A simple plan to end the Supreme Court confirmation wars for good

Ian Milhiser wrote in ThinkProgress, A simple plan to end the Supreme Court confirmation wars for good. I didn't know about The Missouri Plan

When a vacancy arises on the state’s supreme court, a seven person commission consisting of ‘three lawyers elected by the lawyers of The Missouri Bar . . . three citizens selected by the governor, and the chief justice’ submits three candidates to fill that vacancy to the state’s governor. The governor then has 60 days to choose among those three names. If the governor fails to meet this deadline, the commission selects one of the three.

Finally, after a year of service, the newly appointed judge must survive a retention election, where a majority of the electorate can cast them out of office — though this only happens rarely.

This method of judicial selection, as well as variants upon it, was adopted by many states since its inception in Missouri."

It’s not a perfect system. In Iowa, which uses variant on the Missouri system, three justices were removed from office after anti-LGBT groups campaigned against them due to their votes in support of marriage equality. In Arizona, which uses a Missouri-style commission but with significantly more gubernatorial appointees, a libertarian attorney with aggressive plans to roll back laws protecting workers recently joined the state supreme court. Judicial selection commissions neither eliminate politics entirely nor shield a state entirely from ideologues.

But they are a whole lot better than the world we live in now at the federal level, where no president is ever likely to appoint a justice again unless that justice shares the ideological preferences of a majority of the Senate.