Pa. high court rejects bid by legislators to join case on judge retirement age
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by two high-ranking GOP lawmakers to intervene in a legal battle over the retirement age of judges.
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by two high-ranking GOP lawmakers to intervene in a legal battle over the retirement age of judges.
With no explanation, the court denied the motion by Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati (R., Jefferson) and Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre).
The ruling put the Republican leaders on the sideline of a closely watched battle that has erupted into a forefront issue for some of the state's top officials.
At stake is a question to voters on the November ballot that would raise the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 75 - a decision that could alter the partisan makeup of the Keystone State's highest court within the next year.
Originally intended to appear on April's primary ballot, the question was written to ask voters if they would approve raising the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 75.
But both Republican-controlled legislative houses said that wording was unwieldy and confusing. So they passed a measure, with the support of some Democrats, to postpone the referendum and change the wording.
The new language asks only whether voters approve of requiring judges to retire at age 75, omitting the fact that the current mandatory retirement age is 70.
Last month, two former Supreme Court justices, Ronald D. Castille and Stephen Zappala Sr., along with Philadelphia lawyer Richard A. Sprague, sued Pennsylvania's top election official, Pedro Cortes, to halt the change, calling it "misleadingly designed to garner 'yes' votes from voters who are actually in favor of restricting the terms of Supreme Court justices, judges and magisterial district justices."
The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear the case on an emergency basis. Soon afterward, Scarnati and Corman, both of whom supported delaying the referendum, filed to intervene.
"I'm not going to soft-sell the fact that we would obviously prefer for [intervention] to be granted," said Drew Crompton, counsel to Pennsylvania's Senate Republicans and chief of staff to Scarnati. "But we're not distraught over the court's decision, because we're not certain that their decision today is going to matter."
Sen. Daylin Leach (D., Montgomery) has cast the last-minute change as little more than a move to protect Supreme Court Justice Thomas G. Saylor, a Republican, who will turn 70 at the end of this year. With Republicans currently the minority on the seven-member court - just two compared with the Democrats' five justices - keeping Saylor could stave off another Democrat's taking a seat on the court.
Crompton said the senators now hope to participate in the case as friends of the court - people who are not a party in a suit but who offer information that bears on the case.
Monday afternoon, Sprague said he was "very gratified" by the court's decision.
"I think [the senators'] purpose was to make the case more complicated than it is," Sprague said. "The action of the Supreme Court keeps the appropriate parties as opposed to the two senators."
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