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Crap - George Will and I agree on something...
George F. Will - Bargain Basement Judiciary - washingtonpost.com:
Oh, I agree with you that Will's constant complaints about the power of the judiciary are unfounded, and he's among the worst of quote-miners and cherry-pickers when it comes to the Federalist Papers excerpts on the subject.
But the overall view that federal judges should be paid (and get raises) on scales that adjust with inflation, as does every other aspect of government payroll (except Congress that has to explicitly vote their own raise every time - who were the ad wizards who came up with THAT one? :) ), I can accept as a valid point.
Then again, if one associates the stereotype of financial greed of the Conservative/Republican side of things, then by raising the salaries of judges, maybe he's implying that one would get more conservative lawyers willing to be judges. He's making it look like it's a case of "you get what you pay for" as a form of quality control, but really he may be saying that "right now, the government can't afford the people I think would become the judges we need to set this country straight."
The problem, Roberts believes, is that we are not paying enough to acquire judicial competence commensurate with the importance of courts in our system.
Last year the House Judiciary Committee voted 28 to 5 for a significant but only partial restoration of what has been lost: The bill would have increased judicial pay to what it would be if judges had received the same cost-of-living increases that other federal employees have received since 1989. The Senate Judiciary Committee was considering similar legislation when last year's session ended.
The denial of annual increases, Roberts wrote, "has left federal trial judges -- the backbone of our system of justice -- earning about the same as (and in some cases less than) first-year lawyers at firms in major cities, where many of the judges are located." The cost of rectifying this would be less than .004 percent of the federal budget. The cost of not doing so will be a decrease in the quality of an increasingly important judiciary -- and a change in its perspective.
[...]
Conservatives regret this development but must come to terms with its imperatives, one of which is:Well, I agreed with it on the surface, but on another post (which gave a little background on Will's overall view of the Judiciary) led me to write the following:
The enlargement of the judiciary's role by the regulatory state requires compensation of the judiciary commensurate with its ever-expanding importance. That importance, although regrettable, is a fact, and so is this: You get the quality -- and the perspective -- you pay for.
Oh, I agree with you that Will's constant complaints about the power of the judiciary are unfounded, and he's among the worst of quote-miners and cherry-pickers when it comes to the Federalist Papers excerpts on the subject.
But the overall view that federal judges should be paid (and get raises) on scales that adjust with inflation, as does every other aspect of government payroll (except Congress that has to explicitly vote their own raise every time - who were the ad wizards who came up with THAT one? :) ), I can accept as a valid point.
Then again, if one associates the stereotype of financial greed of the Conservative/Republican side of things, then by raising the salaries of judges, maybe he's implying that one would get more conservative lawyers willing to be judges. He's making it look like it's a case of "you get what you pay for" as a form of quality control, but really he may be saying that "right now, the government can't afford the people I think would become the judges we need to set this country straight."
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