St. Louis social media right now is full of enthusiasm for denying two recently appointed Missouri Supreme Court judges their full terms on the bench—but whether that online energy yields real-life results is very much an open question.
The loosely organized campaign of left-leaning Missourians urging their fellow voters not to retain Judges Ginger Gooch and Kelly Broniec stems from their actions in a 4-3 court decision in September. The case determined whether Amendment 3, which would restore access to abortion in Missouri, should go to voters. Broniec’s dissenting opinion was not about the legality of abortion, per se, but rather found that the amendment contained technical errors because it didn’t specify which laws would be repealed by its passage and should be stricken. Gooch and Judge Zel Fischer co-signed her dissent.
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Now the same voters casting a ballot on Amendment 3 are also voting on whether Gooch and Broniec get to stay on the court. That’s because, under the Missouri Plan for selecting judges, the governor appoints judges to the Missouri Supreme Court from a list of qualified candidates put together by a commission. After a judge has served a full year, the voters decide to retain him or her in the next general election.
Fischer, first appointed in 2008 and already twice retained by voters, will be on the bench until 2034. That leaves Gooch and Broniec facing heat from the exact people fired up to go to the polls to vote for Amendment 3.
Why It Matters: Since its inception in the 1940s, the Missouri Plan for selecting judges has been seen as an effective way to minimize the influence of partisan politics on the judiciary, even while giving voters a say, and the plan has been adopted and adapted by many other states. However, the voters’ actual influence is debatable: In the history of the Missouri Plan, no state supreme court judge or even appellate judge has ever not been retained.
At the same time, the system has traditionally been seen as a bulwark keeping the state’s judiciary centrist. That’s happened to some extent in recent years even as Missouri leadership moves ever rightward: Judges currently on the court date all the way back to Democratic Governor Bob Holden, who like his successors Matt Blunt, Jay Nixon, and Eric Greitens accounts for a single current judge. (If Gooch and Broniec are retained by voters, that will mean three of the court’s seven judges are Parson appointees.)
And so it’s ironic that, in the case of Broniec and Gooch, it’s liberals who are unhappy with the judiciary. On more issues than not in recent years, the court has been far less conservative than other branches of government.
What’s Next: In addition to being another data point for legal scholars debating the merits of the Missouri Plan, the voters’ decision on Gooch and Broniec will also represent the power, or lack thereof, of social media in judicial elections. If the judges stay on the court, it will be yet another reminder of the truism that social media is not real life. If they get the boot, it will signal that truism is getting less true.
