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The good people at Wispolitics.com are providing excellent coverage of the Republican State Convention on their Convention Blog. And I think the readers of this blog would be very interested in their post on the Eastern and Western district judicial vacancies.

The president wants to nominate candidates to fill two openings on the federal bench in Wisconsin at the same time, but U.S. Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold have yet to recommend names for the Western District spot, causing a delay, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said Friday.

Sensenbrenner said he feared it could mean the Western District opening would not be filled until at least 2010 because time was running out for this president to nominate someone, and then next one may need until late 2009 to forward a candidate.

As the senior elected congressional Republican, Sensenbrenner nominates members of the Nominating Commission that interviews candidates and fowards names to the 2 US Senators and senior Republican, who in turn forward those names on to the White House.

Kohl and Feingold have already forwarded on four names to the White House for the Eastern District vacancy created by Judge Randa’s retirement, but the White House has not yet selected one of the four as the President’s nominee. For the Western District, Judge Shabaz’s seat, the Senators have not forwarded on names culled from the Commission’s list of five.

Kohl and Feingold both sit on the Judiciary Committee, so if they wanted these seats filled, they could get quick action once the White House makes a nomination. The President needs to act quickly on the Eastern District, because the window for Senate action on any judicial nominations is closing fast. As we saw during the showdown on judges a few weeks ago, this is a tense area on the legislative calendar. In the interview, Rep. Sensenbrenner indicated that the WH wanted to submit the two nominations together, which is why they are waiting.

Kohl and Feingold’s continued delay in submitting a list for the Western District vacancy has effectively ended the possibility that the seat will be filled by President Bush. Their delay in submitting names to the White House, and their decision to cut two qualified candidates, may have prevented the Eastern District seat from being filled promptly as well.

Of course, perhaps that is the plan - they’re playing the wait and see game in the hopes that President Clinton or President Obama gets to fill the seat with a nominee from the liberal side of the bench.

In her discussion with retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said she still believes elections are the best system for choosing judges, but there are “defects” that need fixing. AP report:

“I favor elections in Wisconsin. I think we should work to repair the defects that have appeared,” she said. “We have had the elective system since 1848. It’s up to all of us to make sure the elective system works.”

Her solution, of course, is public financing of elections. In a recent Q&A with the Madison Capital Times, she said:

Q. Do the larger donations coming to Supreme Court campaigns from certain groups raise a concern?

A. Polls seem to show that the public believes that judges are influenced by contributions. Whether that perception is accurate or not really sometimes is beside the point because the perception can become the reality. That’s why the seven judges on this court all signed a letter supporting public campaign financing for justices of this court so that much of the money is removed from the race so no one will have a perception that justice can be bought in this state.

The obvious thoughts are these:

1. most of the money spent in the election was by outside interests, 527s and 501(c)(4)s, not campaigns. Thus, public financing will not remove most of the money from the system.

2. During the Q&A, she mentioned recusal. Judges very rarely recuse themselves because they received a donation from a lawyer or party before them. Some have suggested that judges should do so more often, or even automatically. If that is the case, WMC should donate $10000 to Abrahamson, Bradley, and Crooks so they are never on another case where WMC has an amicus brief!

Here’s another thought that I’ve been processing but haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere:

Everyone agrees that the most, I’ll say aggressive, ad of the campaign cycle was the Gableman “Reuben Lee Mitchell” spot. If we had taxpayer financing of elections, this spot would still have been run!

You think the ad was offensive? How do you like the idea of your hard-earned tax dollars paying to put it on the air?

Tax-funded financing of elections for judges is not the answer (if there is a problem).

As you may know, retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor is coming to Milwaukee on Wednesday for the 150th Anniversary luncheon of the Milwaukee Bar Association.

After giving the keynote address at the MBA Luncheon, held at the Midwest Airlines Center, she will come to Marquette’s campus for a “Conversation on Judicial Independence” with Mike Gousha.

