To bring closure to this thread, Kansas voted to retain four of the Justices on the Kansas Supreme Court, as noted in McClatchyDC:
Efforts to remove four of the seven justices started with critics of past rulings that overturned death sentences in capital murder cases. The justices plan to hear arguments in December in the case of a man sentenced to die for killing his estranged wife and three other family members in northeastern Kansas.
Abortion opponents and conservative Republicans also wanted to remove the justices ahead of major rulings on abortion and school funding cases. The court has yet to hear the abortion case, but a ruling on education funding is expected by early next year. …
The court’s critics targeted Chief Justice Lawton Nuss and Justices Marla Luckert, Carol Beier and Dan Biles for removal in statewide yes-or-no votes to determine whether they should remain for another six years. They were appointed by moderate GOP or Democratic predecessors of conservative Republican Gov. Sam Brownback.
Brownback’s only appointee, Justice Caleb Stegall, also was on the ballot but wasn’t a target.
Voters retained all five.
Nuss said in a post-election interview that the ouster efforts would not influence the court and that its rulings would continue to be “based on the rule of law and the constitution.”
“If you were in a lawsuit, would you want a judge who was influenced by anything other than what the law requires?” Nuss said.
As I contemplate this temporary victory for judicial independence, it occurs to me that the procedure of appointments, rather than public votes, also excludes, at least for the most part, the modern phenomenon of outside money, by which I mean money raised by organizations which are outside of the jurisdiction in question. It is perhaps one of the most unfair facets of the modern political scene that great amounts of money is raised and used to target candidates for local seats for defeat by organizations which do not, for the greater part, reside in the jurisdiction in question. This occurs because of national strategies which call for dominance of the local political scene in order to produce the same dominance at the national level.
An appointment method for judges would obviate, if not entirely exclude, external influences; naturally, a weak appointing body would still be vulnerable to those influences, but I think that the appointment method is much less vulnerable, in general, to such deviant approaches.
