Former Governor of Tennessee Phil Bredesen told Chattanooga Rotary Club members on Thursday why he supports Amendment 2, which will be decided in the Nov. 2 election. He said there is strong support for this change to Tennessee’s Constitution about the way state Supreme Court and other appellate court judges are selected. He is joined by Governor Bill Haslam and former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson in backing passage of the amendment. He said that support is across the political spectrum and includes hospitals around the state, the Farm Bureau and the NAACP.
The proposed selection process would begin with the governor making the appointment after careful research. On the front end, this will eliminate the judicial nomination commission which in the past has supplied three potential candidates to the governor from which he selects one. Governor Bredesen said in his opinion this is a good idea since sometimes the commission submitted two names out of the three that were certain not to be chosen thus directing their preference.
If the new procedure is put in place, the state legislature would confirm or reject the governor’s choice. This, he said, puts checks and balances in place. Even though this is not a direct election, the citizens would participate in the process because they would put their trust in the governor that is an elected position. If not approved within 60 days of being nominated, the judge would automatically be confirmed, thereby eliminating a bottleneck.
He compared the process to that used by the federal government for choosing the Supreme Court justices. The plan in Tennessee, however, is not for a lifetime appointment. The term would be for eight years, followed by a retention election for subsequent terms.
This method will serve as a way to eliminate special interest groups from helping to elect someone that is sympathetic to their special interests, the speaker said. People have a low recognition of people in the appellate judge positions, he said, and are widely uneducated about them. It is important for these judges to reflect the whole population in general. If they are chosen by election, most of the vast amount of money needed for a state wide campaign would not come from everyday citizens, but from people that want to advance their own concerns, he stated.
If so many groups interested in their own agendas were supporting different candidates statewide, he said, “We’d have a mess.” If chosen in the manner laid out in Amendment 2, the judges would be more isolated from the politics and it would help keep special interest groups from flooding the state, former Governor Bredesen contended.
In local judicial elections, the people voting have some information about what the judges have been doing and about the vast amount of issues they deal with. Appellate judges deal with policy changes and issues, he said, that voters are not always well informed about. That is one of the reasons to have a different procedure for choosing different types of judges.
“This issue has gotten me out of my house,” said former Governor Bredesen. “How it turns out will affect the tenor and style of conducting business in Tennessee.” If Amendment 2 succeeds if will solidify the procedure and put it in the constitution. He said this is a highly respected system for selecting these judges.
In response to the question concerning the cost of supporting the campaign for Amendment 2, Governor Bredesen answered that in round numbers, it will take between $1 and $2 million. In Hamilton County he said $100,000-$150,000 is still needed to get ads on TV. In the end, this is just a tiny fraction of what it would cost for statewide campaigns if judges are elected and, he added, a lot of people think it is important so that fundraising has been relatively easy for this issue.