For 2306, and our discussion of the Texas Constitution, the judiciary, and elections.
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There are any number of ways to pick good judges, bad judges and those not-quite-rare-enough WTF judges, and none of those selection methods is foolproof.
Texas elects judges, relying on voters to sort through pages and pages of ballot undergrowth, figuring out which candidates are fit to put on the judicial robes. The record is mixed. In a normal election, candidates in the races at the top — for president, for governor and the like — are usually well known to voters. That recognition doesn’t often travel far down the ballot, and judges are elected largely on the basis of political party and whether they have melodious names. It’s a grab bag, evidenced whenever a party sweep clears a courthouse full of incumbents, as happened in Harris County in 2018. That was a party rout, replacing the best and the worst Republican judges with the best and the worst Democratic challengers.
The federal government uses appointment, relying on presidents to pick judges and on the U.S. Senate to confirm the qualified ones, sorting legal wizards from rotten eggs. The voters in this case have more information about the candidates, but the partisan nature of the exercise is obvious to anyone who has followed a U.S. Supreme Court appointment and confirmation.
Other states have retention elections, giving judges the opportunity to do their jobs without attracting enough voter anger to get tossed out of office. As in states like Texas, where judges are elected like everyone else, that’s subject to outside influence by political donors and interest groups hoping to influence the direction of the courts, if not the outcomes of specific cases. Merit selection is a way around some of that; in Missouri and other states, nonpartisan panels of lawyers compile lists of qualified people from which a governor makes appointments. Voters then have periodic chances to vote judges they don’t like out of office.
Good judges support all of these systems, and good judges hate all of them. Judicial selection by any method is subjective, and someone who looks like a good pick might turn out to be a terror in a black robe.
