A proposed constitutional amendment to change the way 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 of 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.
