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Friday, May 01, 2009
Ind. Courts - More on: Conferees agreed to version of St. Joe judges selection bill; my thoughts
Updating this ILB entry from Tuesday, HEA 1491 is now ready for submission to the Governor.
The new panel of three Court of Appeals judges created by the bill is not to begin operating until July 1, 2011. Thus it will not impact this biennial budget. The LSA projections are that the impact of the new panel in the next biennium will be nearly $4.5 million.
A check of the Governor's 2009 Bill Watch shows that, as of this writing, Gov. Daniels has not yet received HEA 1491. When he does receive the bill, he may sign it, veto it, or allow it to become law without his signature. If he vetoes the bill, the General Assembly, when it next meets, which may be soon, may override it by a simple majority vote in each house.
The original House bill proposed to make all St. Joesph County judges elective. Some are now appointed via a merit system. Lake is the only other county where all judges are not elected. Many have thought of these two counties as the models for future efforts to make all county judges merit.
The Senate added the provision to create a 6th Court of Appeals panel. The House agreed to the Senate change.
There has been no demonstrated need for a new multi-million dollar appellate panel. Some have said this addition is needed so that Gov. Daniels can add more Republicans to the Court of Appeals, which currently has 13 members appointed by Democratic governors, and 2 members appointed by Gov. Daniels, a Republican.
My thoughts. Veto the bill, Gov. Daniels. Rather than a new, unnecessary sixth panel of the Court of Appeals, if we are going to be adding judges with no demonstrated workload need, wouldn't it be preferable to add two new justices to the Supreme Court of Indiana?
The Supreme Court consists of five men, none of whom appear likely to step down in the foreseeable future. If the Supreme Court were expanded to seven members, you, Gov. Daniels would be in a position to select two women to serve on the Court. The results would be huge, and the fiscal impact would be less.
BTW, Gov. Daniels, a reader has sent me this article by Dalia Lithwick of Slate Magazine on why we need more than one woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. The same rationale follows for why we need gender diversity on our state Supreme Court.
Her article, posted April 21st, includes:
When constitutional historians sit down someday to compile the definitive Supreme Court Concordance of Not Getting It, the entry directly next to Lilly Ledbetter ("Court fails utterly to understand realities of gender pay discrimination") will be Savana Redding ("Court compares strip searches of 13-year-old girls to American Pie-style locker-room hijinks"). After today's argument, it's plain the court will overturn a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion finding a school's decision to strip-search a 13-year-old girl unconstitutional. That the school in question was looking for a prescription pill with the mind-altering force of a pair of Advil—and couldn't be bothered to call the child's mother first—hardly matters. * * *Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 1, 2009 01:18 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts