Marble Falls Kris Kobach is the bad penny that keeps coming up. For those with short memories, in earlier outrages he was a key lawyer in helping concoct anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona. Then he devoted himself to conspiracies around immigrants and others voting illegally. He had a minute of national fame after Trump was elected in 2016, when lobbying for a big appointment, Trump named him to head a voting commission to root out these supposedly fraudulent voters. It all came a cropper over mischief when he started messing with the voter files in New England states, ignored the other commission members, and was fudging the commission’s report in trying to prove his conspiracies, all of which forced Trump to abandon the commission and thrust Kobach back into the wilderness.
The name of the wilderness is Kansas. Koback has failed to be elected governor or Senator there, but was elected as Secretary of State and now is the elected Attorney General. While Secretary of State he created and touted a voter purge program that was rife with errors, but was adopted by many states, which is what had first brought him to Trump Tower in the early days of Trump I. He was first brought to my attention in his first campaign for office in Kansas around 2009-10, when he got headlines claiming that ACORN was trying to steal the election while registering voters, even though I knew full well we had neither organizers, canvassers, voter registration workers, or even an office in Kansas at the time. All of which has kept me vigilant to his mischief-making and political delusions since that time.
His latest project in Kansas is trying to get its fine voters to approve an initiative to change the selection system for the state’s supreme court from a merit-based appointment procedure to direct elections. In general, I have mixed feelings about such a proposition, since I believe in direct elections of judges, utility commissioners, and others as part of democratic practice and citizen accountability. Electing judges isn’t uncommon,
Twenty-one states elect their justices. Eleven give governors or lawmakers wide latitude to appoint them. Kansas and 13 other states instead use a merit-selection system that is meant to limit partisanship on the bench. (The other four states have hybrid systems, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that focuses on democracy and tracks state supreme courts.)
Nonetheless, with Kobach at the center of this effort, I smell a rat.
Also according to the Washington Post, this is all part of the rightwing project to unravel abortion rights and other hot button issues where the voters, including those in Kansas, have already spoken, but since the US Supreme Court has kicked the ball down to the states on these issues from guns to abortion to who knows what’s next, this has become a battleground. Kobach and his team are hoping that with direct elections to the court they can undo what voters have previously approved. The Post notes that control of the state courts has become an issue in a number of states,
In Utah, GOP lawmakers this year expanded the state Supreme Court from five to seven members after losing litigation over a congressional map. Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have become partisan spendathons, with the 2025 race costing more than $100 million. And in North Carolina, the losing Republican candidate in 2024 spent six months trying to disqualify tens of thousands of ballots before conceding.
When caught on the horns of a dilemma, you still have to pick a side. I like direct elections, but if Kobach is for it in Kansas, I know the rest of us need to be against it, if for no other reason than he’s bad business and wouldn’t know the truth if it bit his ass.