Violation of a Concept

It’s a free country, and Gov. George Deukmejian has the constitutional right of any citizen to declare how he will vote this fall on the confirmation of California Supreme Court justices. We have known all along that he would oppose Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird. Now he says that he will vote against Justices Joseph R. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso, who, like Bird, were appointees of Deukmejian’s predecessor, Edmund G. Brown Jr.

That is where the matter should stop. It is bad enough that the governor is misguided in his decision to pick and choose among Supreme Court members. But the governor’s strategists have whispered it about that Deukmejian plans to make his opposition to Bird, Grodin and Reynoso a cornerstone of his campaign for reelection. Just how he may do that is not yet clear, but the court is certain to emerge as a hot issue after Labor Day, the aides have promised.

Clearly this strategy is an attempt to embarrass Deukmejian’s Democratic opponent, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, for refusing to say how he will vote on the justices. Bradley openly supported Bird in the past, but now says that it would only serve to politicize the court by publicly supporting or opposing specific court members. Deukmejian, in his statement Monday, said that candidates for governor have a responsibility to tell people how they are going to vote on justices.

That is not so. Candidates do have a responsibility to discuss the general qualifications that they would seek in judicial candidates. But to choose among personalities and the perceived evils of judicial voting records is improper, and distorts the debate over whether a justice ought to be continued in office. As attorney general, Deukmejian voted to seat Grodin as a member of the court. The only basis now for the change seems to be that Deukmejian doesn’t like the way Grodin has voted.

Deukmejian complains that Bird, Grodin and Reynoso have thwarted the public will. But judges are not selected to waver back and forth according to the whims of public will. The legislative and executive branches of government do that. The court specifically is there to protect the Constitution, and thereby the rights of all citizens, against what Alexander Hamilton described as the “ill humours” that influence society from time to time.

And without an independent judiciary the reservation of rights and privileges to the people through a constitution means nothing, Hamilton said. Deukmejian’s ill-humored mixing of politics and the courts violates that fundamental American concept.