By Judge William C. Whitbeck
Over the past months, I have been campaigning for re-election to the Michigan Court of Appeals. Due to the age limits for judges contained in the Michigan Constitution, this is my last hurrah in a career spent – or misspent if you insist on a cynical view – in considerable part in and around the political arena.
During my time in the field, I have made “brief remarks” at great length, shaken thousands of hands, eaten chicken dinners of seemingly endless variety, gotten lost all too often while driving down lonely back roads to obscure locations, and perhaps learned something about what the people want in their elected officials. In my experience, they don’t want or expect perfection, but they do want at least three things.
First, I think most people want integrity. I mean this in a homespun, down-to-earth sort of way. I think that most people expect public officials to devote honest effort and long hours to their jobs. They expect legislators to be there to cast informed votes on matters both great and small. They expect those in the executive branch to act when action is needed and to have the intellectual fortitude to decline to act when no action is necessary. And they expect judges not only to deliberate fairly, but also to decide promptly.
In short, I think most people expect the officials they elect to have the integrity to attend to their obligations every day, not just with easy words but also with hard work.
Secondly, I think most people want a degree of clarity from their elected officials. It is not difficult to spout windy generalities rationalizing votes in the legislature, to grind out cotton candy press releases justifying executive branch actions, to produce endless pages of legal gibberish supporting judicial decisions But it is very difficult to explain those votes, those actions, and those decisions in clear, simple, and understandable English. And because it is difficult, that is exactly what most people want.
Thirdly, I think most people expect a certain amount of modesty in their elected officials. They know that self-promotion comes with the job and that self-importance is often not far behind. But they also know that some of our bedrock principles – the idea of separation of powers, the idea of limited government, the idea of the reservation of powers to the people – mean that our elected officials are by definition constrained to certain responsibilities beyond which they cannot and should not go.
As a consequence, our citizens know that no senator can, even with years of experience and accumulated clout, command a given result with her vote alone. They know that no governor can, even with the most Herculean efforts, reverse the direction of a bad economy. They know that no judge can, even with the best of motives, rewrite legislation to accord with that judge’s policy preferences.
But in far too many cases our citizens do not get what they want from their elected officials. They want integrity, but too often they get intellectual and physical lethargy. They want clarity, but too often they get deliberate ambiguity. They want modesty, but too often they witness the clash of overweening, over promising egos rather than the frank recognition of the limits inherent in our form of government.
And perhaps for some of these reasons, many of our citizens are disappointed, even angered, by what they see in politics. But for all their disappointment and their anger, they still know that we elected officials can and should work hard at our jobs, that we can and should speak and write clearly, and that we can and should promise only what we can deliver. Surely, if we would but try, we can do these things. We all take an oath to perform the duties of our respective offices to the best of our abilities. That is what the people want and that is no less than what they deserve.
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Judge William C. Whitbeck is one of 28 judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals. A Kalamazoo native, he is a graduate of the Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and of the University of Michigan Law School. He served as chief judge of the Court of Appeals from January, 2002 to January, 2008. He is the past chairperson of the Michigan Historical Commission, a fellow of the Michigan and American Bar Foundations, and a member of the Michigan Law Revision Commission. In 2007, he won the State Bar of Michigan’s short-story competition with “In the Market,” a story of bootlegging and murder set in Prohibition-era Michigan. He has also completed one novel and is hard at work on a second. He and his wife Stephanie live in a completely renovated 130-year-old home in downtown Lansing. He can be reached at JudgeWhitbeck@
AOL.com.
