The following article is published in Kansas City’s new monthly print newspaper, The Citizen, during this month of March 2011.  If you’re in Kansas City, please contact The Citizen’s owners to ask how you might help make the paper as successful as possible (for example, if you know of coffee shops or bars where the paper can be dropped off for free to readers.

This article is about how Kansas selects its judges.  Eight other states use a similar method — sometimes referred to as the “Missouri Plan” or the “merit system.”  But Kansas’ judicial selection method is the only one in America that makes it largely irrelevant who the governor is, or who is in the legislature — lawyers control a committee that decides, in secret, three judicial nominees, one of whom must be chosen by the governor (or else the Chief Justice gets to choose, if the governor refuses).

The article, in part, is below.  Click here for the entire article at The Citizen-Kansas City’s Web site (kc.citizen-publications.com).

“The basic issue here is democ­racy, where we have equal vot­ing rights for all citizens.”
- Stephen Ware, Pro­fes­sor of Law, Uni­ver­sity of Kansas

Ware is not refer­ring to an emerg­ing democ­racy in a far-off nation. Rather, he’s talk­ing about the lack of ademoc­racy in his home state of Kansas, where judges are cho­sen secretly by an elite, unac­count­able group ofpeo­ple. In fact, the judi­cial selec­tion method used in Kansas is less account­able, less demo­c­ra­tic than in any other state.

With human nature being what it is, it is not sur­pris­ing that unac­count­able judges act in an unac­count­ableman­ner. The result: in deep-Republican Kansas, we have some of the most activist, lib­eral judges in America.

[Click here or on image to enlarge]

Today, the Kansas Supreme Court not onlyfunc­tions as the top judi­cial branch but as a super-legislature, as the most pow­er­ful branch of Kansas gov­ern­ment. The only action that will serve as a check or bal­ance to our courts is an over­haul to the method of judi­cial selection.

…..

Lawyers are extremely Demo­c­ra­tic, at leastaccord­ing to where they put their money.Accord­ing to OpenSecrets.org, a project of theCen­ter for Respon­sive Pol­i­tics, lawyerscon­tributed $93 mil­lion to Demo­c­ra­tic fed­eralcan­di­dates and polit­i­cal action com­mit­teesdur­ing the 2010 elec­tions. That’s com­pared to the $28.2 mil­lion donated to Repub­li­can can­di­dates and PACs.

When I served in the Kansas House, we debated Kansas judi­cial selec­tion method in the Fed­eral and State Affairs Com­mit­tee. To the experts who tes­ti­fied in favor of the cur­rent sys­tem, I asked: Is cit­i­zen­ship arequire­ment, in order for lawyers through­out Kansas to vote for the Supreme Court Nom­i­nat­ing Commission?

Incred­i­bly, the answer I received was “No.” Mean­ing, even non-citizens are legally allowed to play a sig­nif­i­cant role in the process of choos­ing Kansas judges.

Pro­po­nents of the cur­rent judi­cial selec­tion method fre­quently refer to it as “merit-based,” but such a notion insults the good intel­li­gence of the vot­ers, who are fully capa­ble of decid­ing the merit of their leg­is­la­tors, spouses, places of edu­ca­tion, and cell phone providers.

“The cur­rent sys­tem of select­ing our Court of Appeals judges and Supreme Court Jus­tices dis­en­fran­chises all but the 9,000 Kansas lawyers,” said Alan Cobb, a lawyer and Vice Pres­i­dent of State Oper­a­tions with Amer­icans for Pros­per­ity. “The defense by some lawyers of the cur­rent sys­tem, that only they have the smarts and apti­tude to choose who would and who wouldn’t be a good judge, is the height of elit­ism and arrogance.”

Click here to read more.

Read More →

Click here to view a Web page version of my recent Email on this topic.

Listen in tonight at 6 p.m. on 980 AM radio, as Darla Jaye interviews Catholic lawyer and former Johnson County Community College student Kathy Brown.  Click here to listen live at KMBZ’s Web site.

