The Nevada Center for Public Ethics was sounding the drumbeat to take the selection of judges out of the hands of voters even before a report on the 2004 Supreme Court races suggested the integrity of the state's judiciary was compromised by millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

The "Supreme Jackpot" report, compiled by Paul Brown, then-director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, showed the money spent by Supreme Court candidates had jumped 300 percent in six years.

Craig Walton, president of the ethics center, argued in a letter to Gov. Kenny Guinn that the separation of powers was threatened because all three branches of government had become supplicants to campaign donors. Walton urged the creation of a Commission on Judicial Selection, a group that would nominate qualified jurists for vacancies on the bench. Those judges would then come before voters in a retention election, similar to the practice used in Missouri.

This is not exactly a new idea in Nevada. Nevada Supreme Court Justice Bob Rose, as part of a 1994 commission, advocated sweeping judicial reforms in the state, including the creation of a panel to take the selection of judges away from the rough-and-tumble politics of elections. The issue was then relegated to the back burner -- until now.

Nothing sparks reform like a prize-seeking effort from a major metropolitan newspaper. The Los Angeles Times might have written the 2006 Nevada political story of the year in its "Juice vs. Justice" series, published in three parts June 8-10. Read in total, particularly from an out-of-state perspective, the series makes Nevada look like a backwater of justice where campaign donors regularly get what they want from the judges they help elect.

Since the series was published, the Times has followed up with several "look what we've done" articles suggesting different efforts at reform here spawned by the stories. In journalism, this isn't just tooting your own horn -- it's building the case, as the dad in "A Christmas Story" would say, for a "major award."

In July, Washoe County District Judge Brent Adams proposed the Supreme Court ban judges or judicial candidates from seeking campaign contributions. Adams had proposed a similar ban after the Rose Commission's report.

Now Rose is chairing the Article 6 Commission, a newly launched study of all aspects of the Nevada judiciary, named after the section of the state constitution that established the court system.

The panel will report to the Legislature next month, and already several heavy hitters are backing reform. Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, has joined with Assembly Ways and Means Chairman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, for a bill draft that would begin the process to amend the constitution and create, finally, the Commission on Judicial Selection.

This is old hat for Raggio, an attorney who has long argued for such a commission. The attorney who runs the Assembly, Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said she also supports a commission. Both leaders serve on the Article 6 Commission as well.

Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, also has pledged support for the measure.

But if judges are immune from the perceived impropriety associated with making decisions that affect campaign donors, how would a selection commission stand above such potential conflicts?

This is, after all, Nevada. And if we do one thing really well here in this small-town state, it's getting our friends' friends into good positions -- and their enemies shut out of them. Thus, the struggle to create the right kind of commission could get weighed down in the legislative process, where there are already skeptics about that type of reform.

And as we've also seen in the Legislature, reform generally comes incrementally.

Buckley again, for example, has put in bill draft requests that address payday loan operators and low-cost prescription drugs from Canada.

Even if some portions of Walton's ethics package do win support in Carson City next year, many others will take many years more, and others will never see the light of day.

And even if, through additional pressure from the big-city newspaper down Interstate 15, the Legislature does want to create a commission to select judges, the earliest that could occur is 2010.

Perhaps the federal ethics package promised by congressional Democrats will refocus efforts at the Nevada Legislature. Perhaps the voting public, still smarting from the G-Sting corruption case in Clark County, will pay more attention to ethics.

Perhaps we'll actually end up making it more difficult for the Los Angeles Times to win an award for its work. After all, it takes reformers, not just the Fourth Estate, to reform.

Erin Neff's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com.