Action needed to protect our courts, reproductive rights, public education funding, and voting rights

Easy link to email your state level senator is included. This resolution to change our courts will have a big impact on a lot of the things we value and care about.

Senators will be voting late Wednesday (3/5) afternoon on resolution SCR 1611 that would change our state constitution by replacing the current merit-based process of selecting Supreme Court justices with a partisan election process.

Changing the state constitution is a big deal. This change would introduce politics into our courts and could be detrimental to things like:

• reproductive rights

• public education funding

• voting rights

Our current impartial Kansas Supreme Court has protected all of these issues in recent rulings.

Further down, I’m including some graphics and links from my previous email to provide more details on SCR 1611, but the action item needs to go right up front.

Email (& call) your Senator ASAP — Keep politics out of our courts

Email (and call) your state level senator preferably before 3:00 pm on Wednesday. We could use a full court press on this one, so try to email and call. You can keep emailing through 5:00 pm or so, as they may be on the floor conducting other business and debating the resolution for a while.

Click here for an easy email link from Kansas Appleseed that will automatically send an email to your senator. Scroll up in the link for some important points from Kansas Appleseed about SCR 1611.

Before sending your email:

• It is a pre-populated email, but it is ALWAYS recommended that you use your own wording.

• Let them know you are a constituent in the opening sentence.

• Ask them to vote no on SCR 1611.

• Scroll down to the talking points section for some help with the body of the email.

• Sign off with your name and city.

If the link doesn’t work:

• Send an email to your state level senator (find their contact info at ksleglookup.org/search)

• Suject line: Vote No on SCR 1611

• Follow the points above for the rest of the email.

To call your state level senator, find their contact info at ksleglookup.org/search. You will likely be leaving a message with their assistant. You can keep your message simple:

Sample Call Script:

My name is ______________ and I’m calling from [city] and zip code ___________. I’d like to ask the senator to vote no on resolution SCR 1611. Politics should be left out of our courts.

Graphics explaining SCR 1611

You can find these graphics on the Six Degrees of Activism, Informed Action for KS, and Moms for Kansas Instagram accounts. Please share the graphics from our accounts or feel free to share some or all of them on other social media.

For more details about SCR 1611 regarding:

• the merit-based system,

• why this could be so detrimental to reproductive rights, public education funding, and voting rights,

• the constitutional amendment process,

• how other states handle supreme court justices, and

• best practices for Supreme Court judicial selections,

see our previous newsletter from February 23.

Talking points for emails

You can keep your email short. Just make a paragraph or two from some of the talking points below. Drop some in chat GPT and ask it to make a paragraph.

Keep politics out of our Courts

• There is no place for politics in the courts.

• Justices and judges must be free to rule based on the law.

• The Supreme Court selection process should be outside the political arena.

• We need a Court that can make decisions fairly, regardless of the politics, to uphold the Kansas Constitution and protect our Kansas freedoms.

• In Kansas, the Nominating Commission prevents shadow organizations from buying a Supreme Court seat.

• The Supreme Court has a constitutional obligation to consider cases in the interest of all Kansans who appear before them, not concern themselves with political influences.

• The judicial branch is different from the legislative and executive branches. It must be free from political influence.

• Justices must consider cases in the interest of all Kansans, not political agendas.

Strength of the Supreme Court Nominating Commission Process

• The current process has stood the test of time and ensures we have qualified nominees for the Court.

• The Supreme Court Nominating Commission is the best system to protect judicial freedom and the separation of powers.

• Popular elections and Senate confirmations inject politics into our Court system. The Nominating Commission has kept politics out.

Election of judges not working in other states

• In states where elections are held for Supreme Court seats, elections often become partisan and result in millions of dollars being poured into these races.

• In a recent Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, over $51 million was spent on a Supreme Court seat, with over half of that coming from outside the state.