How should judges and justices be appointed?

[redeye]

It seems idiotic to me to have the one branch of government that's supposed to be free from politics appointed solely by political bodies with no professional input (presidents up to and excluding Dubya consulted the ABA for nominations, but the ABA's position was just a suggestion).

I do think that elected officials should have some input, but professional bodies should still have a formal share of the nomination/confirmation process. The best solution IMO is to have judges and justices appointed with the concurrnece of three of four bodies, of which two are political (i.e. the president and the senate) and two are not (one is the ABA and the other is either the National Lawyers' Guild or a board of the deans of the 25 best law schools in the USA). On the one hand, politicians won't be able to push extremists who have no idea what they're doing like Thomas and Estrada (Scalia is an extremist who has a very good idea what he's doing), and on the other, there will still be some influence of elected officials over the appointment of judges and justices.

What do you think?