Daily Herald opinion: Wisconsin race showing how politics contaminate process of selecting judges

In one element of a December year-end editorial series on elections, we focused on the need for a better way to select judges than through elections. We cited among our concerns the conservative-vs.-liberal hand-wringing that dominated campaign rhetoric prior to the election of two Illinois Supreme Court justices last fall. Now, our neighbor to the north is in the market for a new Supreme Court justice, and the run-up to a spring election in Wisconsin provides another vivid demonstration of the drawbacks to asking voters to pick the individuals responsible for the complex task of objectively interpreting the law.

Before even getting into the politics of the campaign, consider this observation on the body of the Wisconsin electorate that will decide this important question: According to a Washington Post report on the Wisconsin campaign, nonpartisan elections in Wisconsin typically attract a turnout of about 20%, a figure generally supported by Wisconsin Elections Commission data. Thus, the direction of the Wisconsin Supreme Court may hinge on the input of just one in five registered voters. We could speculate that these 20% are the voters most attuned to court issues and therefore most qualified to take the measure of the candidates' temperaments and legal backgrounds, but that would be a most generous conjecture. It seems more likely that what little voter turnout the race musters will be motivated most by the political rhetoric being broadcast by the candidates themselves, most of whom told the Post "there is no way to win without the help of the parties" despite the supposed nonpartisan nature of the election.

Which leaves the future of the Wisconsin Supreme Court teetering on, first, a Feb. 21 primary when two candidates will be selected from a field of four - two identified as "liberal," two as "conservative," with the expectation that the outcome will pit a "liberal" against a "conservative" in the state's April 4 spring elections. And leads to the natural question of what does "liberal" or "conservative" have to do with it?

Of course, to some extent, it is impossible to separate any candidate from his or her personal values, which may have a political component. But when it is the political component that gets you the job and keeps you in it, it cannot help but influence, if not override, your studied and independent analysis of the law. So, thus is the system turned exactly backward.

Clearly, the makeup of our own U.S. Supreme Court shows that just taking voters out of the equation is no assurance of achieving objective purity on the bench. But that only serves - along with cases like ours from last fall and Wisconsin's this spring - to emphasize the importance of this subject. From the availability of weapons to the security of elections to the relationship of the law to the question of when life begins and much, much more, our courts make decisions that define our freedom, our safety and the circumstances of our daily living.

Around our kitchen tables, in our schools and universities and in our state and federal legislatures, we must undertake more serious examinations of how to improve the makeup of this critical branch of government.