Taking politics out of judicial selection . . .

The Nashville City Paper reports here that Governor Phil Bredesen has filed suit against the Judicial Selection Commission's re-submission of Houston Gordon's name for consideration to replace retiring Justice Adolfo Birch. I'll write more about this in a subsequent post, but Tennessee's form of judicial selection ("The Tennessee Plan") pretty clearly is unconstitutional (and I don't say that lightly).

Ironically, advocates of the Tennessee Plan assert that it removes "politics" from the judicial selection process (even though our constitution requires that each judge be "elected by voters," which is pretty "political"). But according to the NCP,

Bredesen said the selection commission nominating Gordon again was “fairly blatant political game playing” and that the panel was trying to “box you in a little bit on who you choose.”

“I think in (the selection panel’s) attempt to be clever and political… they’ve managed to get us both tripped up in the mechanics of this,” Bredesen said. “We need to get it straightened out.”