| Cross-posted at DailyKos.com
In January 2007, the seven justices of the Michigan Supreme Court elected Clifford Taylor as Chief Justice for that year. The vote was 4-to-3, with the four-vote conservative majority (Stephen Markman, Maura Corrigan, Robert Young, and Taylor) voting as a bloc. One of the dissenters, Justice Elizabeth Weaver, wrote a memorandum explaining why she opposed Taylor's election and put it on her personal website.
Justice Weaver's memorandum portrays the court as seriously dysfunctional, and lays the blame at the doorstep of the the conservative majority. In fact, she said that none of the four conservatives were fit to serve as Chief Justice.
As for Chief Justice Taylor, she minced no words in opposing his election:
Chief Justice Taylor has proven that he cannot properly lead the Michigan Supreme Court at this time. The people of Michigan deserve to have a Chief Justice who will conduct the people's business in an orderly, professional, and fair manner. |
| Justice Weaver's bad relations with the conservative majority goes back at least to the bitterly-contested 2000 election in which Taylor, Markman, and Young all won. She asserted that Governor Engler, his legal counsel, Lucille Taylor (Clifford Taylor's wife), and Clifford Taylor himself "repeatedly pressured me to do political campaign advertisement for Justices Taylor, Markman and Young." She refused, "believing it to be inappropriate."
Relations grew worse during a dispute over involving trial lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, who has long been an irritant to both the Republican Party and Michigan's legal establishment. In 1999, on his radio talk show, Fieger made crude remarks about a Michigan Court of Appeals panel that overturned a $15 million malpractice verdict in favor of his client. Seven years later, by--you guessed it--a 4-to-3 vote, the Michigan Supreme Court reprimanded Fieger. In doing so, it reversed the Attorney Discipline Board's ruling that tasteless as they were, Fieger's remarks were protected by the First Amendment.
At the same time the court was deciding what to do with Fieger, its conservative majority had adopted an administrative order that Justice Weaver described as a "gag order." She said that the conservative bloc "use[d] their majority votes to silence, or attempt to silence, opinions with which they do not approve." She also argued that there was no legal authority for the order and, in fact, that it was contrary to the state constitution.
Making matters worse, the majority asked for suggestions about what kind of punishment should be imposed on justices who violate the gag order. Justice Weaver believes that this is no idle threat, and that the majority is prepared to punish dissenters. She said:
The majority of four has used open and veiled threats to suppress, and/or attempts to suppress, dissenting voices with personal character attacks, and abuses of power. These include threats to exclude a justice from conference discussions (and actually did so), to ban a justice from the Hall of Justice, to threaten a justice with possible future lawsuits, to refer a justice to the Judicial Tenure Commission [which is responsible for disciplining Michigan judges], or to hold a dissenting justice in contempt.
Weaver's memorandum also described an instance of what can best be called classless behavior on the part of Chief Justice Taylor. In 2006, Weaver disagreed with the conservative bloc on the appointment of a chief probate judge in Kent County. Taylor responded by circulating a draft opinion which described Weaver as "a petulant 'only child'", accused her of "engaging in a tantrum", and suggested that she "use a hunger strike". The vote was, of course, 4-to-3.
In conclusion, Justice Weaver said that her dissent revealed only the "tip of the iceberg, and went on to say:
Over the past year and longer, the majority of four has advanced a policy toward greater secrecy and less accountability. I strongly believe that it is past time to let sunlight into the Michigan Supreme Court. An efficient and impartial judiciary is "ill served by casting a cloak of secrecy around the operations of the courts."
If a court operates in this secretive and dysfunctional manner, is it any wonder that a University of Chicago study would rank it dead last for independence of the justices and the worst overall among America's highest state courts? |
