| ► Ex-Chief Justice Ronald George supports Judicial Welfare for retired judges |
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Ex-Chief Justice Ronald George supports Judicial Welfare for retired judges
While California struggles with massive deficits, retired judges in California are the biggest recipients of welfare in the State.
Many years ago, members of the Judicial Industry stumbled upon a way to further hose the public by lobbying for legislation allowing for a state Chief Justice to appoint and/or assign retired judges to active duty.
The false premise put forth by our esteemed members of the Judicial Industry was that overburdened courts required visiting retired judges to assist in dispensing justice in a timely fashion to the citizenry. The Judicial Industry further argued that retired visiting judges were necessary in cases when the assigned judge had an obvious conflict of interest. This argument is pure BS because you’d be hard pressed to find a case wherein a judge voluntarily withdrew from a case wherein a clear and obvious conflict of interest existed.
Unlike you (folks that actually work for a living) most judges in this country are lucky if they work thirty (30) hours a week. I would invite you to visit any courtroom in the country on a Friday, and if ya do, you’ll discover that most, if not all of the courtrooms are darkened and the judge is nowhere to be found. To be fair, you could find the judge if ya visited the local Hooter’s, gentleman’s club or golf course.
Over the past several years, the public has annually paid $30 million or more in wages to retired visiting judges. My years-long investigation of corruption involving the visiting judge system in Ohio, which was overseen by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer (ca. 1987-2009) that at least 50% of these wages were paid for judicial services that were never performed.
In the recent past, I received an email from the California Supreme Court stating that retired visiting judges were paid for eight (8) hours of work regardless of the amount of hours they actually worked. Put simply, if a retired visiting judge in California worked but one hour on a given day, he/she would be paid $709 (ca. 2009). Who in the world would authorize a state employee to be paid for eight-hours of work when said person only worked one-hour?
State workers in California that actually work for a livin are now being furloughed three (3) days a month due to the state’s ongoing deficit problems. However, Chief Justice Ronald George apparently is of the opinion that the state’s resources are sufficient to pay retired judges millions upon millions of dollars every year for judicial services they never perform. Isn’t the United States of California a great country?
I suppose the $15 million or more paid to retired judges (ca. 2002-2008) totaling about $105 million for work never performed could have been spent to pay for worthless programs as set forth below:
What really galls me is the fact that the vast majority of these s-called dedicated public servants are also receiving state pensions of $65,000 to $80,000 a year in addition to the $709 per day they receive for working less than four hours a day. Even more sitrubing is the fact that many of these reitred judges are nothing morte than ceritifed morons.
And finally, when will Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and our overworked and underpaid legislators take remedial action to put a stop to this ongoing Judicial Welfare?
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