‘The Wrong Message’

Far from being insulated from politics, the California Supreme Court is created from the whole cloth of politics. The members of the court obtain their positions because of loyalties and political debts arising from partisan relationships with party stalwarts, such as former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., his father, and others in the hierarchy of party activities. To say, as your editorialist does, that Rose Bird and other party workers who have been rewarded by the Democratic Party’s political debt-repayment system, are “independent” is, it seems to me, to drain the word of any real meaning.

The basic problem with Justices Bird, Reynoso and Grodin is that they are lacking in balanced judgment and patronizing in their attitudes toward those who have viewpoints different from their own. They have for a number of years, within the protective isolation of the Supreme Court, assumed the roles of self-appointed martyrs to arbitrarily impose their own one-sided political viewpoints against the basic common sense of the citizenry regarding legal justice.

The safety valve provided to California citizens by the periodic vote on the fitness of justices is in the highest tradition of our democratic system. Using that vote to remove an out-of-date and biased political minority from entrenched positions on the highest state court will enhance, not reduce, the independence of that court.

WILLIAM N. McNAIRN

Palos Verdes Estates