Gov. DeSantis stiffs Florida Bar

Stacks courts with hard-right judges

The news is not good for people who believe Florida’s courts need to be something more than extensions of the governor’s office.

Picking up where his predecessor left off, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently rejected the Florida Bar’s nominations for lawyers to serve on seven judicial nominating commissions. The organization, which represents all 106,000 lawyers licensed in Florida, has called for new volunteers willing to have the governor embarrass them, too.

That’s our characterization, not the Bar’s, but it fits.

As customary, DeSantis did not explain why he found none of the 24 people on the Bar’s lists suitable to help select Florida judges.

But his reasons can be assumed. DeSantis is open about wanting to pack the judiciary, especially the appellate courts, with lawyers who echo his hardright philosophies. To be sure of that, he needs like-minded nominating commissioners.

Meanwhile, 11 of the 26 applicants for two judgeships on the First District Court of Appeal are present or former members of the arch-conservative Federalist Society, as are two of the three people DeSantis appointed to the Supreme Court in January. A Federalist himself, DeSantis boasted to its state convention in January that the court wouldn’t be ruling in favor of Democrats as often as it had in the past.

The integrity of the courts is dependent on their independence from politics. ThenGov. Reubin Askew was devoted to that principle, which inspired him to establish Florida’s nominating commissions in 1971. Askew did not control the nominating commissions, but Florida governors now do, which means they can appoint whomever they wish to the bench. Judgeships are political patronage once again.

“It’s a charade,” says Kelly Overstreet Johnson, a former Bar president whom Gov. Rick Scott refused to appoint to the commission that nominates judges for the First District Court of Appeal. “It has been a charade ever since it got changed.”

During his eight years in office, Scott rejected 33 sets of Bar recommendations for nominating commission positions. Neither of the prior Republican governors had turned down any.

The Bar’s president in 2016-2017,

William Schifino, Jr., of Tampa was among the nominees DeSantis rejected for two vacancies on the nominating commission for the Second District Court of Appeal.

Schifino, who has a trial practice, served eight years on the nominating commission for the 13th circuit, having been appointed by Republican Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist. Joe Negron, past president of the Florida Senate, appointed him to the Constitution Revision Commission that met in 2017 and 2018. Like the governor, Schifino is a Republican.

“I was very disappointed not to have the opportunity to serve on our 2nd DCA JNC,” Schifino said in an e-mail.

Given Schifino’s prestige in Florida’s legal community, DeSantis’ snub will win him few friends there. Perhaps he thinks he doesn’t need any.

From the Bar list that replaced the one with Johnson’s name on it, Scott chose Richard Doran, who quickly became the chair of the nine-member commission. It is considering 26 applications for two vacancies on the First District Court of Appeal.

That Tallahassee-based court is second in importance only to the Florida Supreme Court, but not by much. It hears most appeals involving state agency decisions and state laws before the higher court decides whether to take them.

The membership of that court’s nominating commission is an example of what it should not be: a concentration of Tallahassee Republican insiders.

· Two members, Mohammad Jazil and Gary Hunter Jr., are in the Tallahassee law firm, Hopping Green & Sams, whose vice president is one of the judicial applicants. Hopping Green represents a powerful array of developers and other special interests feared by environmentalists.

· JNC member Christa Elizabeth Calamas is a committee staff director for the House of Representatives; former and current colleagues are applicants for the judgeships.

· Commissioner Heather Stearns was Scott’s deputy general counsel, with a record of hostility to transparency and open government laws.

· Member Peter Penrod is general counsel for Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and used to be general counsel in the governor’s office.

· Although the First District hears appeals from 12 circuits comprising 32 counties, all but two of its members live in Tallahassee. The others are from Pensacola and Jacksonville.

According to Doran, members identified applicants they worked with or whom they know, so that they wouldn’t be assigned to vet them. “But no one thought it necessary at that time for anyone to be recused.” He said the matter could be raised again when the commission meets Aug. 29 and 30 to interview candidates and recommend up to six.

There is something deeply wrong with rules that don’t forbid nominating commissioners from voting on present or former colleagues.

A nominating process that was meant to be nonpolitical now favors political insiders for judicial vacancies, particularly the appellate courts that can make or discard precedents.

The most conspicuous applicant for one of the two judgeships is George Levesque, former general counsel for both the Florida House and Florida Senate, who asserted Republican positions in politically charged cases, including a major dispute over education funding. His wife heads a foundation that promotes private school vouchers, an issue certain to reach the First District court in a year or so.

Political connections were rarely a concern under Askew’s system, which allowed the governor to appoint only three of each commission’s nine members. The Bar, which is an arm of the Supreme Court under a board of governors elected by Florida lawyers, selected three. Those six then chose three non-lawyers to round out the commission memberships.

That changed for the worse in 2001, when the Legislature, newly under Republican control, gave Gov. Jeb Bush and his successors the power to appoint all nine members of each commission to staggered terms. As a sop to the Bar, it was allowed to recommend three lawyers for four of the nine positions, but the governor can reject lists over and over until he gets names he wants. When the Bar’s Board of Governors voted to accept that, Johnson dissented.

“We would have been better off losing it altogether,” she said.

She was right about that. The Bar’s participation gives a veneer of respectability to what in reality has degenerated into a disreputable political process that leaves Floridians with scant grounds for faith in the integrity of the courts.

Askew’s reform helped clean up a politically corrupt Supreme Court, where two unethical justices resigned to avoid impeachment and a third narrowly escaped it. Having forgotten that ugly chapter of history, Florida is almost surely fated to repeat it.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.