Kansas Supreme Court challenged Gov. Brownback and his allies. Their solution: replace the judges

Photo by Thad Alton/Topeka Capital Journal via Mother Jones

According to an article in Mother Jones, Gov. Sam Brownback's tax-slashing crusade threatens to become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Since Republican Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas in 2011, he and his allies in the GOP-dominated state Legislature have implemented drastic tax cuts—part of a "real, live experiment" in conservative governance, as Brownback put it in 2012, that has resulted in precipitously falling revenues. But Brownback's tax slashing hit a snag last year when the state Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to increase education funding, potentially forcing the governor to roll back his signature tax cuts in order to increase school spending. So conservatives in Topeka declared war on the court.

In the year since the court's education decision in March 2014, conservatives in the Kansas Legislature have proposed giving the governor more power to pick state Supreme Court justices and making it easier to remove justices from the bench. They've voted to strip the state's top court of its authority over lower courts and threatened to defund state courts if they rule against the Legislature in a key case. The escalating power struggle between the state's three branches of government has put Kansas "on a direct collision course to a constitutional crisis," says Ryan Wright, executive director of Kansans for Fair Courts, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping partisan politics out of the judicial selection process in Kansas.

The school funding issue, meanwhile, still hasn't gone away. The current battle began in 2010, when a coalition of school districts sued the state, seeking to force the Legislature to reinstate school funding that was cut during the Great Recession, under a provision of the state constitution that mandates adequate levels of school funding. When Brownback took office in 2011, in the midst of the litigation, he prioritized tax cuts that have made it impossible to restore the funding due to dwindling revenues.

In March 2014, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that school funding was not equitable between rich and poor districts. The court ordered the Legislature to fix the equity issue right away while sending a second piece of the case—whether overall school funding was adequate—back to the district court, which last December ruled that spending was indeed inadequate. In early 2015, the Legislature passed a new school funding bill that a coalition of school districts argue undid increased funding to create equity between districts, prompting the issue to go back to the district court this month. Once that courts issues its ruling—possibly this week—the state Supreme Court is expected to take up both pieces (adequacy and equity) and could issue a final verdict on the issue this year. If the top court finds school funding too low, it could force the Legislature to make a choice: raise taxes in order to find enough money for schools, or buck the courts.

Because right now, Kansas lawmakers can't pass a budget even without additional school funding, thanks to Brownback's tax cuts.

Read entire article on motherjones.com

Promising new jobs and a reinvigorated economy, Brownback and the Legislature slashed income tax rates in 2012 and 2013, reducing top earners' liability by a quarter, and eliminated taxes on profits for about 200,000 small businesses, including multiple subsidiaries of Wichita-based Koch Industries, which brings in annual revenue more than $100 billion. But the economic boom the cuts were supposed to trigger never came. Instead, Kansas' economy lagged, its credit rating was downgraded, and job growth slowed. By 2014, projected revenues had fallen by nearly $4 billion over the next six years. In the first four months of 2015, Kansas lost jobs. Lawmakers in Topeka are currently working overtime, at a cost of $43,000 per day to taxpayers, to plug an $800 million budget gap. Unwilling to raise taxes, the Legislature has thus far been unable to find the money the state needs.