Kansas state government’s equivalent of the Catholic College of Cardinals may be moving into the spotlight this year.
What?
Yes, just as the College of Cardinals names the Pope, and its announcement is marked by a puff of white smoke rising above the Vatican, the less well-known Kansas Supreme Court Nominating Commission selects three candidates for open slots on the Kansas Supreme Court, and—without the puff of smoke—sends those names to the governor who selects from them a new member of the state’s highest court.
Yes, we know the names of the four governor-appointed and five lawyer-selected members of the commission, but they vote in secret, or at least have until the next vacancy on the high court occurs. A law passed this year will make public who voted for whom for the governor to choose from for that black robe and ultimate law-defining job.
So, what’s the news?
Well, that lawyers in the 3rd Congressional District have a new representative on the commission after Matthew Keenan’s term expired and Lenin V. Guerra, of Olathe, was named to fill the vacancy. He was the only candidate nominated for the post and because there was no opposition he was put on the commission without a vote of the district’s lawyers, and very little is known about him.
That new appointment might—or might not—produce a different trio of nominees for high court seats. The “might or might not” business is because nobody knows the vote of commissioners on the last slate of nominees handed the governor, back in 2014, when Gov. Sam Brownback chose his former chief counsel, Caleb Stegall, for the court after the commission put him in a three-candidate bucket for the governor’s selection.
For all of us who, when buying a new car, tell the salesman that we don’t need to see the engine because we drive with the hood down, this changes things.
Five Supreme Court justices stand for retention election in November, and if any of them is not retained, the Supreme Court Nominating Commission gets to interview candidates and send that list of three nominees to the governor for his selection.
There are campaigns under way to defeat Supreme Court justices—though the conservatives like Stegall—and the composition of the nominating commission will to a large degree determine who might be new justices who will interpret the law on issues including the death penalty, school finance, abortion, tax law, nearly every scrap that makes its way from the district court to the court of appeals to the high court.
And, there is a campaign under way to retain the five justices so that the Supreme Court Nominating Commission, and of course, then the governor, doesn’t change the makeup of the high court.
The political presumption has always been that the governor appoints nominating commission members who think like he does, and lawyers elect their representatives who think like they do. We’ve never known for sure because of the secrecy of the vote on the commission, but that’s the halltalk.
So…if you like the court and its decisions, you want to keep those on it now, and vote to retain them. If you want something different, you might…or might not…get it depending on the legal/political tilt of the nominating commission and the candidates it sends to the governor.
All of a sudden, it looks like we’re going to have to look at the motor of that new car, though we probably aren’t going to be sure what we’re looking at. It was simpler in the day when we just chose cars by their color.
Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com.
