Governor Out of Order

Governor Paterson has created a tempest by objecting to the state Commission on Judicial Nomination's not including a single female candidate among the seven it put forward to succeed Judith Kaye as the state's Chief Judge.

"They spanned the globe and they couldn't find a woman qualified to serve as Chief Judge even after we have a woman as a Chief Judge," the Governor fumed last week at a press conference where he announced that he had asked State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to see whether there was a legal avenue to challenge the panel's recommendations.

He said he wasn't taking issue with the quality of the candidates it recommended, calling them "outstanding." But Mr. Paterson said he was unhappy about the impression of a "glass ceiling" for women.

Commission Chairman John O'Mara responded by noting that four of the seven judges on the state Court of Appeals are women as proof that the panel—which makes recommendations for all those posts—has no gender bias.

The commission was created to replace the use of a voter election for positions on the state's highest court. The rationale for the change was that it increased the likelihood of candidates being elevated based on their merits rather than chosen for political reasons by party bosses.

And the underlying reason for Mr. Paterson's stridently criticizing the commission illustrates the wisdom of that switch.

In 2010, he is expected to seek his first full term as Governor, meaning that he wants to begin consolidating his support in the Democratic Party. That has led to rampant speculation about whether, in choosing a replacement for Hillary Clinton as she gives up her U.S. Senate seat to become President Obama's Secretary of State, he might opt for the candidate who helps him most with key constituent groups in the party.

Given the prestige of that seat, whose previous occupants have included Bobby Kennedy and Pat Moynihan, it would be difficult for him to choose someone purely for political reasons. It is believed that he would have had a freer hand in going with the best candidate if his choice for Chief Judge satisfied one or more of the groups he is courting.

One of the candidates the commission did not recommend, Court of Appeals Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, would have appealed to two of those groups: women and Hispanics.

Her exclusion, however, does not justify the Governor's claim that the panel "spanned the globe" and couldn't find a suitable woman candidate. An obvious choice who is both female and Latina, Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor—she's best known for a ruling on a lower court that ended the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike—was presumed not to be interested in the post because it is expected that Mr. Obama will choose her to fill the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Whoever is ultimately chosen by the Governor from a group that includes both sitting judges and lawyers with some government work in their backgrounds should have both the ability to be a skilled jurist and the administrative talent to effectively run a court system that will be undergoing the same financial hardship as state and city government.

The Governor will not suffer from a lack of people able to handle those tasks when examining the candidates the panel put before him. Those should be the only criteria that matter in this selection.