Governor would have more power over picking Iowa district court judges under GOP bill

Republicans are proposing giving the governor more influence over the panel that selects district court judges, under a proposal that advanced in the Iowa Senate Monday.

The legislation, Senate File 2014, would give the governor the power to appoint the majority of the panel that selects finalists for district court judge openings. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds would get six appointments to each 11-member district nominating commission, up from five under current law.

The change would build on a Republican-led push in 2019, when Reynolds signed legislation giving herself and future governors the majority of appointments on the state nominating commission that picks the finalists for openings on the Iowa Supreme Court and Iowa Court of Appeals.

Since the change, Reynolds has appointed several Iowa Supreme Court justices and Court of Appeals judges.

The commissions interview candidates for district court judges, who preside over criminal trials and lawsuits, and send the names of the finalists to the governor, who appoints one to fill the vacancy. Currently, the governor appoints five members of the commission and lawyers in the judicial district elect the other five members. A senior judge in the district serves as the commission's chair.

Sign up: Get the Register's politics newsletter in your inbox every morning

State Sen. Julian Garrett, R-Indianola, said he proposed the bill because he believes the state-level changes have been effective and he wants the process for choosing district court judges to work the same way.

"It seems to me what we did here a few years ago is working well at the state level," he said. "I have not heard complaints about the justices that have been selected under that system, and there have been several."

The bill advanced through a Senate subcommittee meeting Monday with Garrett and Sen. Jason Schultz, R-Schleswig, in favor, and Sen. Nate Boulton, D-Des Moines, opposed. It is now eligible for consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Boulton, who like Garrett is an attorney, said he doesn't want to further change the system for picking judges without understanding the full effect of the last set of changes at the state level.

"We’ve had a pretty narrow sample size since we made major changes to the judicial nominating qualification process," he said. "And certainly we don’t want to see instability in our courts, in a branch of government that should be one of the more stable branches of government."

More: Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' reelection road map looks smooth in 2022 after 2018 squeaker

Iowa's decades-old merit-based judicial selection system is intended to remove partisan politics from the process of selecting judges. Several speakers at Monday's subcommittee meeting said they were concerned the legislation could further erode the nonpartisan nature of the process.

"From our perspective, all that does is drive more politics into our judiciary, which we have all claimed we want to avoid," said Kellie Paschke, a lobbyist for Justice Not Politics, which advocates for an independent judiciary.

Drew Klein, a lobbyist for Americans for Prosperity, which supports the bill, said he supports aligning the district court system with the change Republicans made a few years ago at the state level.

"We certainly haven’t seen any sky is falling moments since we made those changes on the Supreme Court level," he said.

More: As Iowa faces a child care shortage, Republicans think looser regulation is part of the solution

The bill would also change how the commission chooses its chair so that the commission's members elect one of their own to a two-year term as chair, with the opportunity to be reelected twice. Currently, the longest-serving judge in each judicial district automatically serves as the chair of the nominating commission.

Garrett said he's heard concerns about commission chairs exerting undue influence over the interview process. Several people at the subcommittee meeting pointed to District Judge Kurt Stoebe, who was accused by other commissioners of tainting a district court nomination last fall. Stoebe's fellow commissioners said he favored one candidate over the other, made unprofessional comments criticizing some of the candidates and unfairly excluded one of the applicants by falsely claiming he had withdrawn after his interview.

Stoebe's actions prompted Reynolds to reject the two finalists submitted by the commission and directed them to restart the interview process. He stepped down as the nominating commission's chair after the incident.

More: Gov. Kim Reynolds has raised millions for reelection. How do her Democratic opponents stack up?

Caitlin Jarzen, a lobbyist for the Iowa Judicial Branch, said she opposes the bill because she believes judges should be involved in the process of selecting judges.

"We understand that there has been an issue with this process on the district level," she said. "However, that issue was addressed and resolved and we don’t believe that the entire system needs to be changed because of it."

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Why Iowa's governor may have more power to pick district court judges