Out on the campaign trail as I run for state representative in the 17th district, I often hear people describe the idea of electing our supreme court justices in partisan elections as unseemly – or similar terms implying it’s improper, distasteful, or beneath the dignity of the judiciary.
Full disclosure: I support partisan judicial elections. As I argued in my June 2nd op-ed in The Kansas City Star, the current nominating process is already rife with political influence. But standing on someone’s front porch is no place for a lengthy lecture – folks’ eyes start rolling back in their heads fast.
No, I have a better argument: the current nominating process, in which legal elites and politicians pick our supreme court justices, and the proposed electoral option, which will bring plenty of dark money into the state, are both unseemly. There, I said it. Don’t fight it. Acknowledge it. And then quickly pivot – faster than a teenager deleting their search history – to letting the people vote. It’s the ultimate tiebreaker in a democracy.
Yes, dark money will be part of the mix. But so will real accountability. Judges will have to sit for interviews, town halls, candidate forums, and debates. They’ll be forced to explain, in plain language, where they stand on the Constitution, criminal justice, property rights, parental rights, school funding, abortion, and the proper limits of government power. Voters will finally see their judicial philosophy, temperament, and record – not hidden behind a nominating commission’s press release, but out in the open.
That public scrutiny is the best disinfectant we have. In Texas and Alabama, voters have used the ballot box to push back against courts too cozy with trial lawyers, flipping majorities and advancing tort reform. In North Carolina, Republicans flipped the supreme court to a solid conservative majority and reversed prior rulings on voter ID and redistricting. In Wisconsin, liberals used a record-shattering, high-spending election to flip the court the other way on abortion and legislative maps. In each case, the people – not a small circle of legal elites – decided the outcome.
Elections drag the judges, the special interests, and the dark money into the sunlight. It’s not perfect – nothing in politics ever is – but it is far more transparent and democratic than letting insiders in Topeka keep choosing our highest court behind closed doors.
In the end, the people of Kansas who must live under these rulings deserve to be the ones who decide who wears the robe.
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Jim Eschrich is running as a Republican candidate for Kansas House District 17 in Johnson County
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