News from Brownbackistan - Constitutional Crisis [View all]

[deminks]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/final-front-sam-brownbacks-battle-control-kansas

The Kansas Supreme Court Challenged Republicans' Agenda. Their Solution: Replace the Judges.

Since Republican Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas in 2011, he and his allies in the GOP-dominated state Legislature have implemented drastic tax cuts—part of a "real, live experiment" in conservative governance, as Brownback put it in 2012, that has resulted in precipitously falling revenues. But Brownback's tax slashing hit a snag last year when the state Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to increase education funding, potentially forcing the governor to roll back his signature tax cuts in order to increase school spending. So conservatives in Topeka declared war on the court.

In the year since the court's education decision in March 2014, conservatives in the Kansas Legislature have proposed giving the governor more power to pick state Supreme Court justices and making it easier to remove justices from the bench. They've voted to strip the state's top court of its authority over lower courts and threatened to defund state courts if they rule against the Legislature in a key case. The escalating power struggle between the state's three branches of government has put Kansas "on a direct collision course to a constitutional crisis," says Ryan Wright, executive director of Kansans for Fair Courts, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping partisan politics out of the judicial selection process in Kansas.

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After the state Supreme Court ordered the state to spend more on poorer school districts last March, the Kansas Legislature voted to strip the top court of some of its administrative authority, including the power to appoint chief judges in the state's 31 district courts. Republicans claimed the move was unrelated to the education finance issue, but Democrats, judicial watchdogs, and education advocates saw it as punishment for the schools case. "Nobody will admit it, but I have no doubt that it was to pay the court back for the school finance ruling," says Democratic state Sen. Laura Kelly. A state appeals court judge challenged the new law as an unconstitutional power grab—locking the Legislature and the courts in a battle over control of the state judicial system. That case is currently before a the same Kansas district court also determining the school finance issue.

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"Basically, lawmakers are attempting to extort Supreme Court justices to rule in the Legislature's favor or be shut down," the Kansas City Star editorialized, adding that conservative lawmakers' "willingness to deprive Kansas citizens of a working court process is shocking."

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Coming to a state near you.