When judges take the bench to rule on cases around Ohio, everyone affected by the cases they’re hearing hopes that personal politics will play no role in their legal rulings. So, it does not make much sense that candidates seeking elected judicial offices run as either Republicans or Democrats.
Recently Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said she would like judges to run without party affiliation designations. Judges are called upon to consider the facts of the cases in front of them, not on the values of any political party, Justice O’Connor said.
Justice O’Connor is one of four Republicans who hold a majority on the state Supreme Court. And like U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, she has stood up in the past for the notion that the judiciary is above partisanship.
When state Republican Party leaders last fall blasted a Democratic judge’s ruling against limiting absentee-ballot drop-off boxes as partisan, Justice O’Connor pushed back, criticizing her own party. The political attack was unfounded and dangerously undermined an independent judiciary, she said.
This is not the first time Justice O’Connor has urged for the removal of party affiliation in judicial elections. She first pitched it in 2013 and then again urged for it in 2014. In Ohio, judicial candidates participate in partisan primaries with their party affiliation listed on the ballots. In the general election, candidates are listed on the ballot without any partisan designation.
Changing judicial elections to remove party affiliations from all elections would require a change to the Ohio constitution, and thus, cooperation from Ohio’s highly partisan General Assembly.
The politicization of Ohio’s Supreme Court has been disturbing and disappointing for some time, not only because the party affiliation of judicial candidates is attached to their names at the ballot box.
In 2017 Justice Sharon Kennedy made an appearance at a meeting of the the Greater Toledo Right to Life organization, even as the court was set to review a case related to the city’s last abortion clinic. And Justice Pat DeWine has put himself in a job where he must recuse himself from any number of cases because his father is the governor.
In 2019, campaign-finance records revealed that FirstEnergy -- the utility company at the center of a $61 million bribery scandal -- contributed to the campaigns of six of the seven justices on the bench at the time.
Rooting out the politics that has infused Ohio’s judicial system will obviously take much more work than removing partisan designations from ballots, but the move is a good first step in the right direction.
The public rightly expects judges to put politics aside once they put on their robes and take the bench. Those robes are neither red nor blue. The candidates running for judicial posts should not run with explicit ties to any political party.
First Published January 27, 2021, 5:00 a.m.
