Elect Brunner as Ohio's next chief justice

It's a shame that Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor couldn't run for another term. O'Connor, a Republican, is everything voters should expect in a justice: pragmatic, fair and impartial. However, state law prohibits anyone over the age of 70 from running for a judicial office. Two sitting state Supreme Court justices are vying to replace the 71-year-old O'Connor: Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, and Sharon Kennedy, a Republican. Of the two, we believe Brunner is better suited to take up O'Connor's mantle and build upon her work. Before winning her seat on the high court in 2020, Brunner, 65, served as a judge on the 10th District Court of Appeals and as a Common Pleas judge in Franklin County. She also served as Ohio's secretary of state from 2007 through 2011. She ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, but lost in the Democratic primary. Kennedy, 60, spent four years as a police officer before she became a lawyer. She served as special counsel to then-Attorney General Betty Montgomery, a Republican, and worked as a magistrate and judge in Butler County, including a stint as administrative judge, before winning a seat on the Supreme Court in 2012. Although Kennedy has served on the Supreme Court longer, we believe Brunner's prior experience running a statewide office makes her better suited to the administrative duties of overseeing the courts that the chief justice is called upon to perform. Moreover, she struck us in an endorsement interview as more committed to continuing the reforms that O'Connor has tried to implement during her tenure, including the creation of a criminal sentencing database, expanded specialized court dockets and greater use of technology in the court system. Perhaps O'Connor's greatest achievement, however, is her willingness to follow the law even if that means going against her fellow Republicans. Nowhere has that been more evident than in her repeated decisions to side with the court's three Democrats, including Brunner, to throw out the gerrymandered maps Republicans drafted for state legislative and congressional districts. Republican state lawmakers considered impeaching O'Connor for daring to go against their wishes before apparently deciding simply to wait for her to retire and hope a friendlier judge replaced her. (Regardless of who wins the chief justice job, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, will name someone to fill Brunner or Kennedy's unexpired term as an associate justice.) Kennedy told us in an endorsement interview that she favored judicial restraint and following the plain language of the law. Yet she has sided with two other Republican justices in favor of accepting the gerrymandered maps, arguing that the justices who struck down the maps were supplanting the will of the voters with their own policy preferences. "In so doing, it threatens the very legitimacy of this court," she wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Pat DeWine, the governor's son. The conclusion is not only harsh, but it also discounts the actual will of the voters, who in 2015 and 2018 overwhelmingly approved amending the Ohio Constitution to end, or at least limit, the practice of gerrymandering. Kennedy's ruling would allow Republicans to draw maps that overwhelmingly favor her party. We didn't endorse either Brunner or Kennedy when they were running in 2020. Although impressed with Brunner, we didn't believe she made a strong-enough case to warrant ousting then-Justice Judi French, a Republican. She won anyway and has proved herself as a justice. When it came to Kennedy, however, we advised voters to reject her in part because of concerns that she would allow her personal political views to color her legal decision making. We were especially concerned about her decision to give a speech to the Greater Toledo Right to Life in 2017. Kennedy has long argued that the criticism was unwarranted. She pointed us to an opinion column written by O'Connor that defended the speech, which Kennedy has described as a civics lesson. O'Connor noted that Kennedy hadn't commented on abortion or any pending cases before the court during her appearance. Fair enough, but the rules of conduct for judges in Ohio not only advise them to avoid impropriety, but also the appearance of impropriety. Kennedy apparently didn't learn from the blowback to her speech. This year, she telegraphed her anti-abortion views in a response to a candidate questionnaire from Cincinnati Right to Life. Beyond that, she called the legal fight over redistricting in Ohio "the fight of our life" during an appearance before the Marion County Republican Party in March. She attended a rally for Republican U.S. Senate candidate JD Vance that included former President Donald Trump. Kennedy defended her appearance at the rally by noting that she was campaigning and wouldn't criticize her opponent for attending a political rally. It's hard to get more partisan than attending a rally featuring a former president who refuses to accept that he lost an election. Kennedy told us she had opposed adding party labels to the ballot — candidates for the Supreme Court and the state's appeals courts are identified by party for the first time in a general election this year — in part to avoid politicization of the courts. That's a legitimate criticism, although we believe the labels serve voters by providing more transparency. We don't have those same partisan concerns about Brunner. While it's possible to hazard an educated guess where she might come down on issues before the court, Brunner impressed us as having the same qualities we admire in O'Connor. Brunner would be the pragmatic, fair and impartial chief justice Ohioans deserve.