Senate race finally set

So the legal battle over the U.S. Senate race in Kansas ended where it started a month ago – with Democrat Chad Taylor out of the race, his state party looking pathetic, and Secretary of State Kris Kobach seeming more partisan agent than impartial election overseer. At least the absentee ballots can go out now.

Kobach’s court losses mounted during the fight. They included the Kansas Supreme Court’s unanimous Sept. 18 ruling overturning his decision to keep Taylor on the ballot and the Shawnee County District Court’s Wednesday decision that Democrats need not replace him. Nor would the district judges allow Kobach to intervene in the latest case, which seemed to fizzle out when its plaintiff, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat, failed to show up for Monday’s hearing. In the end, the judges decided the voter lacked legal standing and even ordered him to pay the costs of the proceeding.

Both the petitioner and Kobach had focused on the word “shall” in statutory language saying that “when a vacancy occurs after a primary election in a party candidacy, such vacancy shall be filled by the party committee....” But the court pointed to “full five distinct meanings” of the word in Black’s Law Dictionary and concluded “that the legislative and case history falls in favor of a limitation on the use of the word ‘shall’ ... to who has the authority to fill a vacancy and/or otherwise how such a vacancy is to be filled. The statutory framework mandates the who and the how, not the whether.”

In the process of losing again in court, Kobach lost some credibility among Kansans as well. By working so hard to keep a Democrat on the ballot, Kobach appeared to many to be trying to help Sen. Pat Roberts, on whose honorary campaign committee Kobach serves, by splitting the votes against the three-term Republican. Not coincidentally, recent polls indicate that Kobach now has his own tight race against Democratic challenger Jean Schodorf.

Meanwhile, Kansas Democrats satisfied with this week’s court decision should be ashamed instead. The 65,000 Democrats who voted in the primary for U.S. Senate just saw their voices muted and their state party subjugated – apparently by national-level Democratic operatives who are gambling that when independent candidate Greg Orman says “I won’t answer to either party,” as he does in a new ad blaming Democrats and Republicans equally for the mess in Washington, D.C., he’s actually pledging allegiance to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Only the courts are due praise, for how they sorted through some legitimate legal questions in unusually rapid fashion while under fierce political fire.

With Kobach’s legal ploy having played out, voters can now focus on the candidates and their stands, and decide which would best serve Kansas and the country as a U.S. senator.

For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman

This story was originally published October 2, 2014 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Senate race finally set."