Proposed reform on Judicial Review Research Paper

Proposed reform on Judicial Review - Research Paper Example Whereas the level and extent to which other reforms may be beneficial to the judicial process are not in question, this author will lay out but a few salient reasons why the judicial nomination process is one of the most important functions that government makes with regards to the functionality, diversity, fairness, and representative nature that the judiciary should display. Furthermore, due to the fundamental shift in the judicial nomination process that has been experienced over the past 50 years, this author will seek to lay out a series of issues that define the shortcomings that the current legal system experiences as well as seeking to law out what steps could be effected in order to ameliorate these. The first issue that this analysis will consider is the fact that the judicial nomination process has turned into what can only be considered a type of media and political frenzy. Whereas the constitution states that the president should seek the counsel of congress in order to appoint a judge, the actual process whereby the judge is vetted is not enumerated upon and has largely become to be defined by Congress as something of an evolving practice that draws on prior precedence and the political fervor of a given point in time (Gonzalez et al 2003). As Congress itself, nor the president for that matter, can be trusted to make a determination based upon qualifications, the process oftentimes diverges into a political mudslinging contest where both sides attempt to paint the other as either obstructionist or attempting to push through some form of radical judge to the bench. As such, this interpretation of the law and precedent is neither helpful to the understanding of the constitution nor the judicial nomination process. As a function of this, the following analysis will detail and proscribe a set of solutions with regards to this particular shortcoming. Recent court appointments have highlighted the fact that rather than determining the overall qualificat ions of the judge, the opposing political party merely regresses to performing a series of partisan character attacks as a means to stymie the process and generate a degree of public awareness and involvement (McGinnis et al 2010). This of course is counterproductive and forces the process itself to be a multipart game that both the Congress and the sitting president at the time engage upon. Oftentimes the way that such a game progresses is that the president will nominate a series of un-selectable and/or unqualified candidates as a means to exhaust the Congress or the general public with the intractability of the process. Only once this has been accomplished, the president will nominate the candidate that he truly wanted to be make it through the process in the first place. This game theory is counterproductive, inefficient, and wastes a great deal of shareholder time and energy. A better and more efficient process for nomination and selection is therefore necessitated in order to institute a process that is not only more efficient but also a better representation of how the constitution originally envisioned the process of judicial nomination. In this sense, the entire process is hijacked at the expense of political posturing, partisanship, and a degree of political gain