Gov. Sam Brownback's behavior is sooo radical, he warned the justice system if they didn't agree with HIM, he would de-fund them. Guess what? They disagree with him!
Now what....
Kansas Court System Faces Potential Shutdown After Ruling
A ruling this week by a Kansas judge put the courts on a collision course with the state legislature and raised the specter of a shutdown of courthouses statewide.
The confrontation stems from budget legislation passed by the Republican-controlled legislature in June containing something akin to a self-destruct button. The provision said that if a Kansas court were to strike down a 2014 law concerning the selection of chief judges, funding for the courts would be “declared null and void.”
Late Wednesday, Shawnee County District Judge Larry D. Hendricks declared the 2014 law unconstitutional.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who said in a statement that the decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch,” asked Judge Hendricks to put the ruling on hold while his office files an appeal. The judge granted the request on Thursday.
Judge Hendrick’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed last year by Larry T. Solomon, a chief district judge selected by the state Supreme Court.
The 2014 law, known as House Bill No. 2338, gives local courts the authority to select their own chief judges and more control over their budgets, stripping that power from the Kansas Supreme Court. Judge Solomon said in his lawsuit that the law violated a provision of the state constitution that supplies the Supreme Court with “general administrative authority over all courts in the state.”
Judge Hendricks agreed. “The court concludes that the selection of a chief district court judge is inherent in the supreme court’s ‘general administrative authority,’” he wrote in his ruling Wednesday night.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Sam Brownback said he is reviewing Judge Hendricks’s decision.
House Bill 2338 was seen by Democrats as retribution by Republican legislators for two rulings in which the Kansas Supreme Court held that public-school funding was unconstitutionally inadequate. Republicans denied any link between the two.
Jeff King, Kansas Senate vice president, said that the 2014 law was in keeping with the legislature’s broader aim of decentralizing authority in the state. “The legislature said, ‘We are willing to increase spending, but we want more local control over those funding decisions,’” he said.
The language in the court budget – sometimes called a “blow-up clause” – allows the legislature to reevaluate its appropriation if House Bill 2338 is ultimately struck down on appeal, he said.
Sen. Laura Kelly, a Democrat whose district includes Topeka, said the legislature could have reduced the court budget at any time without the threat of defunding the courts entirely, which she said is real. “Those legislators who say it wasn’t their intent to create this kind of crisis were fully aware of what they were doing when they took that vote,” she said.
Judge Solomon also plans to challenge the blow-up clause, formally known as a nonseverability clause, his lawyers said. “We have never seen a law like this before and it is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis,” said Randolph Sherman of Kaye Scholer LLP, who represents Judge Solomon.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/09/03/in-kansas-ruling-puts-court-funding-in-jeopardy/
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