The Arkansas Bar Association had asked the Arkansas Supreme Court to add a simple provision to the state code of judicial conduct. It would have prohibited appellate justices such as themselves from stalling tactics and needless delays.
The Supreme Court, a petty and shoulder-chipped bunch that stalled on the gay-marriage case to create delays that were needless except for the political convenience of the justices, came out instead for continued stalling tactics and needless delays.
That sounds harsh. Allow me, then, to repeat for clarity and emphasis: The Supreme Court considered a professional organization's formal proposal that it make a rule for itself in its official code of conduct not to stall on cases for no good reason. And it declined.
Oh, and another thing: The Bar also had asked the court for a code of conduct revision by which justices would be required to explain their disqualifications from cases, and, if not disqualifying when asked by a party to a case, stand for a possible challenge to be decided by other justices.
The Supreme Court came out instead for letting justices disqualify from cases for the hell of it and stay on cases if they damned well pleased.
Oh, and another thing: The Supreme Court's order on these and other rule change requests was so unclear--primarily in that it failed to cross-reference changes it was making in the existing code--that judges around the state said they had no idea in a couple of areas what the high court was trying to say. The Supreme Court's administrative office had to put out a statement the next day explaining what the justices had meant.
Oh, and one more thing: The Supreme Court came out against percolating notions, primarily from the Bar, to switch from electing justices to selecting them by a process of supposed merit. That's surely because few of the current seven justices would sit on the court if merit was a factor.
Most of them owe their robes to seismic blunders by the voters--Karen Baker over Tim Fox, Courtney Goodson over John Fogleman, Jo Hart over Raymond Abramson, Robin Wynne over Tim Cullen and Rhonda Wood over nobody because she lathered herself in so much nursing home special-interest money pre-emptively that no one dared to challenge her. (And, owing to code of conduct revision she helped rebuff, she doesn't have to disqualify from a nursing home wrongful-death case.)
The only recent election voters got right was accidental. It was Dan Kemp's victory last year over sitting associate justice Goodson for chief justice.
That happened only because right-wing dark-money spenders from out of state got confused. They mistakenly launched cowardly stealth attacks on Goodson on the comically misbegotten premise that she was the liberal in the race. She was married to a rich and politically hyperactive class-action lawyer, which is what remote right-wing groups saw.
But, in truth, both she and her Washington lobbyist husband had assessed the Arkansas political wind and opted to cloak themselves anew as regular Tom Cottons and Antonin Scalias.
The mild-mannered Kemp, a Church of Christ elder and longtime circuit judge in Mountain View, now stands ready to take the chief justice job in January. He has said he will push for some of the code of conduct reforms that the Bar sought and the court rebuffed.
Court insiders predict he will get eaten alive by Baker, Hart, Goodson, Wood and Wynne, pounded about by the skull by the boulders on their shoulders.
I am told that the current chief justice--the esteemed law professor Howard Brill, who was appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson on the passing of Jim Hannah--started wearing a helmet to work, metaphorically speaking, about six months ago, and will never have a happier day than the one on which Kemp offers instead his head for smashing.
Finally, one more thing: The day after the Supreme Court's odd and unclear order on the code of conduct, the Arkansas Bar's House of Delegates failed to achieve the three-fourths majority needed to endorse a proposed constitutional amendment its task force had written to get Supreme Court justices nominated by a committee instead of popularly elected.
The vote was 34-to-20 in favor, solid but well short of two-thirds, and just as well.
Voters who gave the preposterous Donald Trump a 27-point margin surely would recoil at the notion of taking away their right to vote for members of the Supreme Court and handing that selection to a committee of people who knew what they were doing.
It would be better if the conservative-overrun Legislature would refer such a proposed constitutional amendment to the voters, though the proposal would remain doomed, most likely.
Hutchinson prefers doing away with elections for appellate judgeships, but that he, not a committee, make the nominations for legislative confirmation. It suits me. His choice of Brill was superb. Unfortunately, voters had picked the other six.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/20/2016