Where Do Judges Come From?

To me the most important protection of our democracy
should be the insulation of our judicial system from corrupt
influences. If justice comes down to who has the most money,
society as we know it would disintegrate. For a society to
survive the people within it must, after all, believe in their elite.
And they must have trust in the fairness of their judicial
systems. The only other way to hold society together is
with a large internal "security" force.

In a national bestseller, "Personal Injuries", Scott Turow
vividly describes what can go wrong when "The Judge" is on
the take. The story involves favorable rulings in personal
injury cases where insurance companies are on the hook
for huge settlements. Common wisdom holds that insurance
companies use the pretext of those monstrous settlements
to charge their customers outrageous fees for what are in
actuality rare cases. The lawyers get rich, the judges
(in these cases) get a nice bonus of some sort and the
insurance companies get to raise their rates. The plaintiffs
get hugely rewarded for their pain and suffering and as a final
tribute to a system gone horribly wrong, the evildoer is severely
punished. Everyone involved is the winner, the insurance company
pays off, and if there is a loser in there somewhere, no one cares.

WE, the majority of people in USA, have a firm belief in our
democracy (with a few detractors), and a strong backbone
of religious and moral convictions. And WE overwhelmingly
support our judicial system. I believe as a society WE feel shame
when the bad guy goes free (take OJ for example) or when the
good guy gets wrongly convicted (take the hundreds of inmates
recently freed from years of confinement by new DNA evidence).

So what in the world are WE thinking when WE allow the most
politically motivated, and by extension the most heavily influenced,
people in our society to --APPOINT-- the judges who sit on the
highest benches in the land. Every honest person needs to believe
that the person presiding over a court of law, and possibly
sitting in judgment of him, will be impartial, which is inherently
an oxymoronic concept under these circumstances. Shouldn't
WE the people be voting on these guys?