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By GEORGE BOWLES
With the elections now out of the way, the members of the General Assembly are under increasing pressure to resolve one of the most nagging and embarrassing problems they have been confronted with in recent memory.
That is the on-going hassle about how to fill the 10 still vacant judgeships on the new Intermediate Court of Appeals. The issue has caused deep divisions within the Democratic caucuses of both houses of the legislature and may have placed the survival of the court itself in jeopardy.
The establishment of the Intermediate Court was first authorized by the 1963 General Assembly. A controversial idea from the beginning, its progress to the present impasse has been a stormy passage.
The original idea was for the panel to serve as a new court of appelate jurisdiction between the circuit courts and the state Supreme Court. It was created with the thought of relieving the Supreme Court of some of the workload which was causing severe backlogs in its docket. As things now stand, it takes about one year for a criminal case to reach the justices and about three yean for a civil case to be heard.
The legislation establishing the court was strongly supported by the Robb administration and by most, although by no means all, of the state's bench and bar. From the outset, however, the General Assembly was sharply divided about the wisdom of the move.
Hie vote in the Senate on its passage was a 19-19 tie. The measure cleared the upper house when Lt. Gov. Dick Davis, the president of the Senate, cast a rare tie-breaking vote for the bill. Still, however, the lawmaken declined to vote any hinds for the new tribunal.
The battle over money for the new court dragged on through the 1984 legislature. Finally, in the waning hours of the session, the lawmakers inserted $4 million in the Appropriations Bill to finance its launching. Still unresolved, however, were the critical questions of precisely what the jurisdiction of the new court V i would be and, most importantly * from the standpoint of legislative politics, who would be the 10 justices who would sit on it.
The latter question was deferred until a special session of the General Assembly could be
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