via Naional Review by CJ SZAFIR & MATTHEW FERNHOLZ
While Supreme Court and federal-bench nominees get more attention, state judges are important in their own right. And nobody has appointed better state judges than Walker.
According to one exit poll, 70 percent of respondents said the U.S. Supreme Court was an important factor in their vote for president in 2016. Yet the importance of state courts often gets overlooked, even though they handle more cases than federal courts and have the final say on the interpretation of state constitutions. Hence, the men and women who fill state court seats have an arguably greater impact than federal judges on the day-to-day lives of the American people.
Perhaps no governor in America has taken his responsibility to select state judges as seriously as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
Wisconsin voters choose their judges in non-partisan spring elections. When a judicial vacancy is created during a judge’s term, the governor has the power to appoint a replacement to serve until the seat comes up for re-election. So what does Walker look for in a judge? In addition to excellence as an attorney and sound character, Walker’s main criterion for selecting judges is a proper judicial philosophy. He wants judges who “adhere to the rule of law and have a commitment to a textualist, and originalist, judicial philosophy.” He has railed against activist judges who see the Constitution as a living document in need of constant tinkering.
The complete story here > Scott Walker’s Conservative Judges Are a Model for the Nation