Anyone interested in her remarks on Wednesday should start by checking out her remarks yesterday at the University of Minnesota. In her remarks, she urged Minnesota legislators to change to a merit system with retention elections, something that her home state of Arizona recently adopted. She also railed on the recent Butler-Gableman race as being nasty and flooded with special interest money. See also here and here. I expect she’ll pick up similar themes during her remarks on Wednesday. Stay tuned…

In a recent op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Richard S. Brown, chief judge of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals District 2, calls for a system of merit selection for Wisconsin judges. He proposes a commission be empaneled, representing various interest groups. The commission would interview candidates and, theoretically, forward to the governor the names of the three most meritorious applicants:

Certainly, the Republican Party wants a say. Fine. It gets one seat. Same for the Democrats. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce wants a say? It gets a seat. MoveOn.org wants a say, too? OK, it gets a seat. Add a professor chosen by the Marquette law faculty and one chosen by the University of Wisconsin law faculty and the president and president-elect of the State Bar, and you have your judicial commission. The actual composition of the commission and the exact number of seats would be up to the Legislature after input from citizens.

Now, here’s the trick. A candidate’s name could not be forwarded to the governor unless that candidate received a super-majority of the votes - 75% or 80% of the votes of the commission. What does this do? Simply, the only way the candidate makes it out of the commission is if he or she passes muster with conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, business interests and activists, law school faculty and the bar.

In other words, he or she would be the consensus candidate that everyone, or just about everyone, agrees would be a stellar judge or justice - the “slam dunk.”

Of course, here’s the problem with that: The liberals get 75% of the seats, which means that only liberal candidates will get a super-majority. The Dems and MoveOn, to use his examples, are 2 of 8. Then the president and president-elect of the State Bar, which tends to be dominated by the trial lawyers, so we’re at 4 of 8. And the UW and Marquette Law School faculties will clearly put us at 6 of 8 for the liberals. And there’s your super-majority.

And that’s how merit selection leads to the Missouri Problem, namely, the people elect a Republican governor, and the judicial selection commission only submits lists of liberal judicial activists for him to choose from.

The president of the Wisconsin Association for Justice, i.e. the trial lawyers bar, Christine Bremer Muggli, has a brief letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal responding to a John Fund column last week on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election:

John Fund’s column (”Wisconsin’s Judicial Revolution,” April 5) is so off base it’s hard to decide where to start. About the only thing Mr. Fund got right is that Judge Michael Gableman won last week’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court over incumbent Justice Louis Butler.

Mr. Fund downplays the viciousness of the ads attacking incumbent Justice Butler, most of which were paid for by the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC). WMC’s ads successfully blurred the lines between Justice Butler’s previous role as a public defender and his current role on the supreme court, confusing voters and playing a determining factor in the race.

Having just criticized Mr. Fund for a column allegedly replete with errors, Ms. Muggli proceeds to start her argument with an error of her own. WMC never bought ads blurring the lines between Butler’s role as a public defender and his current role on the Court.

WMC’s first TV ad was in praise of Judge Gableman’s tough on crime stance, and the second two attacked decision like Jensen that Butler issued on the Court. WMC’s two post-card mailers were both simply pro-Gableman. The two radio ads followed these lines also.

It seems to be simply the popular thing for liberals to do this week to bash WMC. If you’re going to do so, at least get your facts right, please.

The past several months, I have used GOP3.com a lot to discuss issues present in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race that came to a close on April 1. I have also noted that the April 2009 campaign has begun. While a conservative candidate may not emerge for a while, conservative commentators need to start work now laying the intellectual groundwork for the campaign against the Chief. There’s 32 years of opinions and law review articles to be read and reviewed. To that end, I’m announcing a new category today: Review with Bite.

Court-dorks know that I take my title from the Chief Justice’s majority opinion in Ferdon v. Patients Compensation Fund:

The rational basis test is “not a toothless one.” “Rational basis with teeth,” sometimes referred to as “rational basis with bite,” focuses on the legislative means used to achieve the ends.

Over the next twelve months, this blog will continue to provide “review with bite” as we look at the Court’s current jurisprudence and the Chief Justice’s past decisions and statements. If voters don’t like the negative mud-slinging cherry-picking of cases in the TV ads, they can come here for a sustained and substantial critique of the jurisprudence underlying the decisions.