Like night follows day, scandals in Harrisburg are followed by cries for reform. This time, though, cries are coming from an unusual place: the governor’s office.

So begins an op-ed published in today’s Daily News. The piece recaps the Governor’s call for reform, which includes a change to merit selection of judges. What’s perhaps unusual about this opinion is its optimism. The editors acknowledge the public’s typical reaction to calls for reform, apathy, especially from a governor in his last year in office, but points out why this time things may be different:

[T]hese are not normal times. . . . In the past two years, more than two dozen people from both parties have been charged with fraud and corruption. That includes five current or former elected officials, three of whom held important leadership positions within the Legislature. Those allegations come on the heels [of] the 2005 pay-raise scandal, when lawmakers voted for an increase in the middle of the night. Public outrage forced them to repeal the move.

And how can we forget one other taint on our leaders: what’s been called by our newest Justice-elect the “worst judicial misconduct in U.S. history.” It is no coincidence that the Governor announced his platform in the beleaguered Luzerne County.

So what will stop change this time around?

All of these changes threaten the status quo. The problem is, they also require action from the Legislature, whose members like their quo to remain static. But this is a time when public push-back could make a big difference. Outraged citizens should call their state lawmakers’ office, and tell them that unless they want a repeat of the blood that followed the pay-raise scandal, they ought to pay attention.

In other words, if we the public remain apathetic, we can expect business as usual. But if we raise our voices and let our leaders in Harrisburg hear that we will accept nothing but systemic change for meaningful reform, perhaps this time will be different.

The governor, speaking on the heels of last week’s fresh wave of corruption charges lodged against former legislative leaders, bemoaned the fact a “broken system” has undermined some of his policy goals and caused other accomplishments to be largely overlooked.

To change things going forward, Rendell pledged new efforts to get legislation passed putting strict new rules on campaign financing, boosting citizen involvement in the redrawing of legislative and Congressional districts, and moving to merit selection of state judges.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer/AP:

Rendell renewed his pitch Wednesday for overhauling the state’s campaign-finance laws, the selection of appellate judges and the process by which state legislative districts are redrawn every 10 years.

WNEP-TV reported earlier on Rendell’s announcement, and you can read a short article and watch a video interview here.

You can see our earlier coverage of the Governor’s tour of the Northeast here.

One of the three core-changes the Governor is targeting to purge corruption from state politics is to switch to merit selection of appellate court judges. Speaking to various audiences, including the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader editorial board, the Scranton Chamber of Commerce, and students at Wilkes University, the Governor highlighted two of the serious flaws with our current system of judicial selection: confusion in the voting booth, and money. The Times-Leader reported:

‘People don’t have a clue who they are voting for,’ Rendell said. ‘In an exit poll conducted five years ago, voters were asked five minutes after they voted to name any of the judicial candidates they voted for, and 50 percent couldn’t remember one.’”

Rendell also criticized political campaign donations to judges. ‘Who gives money to judicial candidates? It’s lawyers, for the most part,’ he said.”

The antidote the Governor proposed is to put qualified judges on the bench through a system of merit selection, where they will be untainted by the corrupting influence of money that Luzernites are, unfortunately, all too familiar with.

This message was music to the ears of Lynn Marks and Shira Goodman of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts (PMC), an organization which has long been calling for Pennsylvania to adopt merit selection for the appellate courts. As PMC’s Lynn Marks explained:

‘Merit selection focuses on getting the most qualified candidates on the bench, offers an opportunity for qualified men and women of all backgrounds from all over Pennsylvania to serve and gets judges out of the fundraising business.’”

The other changes proposed in the Governor’s plan are to implement campaign-finance reform for elected politicians to limit the influence of lobbyists on the state’s lawmakers, and to prevent incumbent legislators from maintaining their power through absurd reapportionment of voting districts.

You will recall that in the just-passed race for a vacant seat on the state’s Supreme Court, vast sums of money were spent on negative advertising. According to many commentators, the race was particularly important to the political parties this year because of the reapportionment issue. In a state like ours, where judges hang party labels after their names (we are one of 6 states that elect judges at all levels in partisan elections), the Supreme Court’s role in deciding contested reapportionment questions becomes a political question and Supreme Court elections become tempting targets for the influence of big money.

We are delighted that Governor Rendell is bringing the problems with electing judges front and center, and think there is no better place to launch this message than a county that has felt first-hand what hell can be wrought by judges tainted by the influence of money.