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Texas dads denied parental rights to their own twin sons
- Thread starter RavenSky
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Texas would still have sodomy laws on the books if the Supreme Court had not struck them down.
Celldweller
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That judge is automatically polling at 7% in the GOP primaries.
gmbteach
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Please forgive me ignorance but what are GOP primaries?
It's sort of like American Idol, but instead of musical talent, it has contestants competing to have the audience judge which one of them is the craziest nutbag in the room. Instead of a recording contract, the winner gets the opportunity to lose to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential race.
gmbteach
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No, that would be a stupid way to pick a judge. It was meant that he could run for the GOP leadership and start with a decent core of support because he's shown a willingness to oppress teh gheys.
Celldweller
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Yes, this.
Actually we do elect judges in the US in many cases. It is Federal judges that are always appointed.
For instance, in my state of Michigan, all state judges are elected, including our state Supreme Court.
Texas is similar in this regard, all state judges are elected:
http://www.judicialselection.us/judicial_selection/index.cfm?state=TX
Are you fucking serious? Your judges are picked by popular vote?
Every time that I think your country can't outdo itself on the crazy, you people prove me wrong.
America is a dumb country and I'm really going to have to insist that you switch places with Mexico for a while.
'fraid so.
It is stupid, but it is a result of our federal system, each state gets to design it's own government.
So in the US you will find several types of courts:
Federal Courts are split into two types: Trial Courts and Special Courts. Federal trial court judges are appointed for life by the President (with Congressional consent). Special Courts are things like Tax courts and Bankruptcy courts. These judges are appointed by Congress with 10-year terms.
State Courts can vary wildly. For instance in Michigan all judges are elected in non-partisan elections. In Texas all judges are elected in partisan elections. In California, supreme and appellate court judges are appointed by the governor with the approval of a kind of "merit committee", but the appellate judges must be re-elected during the following gubernatorial election (next time the office of Governor comes up for election). Meanwhile all California's lower court judges are elected in non-partisan elections like in Michigan. You could go state by state and find tons of different variation in how the states structure their judiciaries.
edit: Actually I should clarify the "re-election" of appelate judges in California. They are not running against anyone in those elections. Instead they are what are called "retention elections". Basically people are given the choice to vote to keep the judge or not. If enough people vote not to retain the judge, the newly elected governor will get to fill the spot. Californians never "elect" an appelate court judge, they can just boot one if they want to.
It has it's good points and it's bad points. (And I believe in most states they aren't actually picked by vote. Rather, they are appointed and the vote is to retain.)
The ballot box does provide a means of removing bad judges (the state does a very poor job of this) but it does make them too willing to rule as the people want rather than the law. (Take a local example. Again and again they try to pass laws against the people who hand out prostitute ads. Again and again they stand up in state court {elected} and get struck down when they hit the first Federal judges {no elections there} because all such attempts are unconstitutional. They can't single out one type of commercial speech to ban.)
Why do you think it is so bad for judges to be picked by popular vote? If I was supreme ruler of the U.S., I would insist that all positions be decided by popular vote. That seems a lot better to me than letting some dickball like Rick Perry decide who gets appointed to any position. I've lived in Texas for almost my whole life, and most of the young Texans my age are against all forms of discrimination against homosexuals, so I think it is better to let popular election decide who gets appointed to their positions. Eventually, all the old homophobic bastards will die, and you will have young people voting which in my opinion is better than letting old white men continually appoint important positions.
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Ya, good point. It's not like appointing them is an improvement given the people doing the appointing.
Imagine if you could pick what kind of political system you would want to live in before you were born, and before you had any knowledge of what kind of class you would be born into. This is known as John Rawls thought experiment called the Veil of Ignorance, but you probably already knew that. Inside the framework of this thought experiment, would you prefer our leaders be elected by direct democracy, or would you prefer they be appointed by other people who supposedly know better than the rest of us?
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I see you guys have already given Canuck Tom the bad news about popular voting in many political and jurisdictional offices in Texas.
bilby
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Leaders - ie legislators - yes.
Judges, no.
Judges are not supposed to make law; they are supposed to interpret it. The job of judge is to determine whether or not a person has acted within the letter of the law, and if they have infringed the law, to decide on the scale and nature of their punishment - with the aim of ensuring a consistent and reasonable level of punishment for offences, that is in keeping both with previous punishments meted out for similar crimes, and with the actual harm done to society by the offender.
This job is best done by someone who has spent a great deal of time studying the law. Judges should ideally be appointed on the basis of their level of knowledge of the law, and it makes no sense at all for citizens who are unqualified to assess their level of knowledge to be given the role of selecting them by popular ballot.
Of course, once the system is so broken that judges are allowed to determine what is or is not the law; or worse, such that legislators are able to dictate the scale and/or nature of punishments for offenders (eg through mandatory sentencing laws), the line between legislature and judiciary becomes blurred, and the things that make it useful to elect legislators also begin to apply to the selection of the judiciary. The solution then might appear to be to elect judges; however this would be misguided, as the appropriate approach to the broken system is not to try make it work less poorly despite being broken; it is to fix it so it works as designed.
Most US states appear to have completely lost the plot with regard to the separation of powers, and the lines between legislature, judiciary and executive are so blurred as to be almost non-existent. Trying to fix this by treating all three as though they were essentially the same is really, really, dumb.