We strongly oppose electing Supreme Court justices and hope you will, too. It is a way to undermine public education funding. Read more here:
“Sue Bond isn’t squeamish about partisan politics. Her late husband, Dick Bond, spent four years as the Republican president of the Kansas Senate after all. But Bond, 89, doesn’t think politics should determine who sits on the bench of the state’s high court. That’s why she’s speaking out against the Republican plan to switch from a merit-based system to a model where voters directly elect the seven justices of the Kansas Supreme Court — an effort Republicans believe could help bring to heel a court that has protected abortion access…
“Kansas used to directly elect its Supreme Court justices. But after a major scandal in the 1950s that saw a sitting governor lose his re-election bid and pull off a maneuver to get himself appointed to the high court, voters wanted a change. In 1958, they passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the current system, in which governors fill Supreme Court openings by selecting a candidate put forward by a nine-member nominating commission…
“‘The Republicans that are writing (the ballot question) are very clever, and they know the trick, and they know how to find that statement that, ‘Oops, we don’t want a whole bunch of lawyers.’ The same way they tried to do with the abortion issue, to find a trigger point for everyone that we don’t want that,’ she said. In her experience, Bond said, non-attorney members’ opinions are given just as much weight as their counterparts on the commission.”
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Originally posted to Facebook 5/28/25.