Kansas GOP wants to elect justices directly, rejecting legal experts | Opinion
If you wanted advice on building a house, you probably would call an architect. Or a carpenter. Somebody who really knows the subject. You wouldn’t want your new home to collapse into a pile of rubble because you were clueless about the homebuilding process, right?
Kansas Republicans are built different.
Expertise? That’s for chumps.
Stick with me on the metaphor here. We’re not talking about actual houses here, but the hard task of picking good judges.
The Sunflower State GOP wants to get away from the current “merit-based” system of selecting justices to the Kansas Supreme Court — a process that includes but is not limited to lawyers, serving on a panel that chooses a list of nominees from which the governor makes the final selection — and start electing the justices instead.
Voters will decide the matter next year.
To make their case, Republicans have cast the lawyers on that nomination panel as a shadowy cabal of undeserving elites. What they really are: Folks who know the law, know their colleagues in the legal profession, and are well-placed to help elevate the best of those colleagues to the state’s highest court.
So naturally, GOP officials here were delighted this week when Donald Trump’s Department of Justice announced that the American Bar Association will no longer have an official role in vetting potential judges at the federal level.
And they drew a straight line from Trump’s decision back to the Kansas debate.
“Lawyers shouldn’t have more power in judicial selection than other citizens,” Danedri Herbert, chair of the Kansas GOP, wrote on X. “Take note, Kansans! This is the way.”
“The DOJ ending ABA’s special access aligns with our fight to elect Supreme Court justices directly,” added Attorney General Kris Kobach. “No more bias in our judiciary.”
That’s just silly.
Where is the bias?
Kobach isn’t actually against “bias in our judiciary.” He just wants the court biased to the right. He and other conservatives are angry at the Kansas Supreme Court’s rulings to protect abortion rights in the state from overzealous legislators.
Change the justices — change the way they’re chosen — and maybe those abortion rights go away.
The problem, of course, is that we Kansans really like abortion rights. We voted overwhelmingly in 2022 against empowering the Kansas Legislature to take them away.
So the GOP case to change the Kansas Supreme Court can’t be about abortion itself. Not if the proposal is going to actually win.
Instead, Republicans are trying to turn it into a “common man versus the eggheads” argument to distract from the real issue.
Once again, the GOP is waging a war on expertise.
After former Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss called the judicial election plan a “really bad idea,” Herbert responded online: “People who aren’t members of the bar are too stupid to vote for judges — even though they successfully do so in 22 other states,” she wrote, sarcastically.
Perhaps, the GOP chair added, the GOP’s opponents “just think Kansas voters are too dumb?”
Well no. But I suspect Kansas voters don’t know what they don’t know.
If you’re a regular voter in the state’s elections, you might remember that sitting Kansas Supreme Court justices routinely appear on the fall ballot for retention elections — a thumbs-up-thumbs-down plebiscite on whether they get to keep their jobs.
The justices always win. It’s easy to guess why: Outside of a few die-hards, the vast majority of Kansans have no idea who the individual justices are, nor their records on the bench, nor anything about their judicial philosophies.
Which suggests that it is good, actually, that Kansas lawyers are part of the process of sifting through potential justices in the first place. They simply have a topical expertise that most regular folks don’t have.
We can comfortably vote yes in retention elections because they did their jobs.
Legal expertise is good
Herbert is right: Many states do hold elections for their supreme courts. It is also true that those states sometimes see outside billionaires such as Elon Musk spend big money on those elections trying to bamboozle voters with advertisements and arguments that are about anything and everything but the law.
Building a judicial branch isn’t the same as building a house, but in both cases a little bit of subject-matter expertise is helpful. The law is a complicated thing. Making sure you pick judges who know it well and apply it faithfully is — or should be — more complicated than deferring to the biggest spenders and loudest voices in the room.
After all, you don’t want the house to fall down.
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 1:06 PM.