Got a buck? Kris Kobach’s law mistakes are adding up to embarrassment | Opinion
Maybe Kris Kobach needs another remedial law class.
The Kansas attorney general — the state’s top lawyer! — doesn’t always do a great job of lawyering. Now he’s stumbled again: Shawnee County District Judge Thomas Luedke last week fined Kobach a dollar for filing a motion he “should have known” the court didn’t have jurisdiction to consider.
That’s not a huge penalty, admittedly. It’s still an oopsie on Kobach’s part.
Let’s back up and explain: Luedke’s ruling came in the attorney general’s long-running legal crusade to force the state’s division of vehicles to stop allowing transgender Kansans to change their gender identification in their drivers licenses.
It has not been a successful effort.
Kobach’s office argued that allowing gender marker changes violates the 2023 Women’s Bill of Rights state law that bans trans people from single-sex spaces — and, importantly, that those ID changes could confuse and hinder police when they are in pursuit of suspected criminals.
It was a silly argument.
Kansas simply does not have a problem with trans desperadoes eluding bamboozled cops. That’s why the Kansas Court of Appeals rejected Kobach’s arguments in June. The Kansas Supreme Court in September refused to hear his appeal.
Attempting a legal end-run
That’s when Kobach and his solicitor general, Anthony Powell, made their error.
After the Kansas Supreme Court rejection, the case should have returned to the Kansas Court of Appeals where it was expected judges would lift a two-year injunction against the ID changes. Indeed, the appellate court issued that ruling on Oct. 8.
Before that happened, though, Kobach and Powell filed a motion with the Shawnee County court asking it to order the state to keep a “detailed, individualized, and personally identifiable record of driver’s license changes” and to “temporarily delay” the lifting of the injunction.
Two big problems with that.
First, it was the Court of Appeals — not the Shawnee County court — that had jurisdiction of the case when Kobach and Powell made their move. Their motion came “when the district court was jurisdictionally powerless to address it,” Luedke wrote last week.
Second: Kobach was pretty clearly trying to do an end-run around the higher courts by asking for the delay. That’s not something lower-court judges are much inclined — or empowered — to do.
“The content of the motion itself clearly invited the district court to sidestep, even if temporarily, the mandate” of the Kansas Court of Appeals, Luedke wrote.
“The filing of this motion,” Luedke concluded, witheringly, “was a self-inflicted wound.”
Kansas attorney general’s iffy track record
Kobach and Powell were fined $1 each for the error. No big deal, right?
That’s certainly Kobach’s argument. Luedke’s ruling addressed a “very technical question,” the attorney general said in a statement to the Sunflower State Journal, which is why the judge kept the fine so small.
Maybe. There is no ignoring Kobach’s track record, though.
Back when he was Kansas Secretary of State, of course, a judge in 2018 ordered Kobach to take remedial law classes for missteps he made during a federal trial over the state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
Oh yeah: He lost that trial.
Before that — back when he was in private practice — there was what ProPublica once called “Kris Kobach’s lucrative trail of courtroom defeats.” Towns passed anti-immigrant laws and hired him to defend those laws in court. It didn’t go well.
“The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs,” the news agency said in 2018. One small Nebraska city actually “raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services.”
Nowadays, of course, it’s Kansans who are paying for Kobach’s services.
Listen: Lawyers lose cases. They irritate judges, too. It happens.
But Kobach’s history sure suggests he’s more focused on right-wing culture war issues than in mastering the basics of his profession.
Which is something Kansas voters ought to consider when they consider his reelection in November. Kobach has a penchant for ideologically charged “self-inflicted wounds.” There’s no reason he has to do so in the employ of Sunflower State taxpayers.
This story was originally published January 23, 2026 at 5:08 AM with the headline "Got a buck? Kris Kobach’s law mistakes are adding up to embarrassment | Opinion."
