Last week, we detailed the process by which the Judicial Nominating Commission selects the list of candidates for judicial office from which the governor must choose. We showed how the process is—and how its defenders want to keep it—secretive.

Compare this process to the one used to select federal judges. Who can forget the image of then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett holding up the blank notepad to show she wasn’t using notes? One of my favorite moments in judicial-appointment history was then-Judge Antonin Scalia smoking a pipe during his confirmation hearing. And burned into the memories of conservatives, of course, is the “high-tech lynching” of then-Judge Clarence Thomas.

Those who would keep us in the dark regarding the appointment of Oklahoma’s judges and justices defend the black box by pointing to these, and other, scenarios. They claim if Oklahoma adopted a similar system, the hearings would turn political. After all, for every video of Justice Scalia smoking a pipe, there is a video of Democrats accusing then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape. For the defenders of Oklahoma’s status quo, these hearings are a circus, and copying the process would turn our own judicial appointment hearings into some kind of freak show.

This argument misses something, however. Should hearings for judicial officers become like that of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, or Brett Kavanaugh, voters would actually have more information to take with them to the voting booth. After all, I suspect one reason some people voted against Vice President Kamala Harris in November is that they remember how then-Senator Harris and her Democrat colleagues conducted themselves in the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 [pictured above]. And the reason Senator Mitch McConnell decided not to confirm a nominee during President Obama’s lame-duck year in 2016 is that he remembered how Democrats treated Clarence Thomas over 25 years prior.

Transparency comes with all kinds of benefits. The most obvious is that we know what we can expect from future members of our courts. But an ancillary benefit is we get an extra peak into our elected state lawmakers at the Oklahoma Capitol. And, unlike the unaccountable Judicial Nominating Commission, we the voters can hold our lawmakers accountable. 

Photo Credit: Associated Press