Yet another misjudgment

As Pennsylvania's courts have relentlessly demonstrated, a judiciary populated by a partisan political process will behave accordingly. State Supreme Court Justice-without-portfolio J. Michael Eakin's attempt to engineer last-minute lame-duck appointments provides only the latest troubling evidence thereof.

In December, on the brink of the high court's most dramatic shift in centuries and a proceeding that could remove him from office, Eakin urged his fellow justices to hastily install the next leaders of Philadelphia's patronage-rich court system, The Inquirer reported this week. Shortly after Eakin tried to eke out these key appointments, the Court of Judicial Discipline suspended him pending a trial on disciplinary charges related to bigoted and profane emails. Soon after that, the new year brought the swearing-in of three new justices, shifting the court's majority from Republican to Democratic.

Eakin's reported gambit certainly won't bolster his argument that judicial disciplinary authorities got the wrong guy - an "innocent justice who has given 20 years for the greater good," in the words of his attorney. In light of Eakin's self-servingly incomplete "self-report" of his offensive emails in 2014, along with his more recent effort to pack the Court of Judicial Discipline in his favor, his failed power grab establishes an unmistakable pattern of chicanery.

It's encouraging at least that Eakin's coup de courts met resistance from his fellow justices. "We should not make any major decisions until we are all assembled together as a court after the swearings-in," Justice Debra McCloskey Todd told The Inquirer. The new Supreme Court should distance itself further from such backroom administration, and there is hope that it will. One of the new justices, David Wecht, has spoken compellingly of shifting the court's focus toward jurisprudence and away from administrative preoccupations. Another, Christine Donohue, has called for more transparency in court appointments.

That Eakin felt comfortable even venturing such a maneuver speaks to the Pennsylvania courts' deep and pervasive politicization. Eleventh-hour executive appointments and legislative bargains are part of the normal course of political business, but the judiciary should be the branch of government that enjoys a measure of insulation from partisan back-and-forth. Until lawmakers replace low-interest judicial elections with a merit-based appointment system, the courts will continue to be vulnerable to misrule by judges and justices who don't deserve their titles.