Robes in a Knot.
Some judges will get an unwelcome helping of politics in the session of the Connecticut legislature that begins tomorrow. Renominations of Appellate, Superior Court, and Senior judges, along with Judge Trial Referees, are likely to be presented to the legislature by Governor Rell in stages. This is a change from previous years when they’ve been made at the start at the legislative session. The Judiciary Committee holds a couple of marathon hearings early in the session.
This year will be different. For all sorts of different reasons, most of them ignoble, approximately 47 renominations will not be made at once. The governor’s office wants several administration officials to land on the bench as the ethics governor’s term nears an end. There’s been resistance. In order to assist the appointment of new judges the system doesn’t need and can’t afford, Mrs. Rell will hold some current members of the bench hostage for a couple of months.
The governor is misusing the judiciary by adopting tawdry tactics in order to pay some political debts that the state, by her own admission, cannot afford.
2 comments
In twelve months, Governor Rell will have completed her journey from admired (a product of a do nothing strategy) to humiliated.
It’s great to see that her Excellency is nominating Bob Genaurio to the bench, who has so little respect for the branch of government that he would join. Mr. Genaurio, in regard to a proposal to exempt judicial from further budget cuts, stated: “It is particularly unconscionable to provide a blanket exception to one branch of government at the same time that other state agencies are being burdened with budgetary reductions.”
With all due respect to Mr. Genaurio, it is unconscionable to pretend that the Judicial Branch, a separate and coequal branch of government under our state constitution that is entrusted with providing justice to the citizens of this state, is the budgetary or constitutional equal of a state agency. The Judicial Branch is NOT the DMB or the Council on Environmental Quality or some other agency created by legislative fiat. The judicial branch is a bedrock necessity to our small Republic. His characterization of the judicial branch is insulting and disrespectful, and not befitting someone who wishes to wear the robes in his retirement.