Opinion

Nearly interesting

TBO.com
Published: April 28, 2012

Last Friday, three members of the Florida Supreme Court barely avoided losing their seats on the seven-member court. The court had to call a temporary halt to a hearing on the challenged Florida Senate redistricting plan so Justices Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince could qualify for the ballot. The justices face merit-retention votes this year in which Florida voters will decide whether the justices remain on the court.

Since 1976, when the state constitution was amended to adopt the court system now in place, no justice has lost a merit-retention vote and been removed from the court. If Lewis, Pariente and Quince had failed to meet the candidate qualifying deadline, they would be off the court and the task of replacing them would have fallen to Gov. Rick Scott. Under the constitution, the governor selects justices to fill court vacancies from a list of candidates — from three to six — sent to him by the Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission.

Lewis and Pariente were appointed to the court by Democrat Lawton Chiles, and Quince was an appointment Chiles made in consultation with Republican Jeb Bush before Bush succeeded Chiles.

Scott has said he will appoint judges who "adhere to the written law, changeable only by the Legislature or constitutional amendment, not by the bench according to personal preferences or perceptions of popular preference." So it would have been interesting to see if the nominating commission could come up with would-be justices Scott thought met that judicially conservative criterion.