Judicial term limit issue fails

By Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Originally published 01:06 p.m., May 2, 2008
Updated 01:06 p.m., May 2, 2008

An effort to impose term limits on judges is over after backers failed to get enough valid voter signatures to put the issue on the November ballot.

Former state Senate President John Andrews, who led the judicial term-limits effort this year and also in 2006, said volunteers have been gathering signatures since January but aren't going to have enough before the May 14 deadline.

It takes 76,047 valid voter signatures to get an issue on the ballot.

"Court reform will have to wait for another year," Andrews said, in a statement.

The proposal would have limited all state judges to three four-year terms.

Andrews said the term-limits committee, Limit the Power, will now work at defeating other proposals for this fall's budget.

"Our focus this year will be on curbing the undue power of labor unions, trial lawyers, and the spending lobby here in Colorado," he said.

Andrews, a Centennial Republican, was behind a judicial term limits effort in 2006. It made the ballot, but Amendment 40 lost with 43 percent of the vote.

Some of Colorado's top political and judicial heavyweights two years ago joined forces to defeat the proposal. Republican Attorney General John Suthers opposed it as did then Gov. Bill Owens and his three predecessors.

Owens said it would "seriously impair doing business in Colorado."

"Swapping out the appellate courts every 10 years would result in inconsistent rulings and would jeopardize the uniform application of the law," he said then.

Andrews responded that the public was concerned about "judges who abuse their power and seek to rewrite the laws, not simply interpret them."

Judges in Colorado are not elected. They are appointed by the governor, and at the next election voters decide whether to retain or dismiss them. Their names appear before the voters every time their terms end.