“A couple of other attorneys I spoke with, Levi Martinez and Evan Lipstein, separately reflected on how the state’s nominations process is also politicized: Martinez was one of the only lawyers to object to adoption of the merit selection/retention system in Colorado, 41 years ago. Lipstein, who’s been around a while, too, has always been opposed to the practice of appointing primarily prosecutors to state district court vacancies, primarily because they aren’t familiar with civil litigation. Lipstein had expressed his opinion on occasion with a tongue-in-cheek comment in his column of The Proclamation (a publication of the First Judicial District Bar Association). When Lipstein applied for a vacancy, he recalled, the nominating commission focused almost entirely –and unreasonably– on Lipstein’s past comments. Lipstein didn’t get the job.

Lipstein also noted that one “trick” the nominating commissions employ is to recommend three candidates, two of whom are woefully unsuited for the job, so that the Governor has no choice but to choose the one candidate “selected” by the commission.

Whatever the real story behind Nottingham’s appointment, the scholarly and professional consensus is overwhelming that the selection of federal judges has always been political. See,e.g., Daniel J. Meador, Some Yins and Yangs of Our Judicial System, 66 A.B.A. J. 122, 122 (1980) (”The process of picking a person to be a judge is woven into the political fabric and is, by any definition, a political process.”) (quoted in Peter D. Webster, Selection and Retention of Judges: Is There One ‘Best’ Method?, 23 Fla.St.U.L.Rev. 1, 3 n. 4 (1995)); Richard Neely, Why Courts Don’t Work 41, Houghton Mifflin, 1980 (“In every state a judge needs to be some kind of politician”); Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Appointments Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

So, the question is not whether there will be politics in the judicial selection process; the question is: what sort of politics? The politics of the few — or the politics of the many?”

More info re: Salazar & Allard picks for federal bench vacancies, Apr. 4, 2008, KnowYourCOurts.com, http://www.knowyourcourts.com/News/news.htm.