Editorial: Pa. courts represent all Pennsylvanians

Judges and justices in Pennsylvania have never been a complicated situation.

A magisterial district judge presides over a set portion of a county. The people of that set portion cast a vote for the position.

A county Court of Common Pleas judge presides over a whole county. The people of that county vote for their judges.

The appellate level has three courts: Commonwealth, Superior and Supreme. There are nine Commonwealth and 15 Superior judges and seven Supreme Court justices. They hear cases from every corner of the state. They hear criminal appeals from Allegheny and death penalty appeals from Philadelphia. They hear custody appeals from Forest and civil appeals from Lackawanna.

There is no person in Pennsylvania who is not represented by these three courts. The people who hold the seats could be from anywhere in the state. They serve 10-year terms. They are elected by all of the voters, just like the other statewide positions that are answerable to all of the people — attorney general, auditor general, treasurer, lieutenant governor and governor.

State Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon, would like to change that. Each session since 2015, he has proposed an amendment that would create judicial districts. The judges and justices would no longer be statewide positions, although they would still have statewide authority.

This year the proposal is House Bill 38, a joint resolution that seeks to upend the appellate courts and slowly step them from being statewide offices to geographic boxes in just five pages. It was referred to the Judiciary committee on Jan. 11.

It is championed by some as a way to better represent the people. What it actually does is represent the Legislature, which would hold sway over the districts every 10 years when boundaries are redrawn, as they are for the legislators themselves.

The problem is that geography doesn’t change the law. The legislators do, and with bills just like this one. But what seems like a good idea when you write a bill doesn’t necessarily pan out that way when you release it into the wild.

For proof of that, Republican legislators should look no further than Act 77 of 2019 — the law they pushed as necessary advancement. The law that included the expansion of mail-in voting.

The state has not yet proved that it can find fair and unbiased ways to carve the state up into the districts that have always been designed to be representational. The 2021 decennial redistricting is already set to become a partisan bar fight.

Pennsylvania should be finding ways to bring its people together. The last thing anyone needs is more ways to divide them.