What the hell, Kansas?

Thanks to Governor Sam Brownback, the State of Kansas has pretty much completely replaced Texas as the national laboratory for experiments in bad government.  It wasn’t three weeks ago that I wrote about the excesses of legislative and executive branches when they decide to rein in “unaccountable” judicial decision-makers, in particular, state high-court justices.  One of my cases in point was the recent goings-on in Kansas.  Due to a dust-up over school funding, the Kansas lege went so far as to de-fund the entire state judiciary before reversing course when, I presumed, saner heads took over.  Well, so much for that because the latest measure makes de-funding look like small potatoes.  You see, now the Legislature doesn’t just want to take away a judge’s paycheck.  Now they want to make it an impeachable offense if the legislature disagrees with a decision from the bench.

Senate Bill 297, currently sitting before the Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee, is entitled “An Act concerning impeachment; relating to the grounds for impeachment of justices of the supreme court.”  Yep, that’s right.  They’re not even pretending that this is supposed to apply to the judiciary as a whole, just the target du jour, the one with the power to insist that the Legislature come up with a constitutional school-finance scheme.

So what does this bill do?  It broadens the scope of impeachable offenses for a Kansas supreme court justice, and one of those new grounds is “attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of government.”  Sorry, but did any of you guys ever read Marbury v. Madison?  Limiting the power of the executive and legislative branches is a major reason–perhaps, the reason–why the judiciary exists, and making its fulfillment of that fundamental purpose an impeachable offense pretty much removes the court system as a player in the constitutional scheme, altogether.  And, incidentally, it has Governor Brownback and his ilk’s fingerprints all over it.

Should this bill actually make it into law, it will set up a fascinating showdown.  The ultimate arbiter of the law’s constitutionality under the state constitution would be the Kansas Supreme Court, but the power of impeachment lies with the Kansas House of Representatives, a division of the legislative branch.  So would the Court’s striking down the law also violate the law?  This is the kind of thing that normally gets discussed only in theoretical terms in constitutional law classes.  Nobody is crazy enough to think that something like this is actually a good idea.  Well, except for the guy Kansas has now twice-elected as governor.

And that leaves me wondering what happens if this bill doesn’t become law.  Do the governor and his cronies decide to go ahead and come up with a constitutional finance law, as the Court ordered?  Or do they go old-school and just change the locks on the courthouse door, leaving the bench and office equipment on the curb? It sounds like a crazy scenario, and I surely hope it is.  Because, if Brownback gets his way, it’s not just an experiment in bad government that’s gone awry, it’s a one-fiftieth part of the American experiment itself.

Hat-tip to the great Charlie Pierce.