This is not really a column about bad judges or about children’s safety in preschools — it’s about the genius of representative democracy — but if either topic interests you, read on.
Big issues related to those two subjects are brewing early in Louisiana’s legislative session. They give reason to appreciate how the legislative process can lend itself not just to compromises for their own sake, but to agreements that materially improve the final product.
This is not to say that any compromises have even been attempted yet on the two issues in question. Instead, the initial proposals are well-intentioned but flawed — and the salutary news is that the process affords opportunity to fix the flaws and thus better effectuate the good intentions.
Let’s take preschool safety. I wrote last October about a new law that sailed through the Legislature with ease that, while well motivated, would have awful repercussions. The law was catalyzed by parents whose three-year-old daughter had been assaulted by a classmate. Sponsored by state Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, the law requires private and faith-based preschools, but not public or Montessori schools, to meet the same licensing requirements that day care centers do.
Among the numerous problems with this approach is that the voluminous regulations applicable to day care centers actually make no sense for preschool children, while being so burdensome in practice that significant numbers of faith-based schools feared they might have to close down.
To her credit, Barrow now has introduced a bill intended to mitigate some of those unintended consequences. Meanwhile, state Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, introduced a bill (without consulting Barrow) that would, as our news story put it, virtually “gut” Barrow’s law enacted last year by exempting private and religious schools altogether.
My snap judgment is that even Barrow’s new bill doesn’t go far enough in fixing the problems last year’s law caused. Without agonizing detail, suffice it to say that some senseless regulations still would apply, in ways that hamper reasonable operations of existing preschools.
On the other hand, Mizell’s bill essentially would exempt all private and faith-based schools from all the new safety measures Barrow’s law imposes. If it passes as is, though, parents who have legitimate concerns about their children’s safety would get no relief.
Fortunately, the process of deliberative democracy through elected representatives offers the solution. We should expect Sens. Mizell and Barrow to sit down together and, with their colleagues, find middle ground that doesn’t compromise principle but instead takes the best aims of both approaches to make the final product better than either current one.
A similar outlook should guide efforts to ensure transparency, competence and ethical behavior from state judges. Gov. Jeff Landry is leading a push to make it easier to discipline bad judges, even to remove them.
The proposal he has endorsed, though, is in its current form a terrible idea. It would allow a governor to prompt the state Senate, by two-thirds vote, to suspend or remove a judge (or district attorney) from office. It is a bad idea because it would so significantly infringe upon the principle of separating government power into realms that are largely distinct (with a few but not many slightly blurred lines) from each other. If the proposal passes in that form, it would offer too big a temptation for a governor to target judges not just for ethical violations but for political reasons divorced from a judge’s duty to impartially administer justice.
On the other hand, the problem Landry identified appears to be real. Former state Supreme Court justice Chet Traylor on March 5 resigned from the Judiciary Commission, the committee charged with recommending disciplinary action against judges, while saying that the current system is insufficient to weed out unethical judges or provide public transparency.
Agree or not with individual decisions Traylor made in his Supreme Court days (1997-2009) or his earlier stints as a district court judge, he always struck me as the epitome of rectitude and reverence for the rule of law superseding mere political considerations. His words and warnings carry weight.
Again, though, the deliberative lawmaking process can ride to the rescue. The Legislature has time to come up with a way to make judges more accountable without giving future governors undue, unwise expansions of power.
One of the great maxims from this nation’s founders — although there is no agreement on who said it first — is that “Democracy is a slow process of stumbling to the right decision instead of going straight forward to the wrong one.”
With that wisdom in mind, let’s hope that on these two issues, the Legislature’s deliberative process allows it to stumble not just to compromise, but to constructive consensus.
