Ducey beats president at packing the courts

President Donald Trump, with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing his best to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues.

It’s worked for him so far. However, in the dark art of court packing, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey makes Trump look like a lightweight.

There are two basic blueprints for packing a court. One strategy is to get a law passed to add to the number of seats on a court in order and fill those positions with judges dedicated to your political agenda.

The other is to corrupt a supposedly neutral system for selecting judicial candidates so that only candidates with the “right” ideology are considered.

Ducey has done both.

This may wind up getting the hardcore political animal and conservative ideologue Bill Montgomery on Arizona’s Supreme Court.

A while back Ducey got the Republicans who run the Legislature to expand the court, allowing him to add justices whose politics matched his.

And he’s gone after the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments to make sure the only people who make it through the state’s supposedly neutral process are decidedly non-neutral candidates. As an article by Jeremy Duda of The Arizona Mirror pointed out, there is no longer a single democrat on the commission.

The law says the governor should make sure the commission “reflects the diversity of Arizona’s population.”

Ducey got around that by appointing “independents” -- who happen to have backgrounds tying them to Republican politics.

“It’s a disturbing trend,” said Kyle C. Barry, Senior Legal Counsel for the non-partisan Justice Collaborative Engagement Project. “Gov. Ducey pulled all these different levers to move the court in a more conservative direction. Arizona has a law requiring non-partisanship and this seems to be to be pretty egregious in terms of maintaining a neutral arbiter and the public confidence.”

For example, Ducey replaced three of the commissioners who kept Montgomery from making the final cut for a Supreme Court job last time around. They had expressed concerns about Montgomery’s lack of experience, his hyper political views on issues ranging from marijuana to LGBTQ rights. And simply, his “ability to be fair.”

Sometime soon the newly reconfigured commission will again begin evaluating candidates for a seat on the state Supreme Court and Montgomery is back in the running.

We’ll see how successful Ducey’s court packing strategy goes.

A sense of fairness used to be the most important trait for a judicial candidate. With Trump and Ducey the most important trait is a sense of loyalty.

To the politician who appoints them.