Des Moines Register. January 24, 2019
Increasing political control over court appointments won’t make judges less political
If you think Iowa’s judges are too political, the obvious answer is to inject even more politics into the system of nominating them, right?
Wrong - unless you’re one of the Statehouse Republicans who want to increase the influence that politicians and their pals have over choosing judges for Iowa courts.
Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Kim Reynolds have indicated interest in changing Iowa’s merit-based judicial nominating process. Last week’s decision by a Polk County judge to overturn Iowa’s fetal heartbeat law is likely to dump rocket fuel on the sparks.
State Sen. Brad Zaun, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is among Republican senators who thinks judges are already too political. His case in point: The resignation of Supreme Court Justice Daryl Hecht, announced a week after November’s midterm election.
“This is my opinion to start with and with the resignation that happened immediately after the governor’s election, it makes me question that there isn’t politics involved with some of these judges,” Zaun said in an interview.
“What I would like to see is more input from elected officials in regards to who is on the nominating commission,” Zaun added. He emphasized he discussing his personal opinion and speaking not for the committee. To his credit, he also indicated his main priority this year is criminal justice reform.
Hecht has skin cancer and he resigned for health reasons. The public statements from the state court’s administrator’s office made it pretty clear: Hecht had hoped a new treatment beginning in September would allow him to return to the bench, and he did for a few months. But when side effects of the treatment made him unable to join the court for oral arguments Nov. 13 and 14, and after discussions with his family, he decided to resign and commit his energy to battling the disease. You have to work pretty hard to see anything political in the timing.
But even if the timing of the election had figured into Hecht’s decision, Zaun and other Republicans should applaud him for it. After all, it was Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley who insisted that a Supreme Court justice on the federal level should not be replaced during the heat of a presidential campaign, ostensibly to keep politics out of the process. Sure, Grassley tries to pin that “principle” on Democrat Joe Biden. But it was an effective GOP strategy to deprive President Barack Obama of a last court nominee before he left office.
It’s a ridiculous argument anyway, because Iowa’s judicial selection system isn’t like the federal process. The governor appoints half of the members of the Iowa Judicial Nominating Commission. The other half are lawyers, as specified in the state constitution. Republicans in the Legislature have been talking about trying to pass a law to let the governor appoint the lawyers instead of a pool of other licensed lawyers.
Zaun and other Republicans seem to think the lawyers on the panel lean to the left and that they have too much influence. The lawyers aren’t chosen by that GOP nemesis, the Iowa Trial Lawyers Association, or even the Iowa Bar Association. They can be Republicans, Democrats or independents.
The fetal heartbeat ruling is likely to reinforce GOP alarm about liberal, activist judges. But Republicans advanced that legislation knowing full well it was unconstitutional and designed to set up a U.S. Supreme Court challenge. Any district judge who upheld that law would have to ignore clear precedent and face allegations of acting politically. The case for changing judicial selection is based on myths and hypocrisy.
Changing the merit-based selection process isn’t the way to solve the problem, real or perceived.
Guy Cook is a Des Moines lawyer who has served in the nominating commission. He said putting any governor in charge of appointing the lawyers on the panel would likely change those members’ focus from choosing nominees based on their merits as jurists to fulfilling a partisan political agenda.
Besides, he noted, Reynolds and former Gov. Terry Branstad have clearly had Republican or conservative nominees among the choices advanced by the commission. The newest justice, Susan Christiansen, was a registered Republican. “The proof’s in the pudding in terms of how the judiciary is rated and who the most recent members of the court are,” he said. “It’s really a solution in search of a problem.”
Iowa’s courts consistently rate among the best in the country by groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he noted. Having a non-partisan selection process assures people who come before the court that their cases will be decided based on the facts and the law and not to please a political constituency or special interests.
The merit selection process, also known as the Missouri Plan, was originally established as an effort to limit perceived influence by politicians and interest groups - Democrats and labor unions. “It grew out of perceived Democratic manipulation and control of the process,” Cook said. Among those who worked to create today’s non-partisan system was none other than Grassley, who at the time was a state lawmaker.
A political action group set up to oppose partisan attacks on the courts, Justice Not Politics, has been largely dormant but members are talking about reorganizing, former Lt. Gov. Sally Pederson, a co-founder of the group, said. But as Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office, they can move forward with this legislation if they want. And they may want to unless their constituents tell them to stop.
One point that should make GOP lawmakers think twice: Iowa voters demonstrated in two of the state’s four 2018 congressional races that Iowa is still a swing state. While they returned GOP control to the Statehouse, it stands to reason that Democrats could again occupy the governor’s office someday. If Republicans try to shape the courts in their favor, Democrats will get their turn.
______
Quad-City Times. January 23, 2019.
Leave property taxes alone
Not content to limit themselves to their own budget, Republicans in the Iowa Legislature now are eyeing local governments and their major revenue source: property taxes.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver says he’s asked the Ways and Means Committee to look “holistically” at property taxes in Iowa relative to other states.
No proposals have been floated yet, but his starting point is that Iowa’s property taxes are too high, citing a study that says Iowa is 13th highest in the country when property taxes are measured against median home values.
It’s always amazed us that lawmakers who tout their belief in local control don’t shrink from the chance to tell smaller governments what to do, if given the power.
But such has been the case in Iowa for years. Local control is fine, says Big Brother, as long as you do as I tell you.
Already, state legislators have been making noises about going back on their promises to continue backfilling the property tax revenue they drained from local governments with the commercial and industrial tax breaks they approved in 2013 - much of which went to out-of-state corporations, mall owners and nursing homes.
