Kansas Republicans should stop lying about where Supreme Court justices come from | Opinion
A proposed constitutional amendment to change the way that Kansas selects Supreme Court justices isn’t on the ballot yet and won’t be for at least a year, but some of the state’s most prominent Republicans are already lying about it to try to influence your vote.
The biggest falsehood is that five attorneys are in charge who gets a seat on our state’s highest court.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen this myth being promoted by the president of the Kansas Senate and the chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party. I heard it in person when I was a panelist on the Feb. 28 episode of “Kansas Week,” the public-affairs show produced by KPTS-PBS Kansas.
“At the end of the day we have a nomination commission that has five attorneys, that are Bar certified, that create who they want to,” Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell, a former state lawmaker, said on the TV show.
“They appoint three people and give those names to the governor, who has to pick one of those three, or it gives that decision over to the chief of the Supreme Court,” he continued. “It is a attorney-centric process, and where do they get their mindset? Where do they get their intellect? Well they go to law school. And we know KU and Washburn and other universities that have law schools, they come out kind of liberal-thinking people. So they appoint people who think like them. ”
I couldn’t let that go unchallenged, so I spoke up during the show.
The Supreme Court Nominating Commission is not five attorneys, as Howell implied.
It’s actually a commission of nine Kansans, five of whom are attorneys and four of whom are Kansas residents appointed by the governor — and by law cannot be attorneys.
The five attorney members are elected by their fellow members of the legal Bar. But, to ensure diversity of viewpoints, four of them are elected in separate votes in each of the state’s four congressional districts.
So there’s one from western and northern Kansas elected by the lawyers there, one from south-central Kansas, one from the Kansas City-area suburbs and one from most of the far-eastern side of the state.
Supporters of the proposed amendment — Senate Concurrent Resolution 1611 — want to change the system to one where voters directly elect the justices.
While that sounds like a democratic impulse, it’s coming from the same legislators who are trying to suppress voting at every turn with unnecessary and partisan-driven restrictions on things like mail voting and ballot drop boxes.
In a particularly spectacular case of hypocrisy, the lawmakers attacking merit selection of justices used their veto-proof majority on Tuesday to pass a bill that would create a very similar process for filling Kansas vacancies in the U.S. Senate.
The big difference would be that instead of a panel of residents, the state senators would get to narrow the list of U.S. Senate nominees down to three, from which the governor would have to choose one.
It’s a cheap and transparent ploy to ensure Republican control of the appointment process if Sen. Roger Marshall — rumored to be angling for a job in President Donald Trump’s administration — resigns his seat.
So, when you hear the Republicans screeching about the merit system for filling court vacancies being undemocratic, well, consider the source.
A less-noticed provision of SCR 1611 would gut Supreme Court ethics laws, allowing justices to simultaneously hold leadership positions in political parties and raise and donate money to party candidates.
As a matter of historical fact, the merit system was brought into being in 1958 by Kansas voters who were fed up with the rotten-to-the-core corruption that plagued Kansas courts before that — including the infamous and outrageous “triple play” where a governor, who’d been voted out of office, resigned a few days early so his lieutenant governor could appoint him to the Supreme Court.
But back to the five-lawyers thing, I’ve seen it pop up several times since I was on “Kansas Week” 12 days ago.
There was this post on X by Senate President Ty Masterson: “Kansas currently stands alone as the only state in the union that enshrines power over who sits on our highest court to a commission controlled by five lawyers selected by other lawyers.”
And then there was this comment on Facebook by Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman John Whitmer, a former state lawmaker: “(Democrats) are opposing the effort to change the judicial selection process, changing the current system where Supreme Court justices are selected by an elite panel of lawyers.”
Once more for those in the back, the commission is nine people, five lawyers and four non-lawyers, and they screen the applicants and narrow the list. The governor makes the final selection.
Getting that wrong once is maybe a slip of the tongue.
Twice, perhaps a coincidence.
Three times starts to look like a scheme to misinform voters.
I suppose it’s theoretically possible that GOP politicians have been misled by Americans for Prosperity, a well-funded front group for Koch Industries, which has been flooding people’s Facebook feeds with lies, including this whopper: “Lawyers get to vote on our Supreme Court Judges. Why just them?”
As this will likely be the most important issue on the ballot next year, I could ask Republican Party operatives and AFP to please try to make their case with facts, instead of trying to trick Kansans into replacing a nonpartisan system with a blatantly partisan one.
I could also ask tornadoes to quit hitting mobile-home parks, and probably get the same result.
