What broken system enables this sort of corruption, and why hasn't it been fixed?
This doesn't feel like the right answer. Judges should feel free to make an unpopular judgement if it's what the law dictates.
This is an opinion.
The country is the country of people, they establish all the mechanisms. Including law.
The "country of people" legally is written in founding papers, but here we're questioning on the level of founding papers. Constitution offers a mechanism to change it as a whole; but there currently are other mechanisms too. Working judges impeachment should perhaps be practical - or it should be clear why not.
For example, it was the sole reason a lot of people voted for Trump: because at this moment in history there happened, through sheer chance, to be this hugely disproportionate opportunity for a party to grab power that will last a generation. Just because a bunch of people retired around the same time. And this momentous opportunity completely hinged on what would already be the most important single election in the land. That doesn't feel remotely like what the founding fathers intended.
It wasn't sheer chance. It was Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell subverting the Constitution with a coup, refusing to even let the Senate consider whether to approve Presidemt Obama's nominations. And now that Mcconnell has eliminated the principle of upholding the Constitution, we can expect the same from every Senate for at least a generation, and judges will only be appointed when the President and the Senate are the same party.
Even sheriffs shouldn't be elected, never mind judges. How this ever became an accepted practice in America is beyond my comprehension.
The idea is that people are choosing how to live, and make common rules using government bodies.
Elected judges fit this idea. Why it's a bad idea?
For the same reason that it's insane to have two wolves and a sheep vote on what they are having for dinner.
You elect representatives, who set the law. The job of a judge is to enforce that law impartially. Looking at the track record of elected officials, it should be pretty clear that impartiality is not something that elections select for.
i.e. a judge's job is to interpret the law for a case, so you don't want to impair that with other incentives. i.e. the best judge is a program that, supplied the law and supplied the evidence, provides a judgment that most precisely approximates the law's intent in this situation. This can be very far from the people's present intent.
So if you give the people too much power over the judge, they will transform law-execution into present-intent-execution, something we do not desire.
If law were totally unambiguous and evidence were totally unambiguous, we might be fully constrained. An elected judge would still be unable to appease the crowd. But we know something: law is ambiguous and evidence is also ambiguous. We need the human here to disambiguate and match against statement and then intent. And adding political necessities to that process hurts it.
Are you assuming present-intent is clouded with short-termness?
In general, people want government officials (like judges, here government is in a large sense) to do what they, people, want. Maybe not immediately - though it's a complex questions, with assumptions and counterarguments, but not clearly leading to your conclusion.
We also see that modern state - where laws are complex and judges have leeway to interpret them how they present-intently want, has drawbacks. That's the problem which we face - and want to fix. How's your problems bigger than this one?
> We need the human here to disambiguate and match against statement and then intent. And adding political necessities to that process hurts it.
We somehow don't have mechanism to ensure the intent of a judge is as we expect it to be. Sometimes honestly - I can imagine e.g. a conservative judge who really never imagined a marriage for couple of the same gender (not a very good example, sorry).
https://courts.uslegal.com/selection-of-judges/state-by-stat...
We shouldn't want politics in court.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-deat...
The branches of the US government are meant as a check against power mongering by the other two branches. We modified other attempts at doing so, and others have done the same with ours.
Normal court cases may not be about politics, but appellate and supreme court cases often are. I can appeal a ruling around a law by putting the law itself on trial, invalidating all or parts of it. If Congress doesn't like it, they can come back and try to change the state or federal constitution to put it back, but that is so difficult that only some very big items make it through.
Where a lower court judge can make a mess is by generating more appeals than we (the People, or the Defendent) can afford to pursue. I think it would be disingenuous to say that isn't also political. I don't see how a judge who favors one side of an unresolved policy dispute can avoid generating extra work for the higher courts. However, they may piss enough people off that the resources are allocated to settle this once and for all, legislatively or judicially.
Personally I strongly favour this approach. Judges should not be overtly political, and the process for their appointment should be closer to the way we certify doctors than to the way we choose politicians.
The English system doesn't provide an ironclad guarantee against political meddling, but there's always a tradeoff there: we want both accountability and independence, and these are opposing. (Also, I'm English, for what that's worth.)
https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/the-judiciary-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_judge_(England_and_...
Tbh it's a major source of depression for me. We're boned and I don't see any chance as a world of us getting better. Humans it seems just aren't nice people.