Roses & Thistles: It turns out that civility had a prayer of success

4:37 PM, Mar. 11, 2011  |  

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A thistle to Gov. Terry Branstad for appointing a lawyer to the State Judicial Nominating Commission to fill a seat formerly occupied by a non-lawyer. Surely the governor is aware that one of the raps on the merit-selection system for judges is that the appeals- and district-court nominating commissions are dominated by lawyers. (Actually, they have traditionally been balanced 50-50, reflecting constitutional intent, with half the members being lawyers elected by other lawyers, and half being lay members appointed by governors, but a judge chairs each commission.) This move makes you wonder if Branstad is more interested in restoring public faith in Iowa's judicial-selection process or throwing gas on the flame.

A thistle to the Iowa legislators for wanting to have it both ways on prayers before daily sessions. They want prayin' without opinion. Some of individuals invited to offer the daily invocations stray into controversial political issues and proposed legislation in their prayers. That's not supposed to happen, according to legislative rules. The problem is once legislators have invited ministers or others to pray before the assembly, they shouldn't tell them what they can or cannot say. That seems to trench on both the speech and free-exercise-of-religion provisions of the First Amendment. Then again, the make- no-law-respecting-an-establishment of-religion part of that same amendment should negate the whole exercise.

A rose to members of the Iowa House of Representatives for conducting a civilized debate on public employee bargaining. The mature behavior of Iowa lawmakers was in stark contract to their counterparts in Wisconsin, where Democratic lawmakers fled the state, and Madison looked more like downtown Cairo some days. The Iowa House Republicans gave Iowans an opportunity to weigh in during a public hearing, and they gave the Democrats three days to debate the GOP bill and the reams of the minority party's amendments designed to expand collective-bargaining rights in Iowa. Whether you agree or disagree with the bill that eventually passed Friday (and it had both good and bad), the process worked.