By GEORGE WEEKS
Syndicated Columnist
— In her nearly 16 years on the Michigan Supreme Court, including two as chief justice, Betty Weaver, of Glen Arbor, weighed in on at least 1,000 opinions.
Now, after dropping an extraordinary political bombshell, private citizen Weaver in coming months will be appealing to the court of public opinion to seek support for correcting the "deeply flawed" way Michigan selects its justices.
That will be an important and overdue effort. But it is overshadowed by today's political drama in Lansing.
Effective at 11 a.m., Republican Weaver, who in June had filed to seek re-election as an independent, was to resign from the court after extended discussions with Gov. Jennifer Granholm in which her resignation was contingent on Granholm replacing her with a "solid, independent-minded northern Michigan judge."
It's a solid bet that a Democrat, standing next to Granholm and Weaver, will be announced today. That would be a blockbuster move orchestrated by a Republican justice on a court that has four Republicans — three of whom feuded with Weaver — and three Democrats.
I asked Weaver if her move was an act of revenge against the GOP, which was not about to nominate her for re-election at its Lansing convention this weekend. (Republican Justice Robert Young Jr. said of the GOP nominating Weaver: "Let me put it this way. They can nominate her, or they can nominate me.")
She replied: "I am not a spiteful person. I don't believe in being hateful and vengeful.")
Weaver, before driving to Lansing on Wednesday, said Granholm was responsive to her suggestions and agrees with her that Supreme Court justices should be selected by districts, as are judges of the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Northern Michigan abounds with prospects for Granholm. After all, in the last couple of decades the Traverse City area has had three elected sitting justices — Weaver, ex-Lt. Gov. James H. Brickley and ex-U.S. Sen. Robert P. Griffin.
Weaver is known to be high on a number of northern judges, including Probate Judge Michael J. Anderegg, of Marquette, who once headed state probate judges and sits on circuit cases; Philip Rodgers and Tom Power, of the Traverse City-based 13th Circuit Court; and Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Alton Thomas Davis, of Grayling, former chief judge of the 46th Judicial Circuit, who was named appeals judge by Granholm in 2005 and subsequently was elected to it in 2006 and again in 2008 for a term expiring Jan. 1, 2015.
But Weaver told me: "I only discussed (with Granholm) Judge Davis. I concluded he would be the best."
Davis, former president of the Michigan Judges Association and chairman of a committee of the State Task Force to Reform the State Judicial System, clearly is highly credentialed and may be, as Weaver contends, "independent-minded."
But make no mistake: He's a Democrat — former chairman of the Crawford County Democratic Party, and a northern coordinator for 1983-90 Democratic Gov. James J. Blanchard's 1982 campaign. Blanchard appointed him as a trustee of the Michigan State Building Authority.
Davis, now 62, would be ineligible to run for a second full term because at its start he would be 70, the cut-off age.
While nothing quite tops the Granholm-Weaver-Davis maneuver, over the decades the high court has had other political drama centered on resignations.
In 1975, Democratic ex-Gov. John B. Swainson (1961-62) resigned from the Supreme Court after being convicted by a federal jury of perjury during an investigation into a charge that as a justice he accepted a bribe to arrange a new trial for a convicted burglar. He was acquitted on the bribery charge.
Republican Gov. William G. Milliken (1970-82), who said, "I always had grave misgivings about the charge against him," appointed Republican James L. Ryan, of Detroit, to replace Swainson.
It was a shocker in 1959 when Democratic Justice John D. Voelker, of Ishpeming, a best-selling author ("Anatomy of a Murder"), resigned from the court. As I saw him off at a train station in Lansing heading to his beloved Upper Peninsula, he said he simply could not "serve two masters" — the law and literature. Democratic Gov. G. Mennen Williams (1949-60) appointed Democrat Theodore Souris, of Grosse Pointe Farms, to the vacancy.
Weaver is not as well known as Voelker and Swainson were in their day. But she's shaking things up more than they did.
