Preserve separation of powers

The separation of powers sounds like a dusty old concept. The first time any of us read about it is in history or government class, usually in the context of the writing of the Constitution, something that happened more than two centuries ago.

But it’s a very real, living idea. It comes up when we debate whether the president should continue waging war in foreign countries despite Congress never having voted on the question. Separation of powers, as we know it, bestows Congress with the authority to declare war, after all. The president is tasked with waging it.

The separation of powers also has been roiling social media lately as various wags debate whether, or to what degree, Congress should be doing things like inviting foreign heads of state to speak, or sending letters to countries with whom the president and other international heads of state are actively negotiating.

Separation of powers is neither an archaic nor arcane concept.

And its implications are seen on a much more local level, too. We listened with interest to a presentation at the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday from a group of people opposed to Senate Joint Resolution 3, which is currently making its way through the Alaska Senate, that would drastically change the way judges are appointed in Alaska.

To read a full account, see the story on page A1 of today’s Frontiersman.

Here’s a quick recap: The Alaska Judicial Council, a body made up of three attorneys appointed by the Alaska Bar Association and three non-attorneys appointed by the governor, vet judge applicants and forward a list of candidates for the governor to appoint to vacancies.

This has been the process for as long as Alaska has been a state. It’s in the state constitution. That’s why the resolution in the Senate doesn’t change law so much as call for a vote of the people on whether to change it.

Those changes include adding three more non-lawyers and requiring that the attorneys the bar association picks be confirmed by the Legislature.

We oppose this move for two reasons.

First, we want our judiciary to be free of politics. Stacking the council with three more political appointees, to our mind, would whittle away at an independent judiciary.

One need only look to states where judges are elected to see why politics and the enforcement of criminal law don’t make good bedfellows. Elected judges run on a platform of being tough on crime, and have gone to extreme measures to back up those claims. The fallout in the lives of real people is heartbreaking.

Our second reason relates to the aforementioned concept, the separation of powers.

Forcing legislative confirmation on those nominees and adding more political appointees would, we think, give the legislative and executive branches too much power over the judicial branch. The powers would no longer be separate.

We urge the Legislature to reject this resolution. The current system is not broken. So there is no need to fix it.