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Amendment 5 Would Change Process for Supreme Court Appointees  October 17, 2012 | WMFE - In November, Floridians will decide the fate of eleven ballot measures, all of them placed on the ballot by the state legislature. This week, 90.7 news is examining the amendments. Amendment Five would make big changes in the method the state uses to appoint and confirm justices on the state's highest court.
If Amendment 5 passes, members of the state Senate will have to vote on the confirmation of any Florida Supreme Court justice the Governor appoints. Right now, the governor can appoint a justice without review by any governing body. Ron Meyer has been an attorney for more than forty years and practices constitutional and election law in Tallahassee. He has argued many cases in the Florida Supreme Court. Meyer, as well as Democratic activists, says the amendment is part of a larger effort to remove liberals from the high court. He says Amendment Five will make the court less impartial because politicians will now have more of a say about who can become a justice. “I think it’s going to change a lot of things,” Meyer says. “I think it is going to drive people who have constitutional issues into the federal court system whenever possible, simply because if we don’t maintain the impartial judiciary that we now have, I think we are in for some very difficult times as a society.” Bob Sanchez, the policy director at the James Madison Institute is among those who believe changes to the way Florida picks its Supreme Court justices are long overdue. “At present, the process for obtaining Florida Supreme Court justices is kind of in the shadows,” he says. “A judicial nominating commission, principally appointed by the governor, comes up with a slate of nominees and the governor picks one, and that’s it. There is no review by our elected representatives. So, if at some point in the future, you had a rogue governor you could be stuck for years with justices that don’t meet the quality standards you’d like to see.” For many years, Sanchez wrote award-winning editorials for the Miami Herald about state government and politics. He now works at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, a right-leaning think tank that has endorsed amendment 5. In 2006, Tallahassee attorney Ron Meyer won a famous case in the Florida Supreme Court that threw out an attempt by the Legislature to expand the use of school vouchers, an issue championed by conservatives. Meyer says that the only thing standing in the way of the Legislature and Governor’s political agenda right now is the Court. “Well certainly, if you compromise the impartiality of the court system, then what you are going to see is the Legislature’s continued ability to enact unconstitutional laws, which are not going to be struck as unconstitutional any longer,” Meyer warns. “Judges are going to be affected by legislative control. It’s just a very serious, serious problem.” He says his job, which is to fight laws he thinks are unconstitutional, is going be much harder if amendment five passes. He says governors in Florida are currently in charge of picking judges and they can be just as political as the Legislature. “Charlie Crist had an unprecedented opportunity to appoint four justices to the Florida Supreme Court. The first two he appointed were very conservative and the next two he appointed were liberals-- as he was trying to position himself to run for the U.S. Senate. So, governor’s can be very political, too.” Sanchez says it’s wrong that Amendment 5 is being portrayed as a power grab by the Legislature. Still, the Florida Republican Party has come out in support of a campaign to remove three of the most liberal members of the court. This series on the state’s ballot measures this year was produced by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and VotersEdge.org, a nonpartisan online guide to Florida’s constitutional amendments. Visit Votersedge.org for more information.
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