Alaska editorial: Governor undermines judiciary process
This editorial appeared in Friday's Anchorage Daily News:
It doesn't take much subtlety or foresight to put the lie to Gov. Frank Murkowski's attempt to dominate Alaska's judicial selection process. This is a power grab, pure and simple. Neither Gov. Murkowski nor any other governor should have the power he wants.
"Separation of powers" and "checks and balances" are fundamental to American government and the Alaska Constitution. They are also at the core of this argument. The framers of Alaska's widely praised constitution created the Judicial Council deliberately to limit the options of the governor and thereby limit the incursions of politics into the independence of the judiciary. Judges are not political creatures; governors are. That too is fundamental.
In Alaska's constitutional design, one of the separations of power is that the Judicial Council defines the candidate pool for judgeships before the governor enters the picture. One of the checks and balances - the limits on a governor's power - is that the governor is required to make a choice from a list he does not control. Giving a governor control over the candidate pool, as this governor now demands, would wreck a very successful design.
Gov. Murkowski already has broken faith with the Alaska Constitution by rejecting the nominees for a seat on the Superior Court bench. He did not argue that the nominees sent to him after a proper selection process are not qualified. He argued, through his chief of staff, Jim Clark, that he should be able to choose among all qualified applicants - which is to cut the Judicial Council out of the winnowing process altogether. If he gets away with it, at any level, he and all future governors will be able to simply keep rejecting applicants until they get what they want.
And that is exactly what the framers of the constitution acted to avoid. They created the Alaska Judicial Council specifically to keep this power out of the governor's hands. They wanted a judiciary that was as little beholden to a governor as possible. They wanted a governor's powers - strong in other matters, especially over budgets and spending - to be limited specifically in this area.
Wisely so. Alaska's judiciary is not perfect, but it is widely recognized for its independence and integrity based on standards of law rather than politics. Gov. Murkowski's power grab would trample on that distinction.