Iowa's Total Recall

Wall Street Journal
Editorial
November 6, 2010

Iowans made a clean sweep of the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, voting to recall all three justices who were up for a retention election. The rout is being played as an unprecedented politicization of state courts. Maybe if judges behaved less like politicians, they'd have less reason to fear recall votes.

Voters were expressing their dismay over a 2009 Iowa court ruling that gave the green light to same-sex marriage. That unanimous decision, which overturned a state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, struck voters as an attempt by the seven justices to impose their views on the state. This is precisely the kind of judicial arrogance—finding a right to gay marriage in the state constitution after many decades in which no one noticed it—that the recall election was designed for.

To choose its judges, Iowa employs a version of the so-called Missouri plan, whereby a state judicial nominating commission submits two or three names to the Governor from which he may choose a new judge. Once on the bench, judges face retention elections after the first year and then every eight years to remain on the court.

In Iowa and most other states that run similar methods of judicial selection, retention elections are typically pro-forma. Judges run unopposed, and voters are rarely motivated to shake up state courts. Nationally, some 99% of judges win their retention elections, and Tuesday's triple ouster was the first jettisoning of Supreme Court justices since Iowa adopted the current system in 1962.

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