Voting for Judges: It Is Hard To Know

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Readers we trust will pay attention to the voter guides we have been running.

As a project in citizen journalism, The Prickly Pear does not always have the resources to have an opinion on every candidate for every office. Nor do we claim expertise in all matters. However, we like the work done by the Free Enterprise Club and Arizona Women of Action and trust their recommendations.  And so, that has been provided for you.

There is no party affiliation for some offices, like school boards and judges, which makes choosing difficult.

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It is also hard to find other credible organizations with an opinion on judges.  In addition, there is no competition for the office when we vote.  We get to vote yes or no, and the judge is appointed by the Governor.

That makes voting for judges pretty much a useless exercise.  You wind up filling in the little circle, not having a clue about the judge in question.

There is supposed to be a professional code of ethics and a desire to seek justice. Hence, judges are supposedly removed from the political realm. In addition, judges deal with the complexity of the law, and few of us are versed in both the law and its particular application in a given case.  So, without some action against a judge by a legal association or some gross violation of ethics, it is hard for the voter to know whether one is voting for a good or a bad judge.  Also, as a member of the legal fraternity, one rarely hears complaints from other lawyers, especially if they need to appear before judges aware of criticism. Judges are humans, after all.

But if you have been paying attention to some of the recent cases on election irregularities, or the legal persecution of Donald Trump, it seems judges are increasingly becoming political.  We don’t like it, but it would be hard to ignore this growing reality.

If judges are starting to act politically, then political affiliation might be essential information. But even that is hard to find, and many judges at least appear to stay out of politics. However, the political orientation of those who appointed them may provide more information.

With the polarization of the parties, it is reasonably straightforward (but not assured) that a Democrat will have a suite of beliefs, and so will a Republican.  There are glaring exceptions.  The Supreme Court Justice David Souter comes to mind.  Appointed and endorsed by Republicans, Souter caused great disappointment for Conservatives.

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Then there is the problem of the appointed judge “growing.”  We have seen more than one judge appointed by a Conservative drift off to the liberal side once they have drunk from the Potomac.

With all these caveats, and in the absence of any other helpful information, who appointed the judge is likely a strong hint at the judge’s legal philosophy.

Thus, as a Conservative/libertarian-leaning publication, we would vote to retain judges appointed by Republicans and vote against retaining those appointed by Democrats.

We repeat that we don’t like doing this, but in the absence of any other information, and with judges hiding their views but often ruling politically, it is the best we can do.

This list of judges is numbingly long in Maricopa County. We suspect most people either fill out that portion of the ballot with random ignorance or do not fill it out at all.

You will have to figure this out for yourself, but below are the judges we found appointed by a Democratic governor. Overwhelmingly, Governor Brewer and Ducey appointed the list of judges. However, the following judges were appointed by Janet Napolitano, a liberal when she was the Governor, when President Obama appointed her to DHS, and as a college president.  She appointed:

M. Scott McCoy

Michael D. Gordon

John R. Hannah, Jr.

Michael W. Kemp

Timothy J. Ryan

These men likely are Democrats and hold the beliefs typical of Democrats today. We don’t know for sure, but it seems likely.

However, there is another problem: if any of the above should lose, their replacement will likely be picked by a liberal Democrat, Katie Hobbs.  So voting No on any judge only works if a Republican were governor!

Now, the choice seems to boil down to this: Would a liberal of the Napolitano era be less harmful than a Democrat appointed today? Given how far the party has drifted in the past two decades, you could make a case that a Napolitano appointee might be less radical than a Hobbs appointee.

As we said, it is hard to know.  This might be a good reason to vote for Proposition 137, not to vote on judges at all unless they have done something really criminal.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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