It is amazing, the ongoing unethical and incompetent leadership of JCCC leaders President Terry Calaway, elected Trustee Board Chair Jon Stewart (below, right), and Board Vice-Chair Don Weiss (below, left).

It all ends up hurting students, and it ends up costing taxpayers millions of dollars through wasteful expenses.

Sam Brownback shares responsibility for promoting this anti-educational environment at JCCC, because Brownback inexplicably placed corrupt JCCC Trustee Lynn Mitchelson on his campaign committee.  Mitchelson even supports the college’s no-bid contract to dishonest attorney Mark Ferguson, who is a law partner with Kansas Democratic Party chairman Larry Gates.

Kathy Brown was a student during the first semester of 2009.  She accuses JCCC of two separate First Amendment violations.  Fifteen months later, JCCC leaders still have offered her no meaningful explanation or solution.  Yet these same leaders recently responded to illegal immigrant students within three days, when they wanted to attend a conference at taxpayer expense.

A year ago, I had no idea how accurate I was, when I described the law-breaking at JCCC under President Terry Calaway, Board Chair Shirley Brown-VanArsdale, and Vice-Chair Lynn Mitchelson as “the cover-up is worse than the crime.”  That was when they wasted thousands of dollars covering up their law-breaking after they broke the Kansas Open Meetings Act (it’s pretty clear that many of them didn’t even know the law, despite being public officials for years and years).  My comment was also made after it had been proven that Calaway’s choice for Dean of Arts and Sciences Betty Furtwengler (right) had violated the First Amendment by punishing a professor for merely criticizing the human rights records of Muslim-controlled nations.  Furtwengler’s department is the same department under which Kathy Brown was a student.

I was a public representative at JCCC through the end of June 2009, yet Terry Calaway, JCCC’s lawyer Mark Ferguson, and elected leaders Lynn Mitchelson and Brown-VanArsdale violated their ethical duties to inform me of Brown’s complaints.  Yet they did take the time to send me a taxpayer-funded “cease and desist” letter that was based off of knowingly-false premises, and that threatened me with a taxpayer-funded lawsuit if I were to continue to accurately accuse them of engaging in unethical, dishonest behavior.

Keep in mind, also, that many of these hostile, anti-educational actions by JCCC leaders occurred after the college added the Orwellian job of “Dean of Learner Engagement” within the administration.  The job was given to the pro-union (NEA) faculty member Rick Moehring (right), who was so aloof that he then interviewed with The Kansas City Star to tell us how (in his mind) he got the job, and during one of America’s weakest economies ever.

What was the most important influence in your ability to achieve this particular position?
“Passion and ideas. I have a strong passion to see students succeed and love the process by which ideas become innovation.”

What is your best advice for others interested in moving up?
“Two things. First, my time in leadership within the faculty taught me that, as a leader, people need to be able to trust and respect you, your motives, and your ideas. Develop yourself as a leader now. If you cannot convince people to follow you early in your career, an administrative position will not help.
The second is summed up nicely by Eric Hoffer, an American social writer and philosopher who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983: ‘In times of drastic change, it is the learner who inherits the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.’”

JCCC’s motto is “Learning comes first.”  No, it does not.  These people are not serious educators.  They are unconcerned about student performance, and they are unconcerned about representing the interests of the voting taxpayers.

Listen in tonight at 6 p.m. to Darla Jaye’s show.

Links to related stories:

• Kansas Watchdog: JCCC, LUNA, La Raza and alleged discrimination against students lacking documentation
• Kansas City Star:  JCCC tries to find way to send students, including illegal immigrants, to conference
• Kansas Watchdog:  Former student pushes JCCC ‘Discomfort’ complaint
• Nice Deb:  JCCC Student Discovers Campus “Discomfort Doctrine” Only Applies To Conservatives

Read More →