There Goes the Judge?

There's one big race that's still a wild-card.... And it's the kind of race that never, ever, hinges on a wire. But such is the Post-Huge-Raise condition of politics in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

For the uninitiated, here's the scoop. In the middle of the night at the end of June, the Legislature here gave itself a raise in its base salary from the high $60Ks to $81,000. Employees of the executive and judicial branches also got nice pay bumps as well.

It stoked the kind of fury unseen here since... well, never before.

Technically, the good-government folks argued, the raise was unconstitutional as our 253 state legislators were taking their increases before an election in the form of unvouchered expenses. The state courts deemed it constitutional, so as the Lege is in an off-year, but the judges aren't, the good-government folks decided to take on the judges. And nobody in this fair Commonwealth has ever done that.

We elect our judges here; well, we elect them to start. And then they have to face a yes-or-no retention vote every ten years until they reach the age of 70, when they retire. Two of the seven members of our State Supreme Court were up for retention, and they got flamed and scrutinized as never before, even down to one justices' expensed purchase of half-and-half, allegedly for a meeting.

That justice, Sandra Schultz Newman, seems safe as she's got a comfortable margin with 81% of the statewide vote in. But Justice Russell Nigro -- a native Philadelphian (and, in the interest of full disclosure, an old family friend) -- is tottering on the brink of being the first Pennsylvania jurist to ever lose a retention vote. At one point Nigro closed a deficit of 20,000 "No" votes, but the count keeps fluctuating wildly.

I've never seen anything like this, and my night's not done just yet.

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