February 24, 2006
Eyes om Justics: the Justice at Stake Campaign Newsletter

Legislators in Kansas recently rejected an attempt to inject partisan politics into how the stateâs Supreme Court justices are selected. On February 21 the House Judiciary committee gave a bipartisan rebuke to the bill that would have undermined the state's system of merit selection the system that Kansas has followed since 1958. Under this system, applicants for the state's high court are vetted by a screening panel, on the basis of qualifications and experience. The panel narrows the pool to a short list of three nominees and presents them to the Governor, who makes the final selection. The new justice shortly thereafter appears on the general election ballot without an opponent, when the voters of the state get their chance to confirm the judge for a six-year term, or reject the judge and start again.
 
The 2006 legislative proposal would have scrapped the state's longstanding nominating commission that screens the applicants the quality control part of the system and replaced it with Gubernatorial appointment and a state Senate "confirmation vote." The result would be to add a layer of politicization, lobbying and horse-trading.

Kansans For Simple Justice, a nonpartisan coalition that includes the Kansas League of Women Voters, the Kansas Bar Association, the Kansas Appleseed Foundation and others, led the effort to block the tampering. The coalition believes that returning to the politically manipulated system that existed before 1958 would be a disaster. They argued, in short, "if it ainât broke, donât fix it."

In addition to Kansas, efforts to inject legislative tampering into merit selection systems have popped up in Arizona, Indiana, and Missouri in recent years. Across the country, 16 states use a system of merit selection to choose the judges that sit on their highest court. For the most part, the "retention" elections used to confirm or reject the justices have looked nothing like the bruising battles that are now common in the 22 states that use contested (and in some cases overtly partisan) elections for state Supreme Court seats.

The recent defeat of this proposal in the Kansas Houseâs Judiciary committee is a victory for the coalition. But this issue is not going away: three days before the power grab was rejected, a similar measure was introduced in the Kansas Senate.