In a recent stinging column, Ed Flentje dismissed Secretary of State Kris Kobach as a two-bit curbstone lawyer who has chased the myth of voter fraud with all the zeal and none of the skill of a common ambulance chaser. And that was the complimentary part.
Flentje is a professor emeritus at Wichita State and served as a cabinet official and advisor to two Republican governors, Mike Hayden and Bill Graves. Flentje’s disgust is provoked by Kobach’s guttural stridence in office and the demagoguery that lights his lust for a higher one, his party’s nomination for governor.
Last month in federal court, Judge Julie Robinson vaporized Kobach’s infamous “proof-of-citizenship” law, the statute embraced by Kobach and fawning Republicans to crack down on the non-existent curse of voter crime.
Robinson also ordered Kobach back to law school, 12 hours of refresher courses in courtroom practice. “Courtroom proceedings stripped bare Kobach’s public bloviating on illegal voting and revealed his lack of prepa-ration, inadequacies in assembling evidence, ignorance of judicial procedure, and willful violation of elementary courtroom rules,” Flentje said.
Kobach had no evidence, no reliable or competent wit-nesses, no case for his great law that a) required voters to produce various forms of identification simply to register, and b) to navigate a two-tier ballot scheme, one ballot for qualified voters (as Kobach deemed them) and another for the not-quite qualified. The ACLU attorneys had little trouble dissolving the ghosts of Kobach’s Jim Crow.
The judge also fined Kobach $50,000 for violating her earlier court order to inform more than 30,000 suspended voters that they were eligible to vote. Kobach has been fined before, a $1,000 hit last year for lying to a federal judge about the contents of a document he had taken into a November 2016 meeting with president-elect Trump.
(Kobach has appealed but palmed off the job to an adult ‒ Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who oddly agreed to continue Kobach’s dubious case.)
There’s more.
A year ago, the Legislative Coordinating Council ordered Kobach to tell just what he meant in campaign materials that asserted the Legislature was corrupt. The Council is a seven-member panel of the legislature’s leadership that includes the Senate President and Speaker of the House and acts the Legislature when it is not in session.
“I’m concerned that Kobach calls us corrupt, and if there is corruption, we need him to tell us what he means,” said House Speaker protem Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican. “Is it criminal corruption? If so, we need to know what it is, and if it isn’t, then we need to take steps to protect the reputation of members of the legislature.”
Kobach was also under investigation by the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator for his involvement in voting cases, and his lies to a judge about the con-tent of papers he took into that Trump meeting.
This and more should dissolve Kobach’s license to preach his barbarism if not his license to practice law. His run for governor evokes a remarkable stretch backward to darker times, with no tolerance for light, or for taxes, or spending, or government itself, and no help for those who need it and no way out for those who wish to escape his molestations. Kobach has taken his campaign to the low swamps of malaise, a litany of threats and conspiracies, starting with “communists” of the American Civil Liberties Union, lawyers who exposed his chicanery in court, a place where truth matters.
Serious questions about Kobach stretch back for years. In a letter to Kansas editors nearly four years ago, in September 2014, Jim Concannon, a professor and for-mer Dean of the Washburn University School of Law, denounced Kobach and questioned his fitness for public office. Concannon was dismayed when Kobach he denied the request of a candidate to remove his name from a ballot, calling it a political stunt; the Supreme Court ruled against Kobach.
Concannon said Kobach had violated “a clearly defined legal duty in order to advance (his) personal political agenda…
“As administrator of our election laws, the Secretary of State must be held to a higher standard of integrity than other elected officials,” Concannon wrote. “Mr. Kobach’s decision to ignore his statutorily defined legal duty calls into question his fitness to hold any public office and, with-out question, the office of Secretary of State.”
And that was then. Things have since piled up badly for Kobach, revealing his glaring impostures almost daily. And they pile more and more onto Kansans with each day that he continues in office.