Now, GOP leaders want to take it a step further. Honestly, we’d be happy if they’d just live up to their promises from the 2013 law.
We know that nobody likes property taxes. But the tin ear in Des Moines has never figured out that, around here, we on the Iowa side of the Mississippi River have it relatively good when it comes to taxes on real estate. Our Illinois neighbors tell us that all the time - those who don’t move over here.
But what about property taxes on this side of the river?
Iowa Department of Management reports tell us the City of Davenport is levying about $70.5 million in property taxes for fiscal 2019, 8.8 percent higher than it did four years earlier.
That’s an average increase of a bit more than 2 percent per year. It’s a bit above inflation, but it still doesn’t sound too bad to us.
The largest school districts in our area also have levied only modest increases between those two years. In fact, actual property tax receipts between 2013 and 2017, the latest years available, either remained steady or fell for the Bettendorf and Davenport districts.
In Bettendorf, the story is bit different. In 2019, the city levied for $29.2 million in property taxes, about 19 percent more than it did four years earlier. That amounts to an increase of a little less than 5 percent a year on average.
We won’t sit in judgment on which city or school district is doing better by its property tax payers. But we’d ask that Des Moines not do it, either.
Bettendorf voters can speak for themselves. They did just that by turning down the school district’s proposal last month to sell general obligation bonds that would have increased property taxes. If Bettendorf voters want to voice their displeasure with the mayor and aldermen in this year’s election, they’re free to do so.
The same goes in Davenport, where property tax increases have been fairly small - but, as we’ve observed on these pages, city streets also are badly in need of fixing. Instead of seeing property tax cuts, we’d rather see smoother roads.
We haven’t even mentioned that Scott County’s sheriff is pushing for major personnel increases, which also could contribute to the board of supervisors increasing property taxes. (By the way, Scott County has increased the amount of property tax it has levied by less than 2 percent per year since 2014.)
All of this is trying to make the point that our local governments are better situated to make their own tax and spending decisions. They don’t need the heavy hand of Des Moines to guide them. (We think state lawmakers have enough to do straightening out the Medicaid mess and, incidentally, fixing last year’s rushed-through income tax cut, which delivered an unintended tax increase to non-profit blood banks, including the Mississippi Valley Blood Center.)
As for nationwide property tax studies, we would urge caution. Property taxes vary widely, even within states, and generalizing about them is a difficult thing to do.
The bottom line for us is this: There’s plenty the state legislature could do to make things better in Iowa. Meddling with local government budgets isn’t one of them.
____
Dubuque Telegraph-Herald. January 23, 2019
Jury not out on innovation and efficiency
A week ago, in delivering the annual Condition of the Judiciary address, Mark S. Cady, chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, surprised no one with his renewed call for an increase in funding for the court system. When did anyone in government ask for less?
However, Cady hardly promised more of the same at greater expense. He made a persuasive case for investment in innovation to make the court system more efficient and responsive. That efficiency and responsiveness would not benefit only the people who work in Iowa’s courthouses but citizens, businesses and agencies that interact with and rely upon the courts.
While Cady called Iowans the court system’s “customers,” many citizens who find themselves interacting with the courts - jurors and parties to civil suits and criminal cases, among others - could be forgiven if they sense role-reversal, where they are not the ones being served, and where their time is considered the least valuable. That is neither new nor limited to Iowa. The quote, “The wheels of justice turn slowly .” and its variants have been around for centuries, if not millennia. By the way, the conclusion of the quote is “. but grind exceedingly fine.” Quality, not speed.
The chief justice last week presented his vision that Iowa’s courts can improve both quality and speed. He discussed the court system’s Digital Opportunities Initiative, in which technology could allow for electronic search warrants, text-message communication with court users and remote court reporting. Especially intriguing is the idea of online dispute resolution for small-claims cases.
“Imagine an online process that will allow Iowans to resolve some of their legal disputes without taking time from work to go to the courthouse,” Cady said. “Imagine a time when law enforcement officers will no longer need to drive from the scene of an investigation to a courthouse to request a warrant because judges will be able to transmit search warrants to officers in their vehicles.” He also invited us to imagine a system in which defendants don’t miss their court appearances - resulting in penalties and a tighter court calendar - because they received reminders via text message.
Cady also spoke of other ways Iowa courts can improve efficiency, service and the cause of justice, including specialty courts - from business courts, where cases are often complicated and technical, to drug courts to juvenile diversion courts - as well as more resources for the growing number of Iowans who choose to represent themselves in court and expanded service in rural courthouses.
As noted earlier, all this has a price tag. Cady is asking for an increase of about 4 percent for the next fiscal year - more than $7 million - toward those initiatives and a 4 percent raises for judges, who have received one increase since 2014.
Some might argue that the state can do better with its precious dollars than baby-sitting defendants to keep their appointments. That would be true if missed dates didn’t impact the court calendar, if the same system wasn’t available to improve communication among judges, jurors and law enforcement, and if the proposal were the big-ticket item on Cady’s list.
Just a decade ago, when Iowa was a pioneer in instituting electronic court records, some questioned the trouble and expense. Was a paperless (or nearly so) system really worth it? Why not stick with the paper process we had for more than 150 years? Today, you don’t hear those questions.
In another decade, if the Legislature and governor grant the funding for these innovations now, we doubt we will hear those questions regarding Cady’s technology-infused proposals.
The only question in 2029 might be, “Why didn’t Iowa do all this sooner?”
____
Please read our comment policy before commenting.