rights efforts by Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, respectively; both later became Supreme Court justices. Lithwick wrote:

“It should terrify anyone who cares about the future of the judiciary that advocacy, especially passionate advocacy, and most especially passionate advocacy on civil rights issues with respect to laws that have since been repealed, can be disqualifying. Or at least it can be disqualifying when that zealous advocacy is for a cause about which elected officials have personal religious objections.”

A Washington Post news article noted that among nominees elected to judgeships by legislators in the session’s closing hours were individuals who have championed gun rights and organized labor as vociferously as Thorne-Begland has championed gay rights.

At times, the national debate over same-sex marriage has strongly impacted fair and impartial courts. In 2010, after an ouster drive funded heavily by conservative out-of-state interests, voters in Iowa removed from the state Supreme Court three justices who had been part of a unanimous court ruling that permitted same-sex marriage.

Justice at Stake has urged efforts to enhance diversity on the bench, stating on its website: “In order to function effectively, every American must have the utmost confidence in their courts. However, a judiciary that does not reflect the population it serves undermines that confidence in creating a perceived or actual bias in judicial decision making. An ideal bench is representative of the larger community, including women, persons of color, members of the LGBT community, persons with disabilities and other underrepresented groups.”

Justice Scalia’s tone this year has raised new criticisms, according to the article, which notes the justice’s accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of “high-handedness,” questioning whether U.S. immigration policy was designed to “please Mexico” and dismissing as “extraordinary” part of the U.S. solicitor general’s defense of the Affordable Care Act.

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor was President Reagan’s solicitor general, said that while Justice Scalia always has asked “pointed” questions, “he came across much more like an advocate” in oral arguments over the health care case. Justice Scalia was an appointee of Reagan’s.

“Someone who had just tuned into the health-care argument might get the impression that the court is a much more partisan institution than it actually is,” said David Strauss, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

But Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at Washington-based Cato Institute, did not think Justice Scalia has gone too far. “He’s sarcastic, and he goes right to the heart of the weakness of the advocate who’s in front of him,” Shapiro said.

Kansas Judge Steve Leben and Minnesota Judge Kevin Burke, the past and current presidents, respectively, of the American Judges Association, raised concerns about a “partisan tone” within the judiciary in a recent essay. You can learn more about their commentary from Gavel Grab.

• In the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, an article about three members of the state Supreme Court seeking re-election was entitled, “Supreme Court challengers say court is too pro-business.”
• According to FactCheck.org, claims by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., that biased “liberal judges” redrew her congressional district “in retaliation for repeatedly standing up to President Obama” are false.
• A work group in Oregon is looking at possible reform of state Appeals Court and Supreme Court elections, according to KLCC.org. To learn more, see Gavel Grab.

A New York Times editorial said the lawsuit “makes some strong historical points, but it may not be necessary.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said two senators who had proposed rules last year to rein in use of the filibuster had been right, whereas he was wrong. Reid should lead a reform effort is he continues in January as majority leader, the editorial said.

Emmet Bondurant, a lawyer and member of the Common Cause board of directors, outlined his case for a constitutional challenge of the filibuster in a 2011 scholarly article, according to a Washington Post commentary by Ezra Klein. “Bondurant makes a strong case,” Klein writes.

Jonathan H. Adler writes in The Volokh Conspiracy blog, on the other hand, “I don’t think this suit will go anywhere,” and Adler spells out his legal reasoning. Adler suggested a challenge to nomination filibusters, as opposed to Common Cause’s suit over filibusters against legislation, “is more plausible” given the Senate’s obligation to “advise and consent” on presidential nominations.

Filibusters are one tool that senators have employed to block judicial nominations. Earlier this month, Justice at Stake and 28 other national organizations called for prompt Senate votes on judicial nominations (see Gavel Grab). The groups’ statement said leaders of both political parties must end a chronic gridlock that is thwarting the delivery of justice.

Common Cause is a JAS partner group.

On Monday, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel in Washington, D.C., by a 2-1 vote, declined to stay an order by a lower court judge that directed groups running election-related TV ads to identify their donors, according to a Los Angeles Times article.

The Supreme Court endorsed public disclosure in its landmark Citizens United ruling, the two judges in the majority noted. “The public interest is best served by access to more, not less, information,” they wrote.

“It’s the first major breakthrough in overcoming the massive amounts of secret contributions that are flowing into federal elections,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. “It certainly gives us momentum.”

At issue was a ruling by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She said the Federal Election Commission went too far when it allowed groups that fund “electioneering communications” ads to keep their financiers anonymous (see Gavel Grab). Such ads clearly seek to sway voters, even if the ads stop short of specifically calling  for a candidate’s election or defeat.

Until an appeal of the case is decided in the fall, any group running “electioneering communications” ads will be required to disclose all of its donors going back to the start of 2011, the Los Angeles Times said.

But it was uncertain whether these groups actually will comply, a Huffington Post article suggested.

Shortly after Citizens United was handed down in 2010, Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, emphasized the importance of campaign finance disclosure in judicial elections.

“States that elect judges should immediately enact strong, real-time reporting laws, so that special-interest spending is forced into the sunlight. Voters have a right to know who is paying to put judges on their courts,” he said. To learn more about the importance of robust disclosure laws, see the JAS issues page on the topic.

Brown focuses on two recent episodes. In one, Roy Moore recently won the Republican primary nomination for his old job as chief justice for the state Supreme Court (see Gavel Grab), despite his removal from his post in 2003 by his peers for what Brown calls ethical violations. In the second, Chris Messervy, a local candidate for District Court judge, was denied by the GOP’s state-level governing entity a certificate of nomination from the party. Messervy had multiple violations of Alabama campaign finance disclosure law.

Brown asks, “Both the Moore nomination and Messervy disqualification should raise a fundamental question for civic-minded Alabamians. How should we select judges in our state? Should we continue to elect judges, and perhaps others in the judicial branch, on a partisan basis?”

After tracing the history of Alabama judicial elections, and discussing the critical importance of impartial and well qualified judges, he points to the Moore and Messervy episodes as meriting a “wake-up call for conscientious judges and lawyers affiliated with both parties or with neither party. Those who can speak with authority about judicial selection, such as leaders in the bar associations, should manifest the political courage necessary to advocate a change in Alabama’s judicial selection.