All three branches of Illinois government require serious, structural reforms. Such reforms can only come from a new state constitutional convention. If we do not take advantage of the call for a con-con on the November ballot, those reforms will surely not be made before 2008, the next time a con-con call will appear on our ballot. I urge all Illinois citizens to vote yes for con-con.
Most of all it is our system of electing state court judges which makes a state constitutional convention necessary. Next month, Cook County residents who go to the polls will vote on 47 judges running for retention and will be confronted with 51 candidates running in partisan elections to fill judicial vacancies. Most of us will not be familiar with very many of these judicial candidates.
”Judicial elections” are as random as the winners of the Lotto jackpot. People vote for judicial candidates based on the ethnicity of their names, their sex and their color, not on the candidates` judicial qualifications. It is virtually impossible for the most conscientious citizen to make an informed choice about any judicial candidate. As former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Seymour Simon has said: ”The notion that the voters choose their judges is a myth. Quite simply, the voters do not choose most of the judges in the more populous parts of this state; the political parties do.”
The current system is also a disaster for the judges themselves. They are forced to raise extraordinary sums of money for their campaigns, particularly when they are first running in contested elections. They look for that money from the most logical source, the lawyers who practice before them. It is a demeaning process for judges. Furthermore, no matter how honest the judge may be and no matter how scrupulous the lawyer who gives the contribution may be, this system reeks with an aura of impropriety.
Some prominent members of the black community who want to keep the elective system, such as Illinois Appellate Court Justice R. Eugene Pincham, claim that the push for merit selection is nothing more than an effort by white liberals to prevent blacks from going on the bench now that the black community has obtained significant political power in Chicago. Nothing could be further from the truth.
History shows that the drive for merit selection is no recent phenomenon. On May 17, 1954, most of the news section in the Chicago Daily News was devoted to discussion of the U.S. Supreme Court`s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, banning racial segregation in public schools. But on page 8 of that issue was an article which read, in part: ”The rough outline of a court reform system proposal for Illinois has been tentatively approved by a joint committee of the Illinois State and Chicago Bar Associations. The proposal is aimed at modifying and improving the judicial reform bill rejected by the legislature last year. A principal aim is to take judges out of politics.”
Opponents of con-con say that any necessary changes in the Illinois Constitution can be made by the legislature`s proposing amendments to the voters instead of by con-con. But history demonstrates that the legislative process will not work. Three times since the 1970 Constitution was adopted, the legislature has bowed to the pleas of veterans groups and placed on the ballot an amendment to exempt veterans posts from property tax. Three times the voters have defeated it.
But not once has the legislature listened to the repeated cries of its constituents to end the farce of electing judges. A merit selection amendment has been proposed in the Illinois legislature during every session since 1953. By now it is quite clear that the legislature will never put merit selection on the ballot. Legislators have too much of a vested interest in preserving the current elective system. The leaders of both parties use judgeships as favors and incentives.
Though many of the men and women who serve on the bench in Illinois are bright, dedicated and scrupulously honest, the current elective system still fosters incompetence, lack of judicial independence and, as shown by Operation Greylord, massive corruption. It must be changed. The call for con-con on the Nov. 8 ballot is the only vehicle available to Illinois citizens to end the elective system of judges during this generation.
