Kansas GOP Insider (wannabe): Stop Discouraging Your Conservative Friends

Monday, August 29, 2016

Stop Discouraging Your Conservative Friends

For about the 10th time last week, a political insider type told me the effort to oust Not-So Supreme members of the Kansas Supreme Court was a dead issue. 

"Not gonna happen," the guy told me as he checked out his hair in a reflection in the window. Conservatives (or quasi-conservatives), this effort is so worth the fight for oh, so many reasons.

This argument that it's over; we shouldn't bother, has to go. I realize Kansas voters have never voted not to retain any justices, but that doesn't mean we never will or that we can't toss them out. That is the WORST argument in human history. If humans throughout history fell for that line of thinking, I would still be whispering in my husband's ear who I thought he should vote for on Nov. 8. I would be dragging a bag across a cotton field somewhere. I'm pretty sure people said for decades that no one would ever run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Someone forgot to tell Jim Ryun that. (And in Rio this year, some of the marathon runners ran a few sub-four-minute miles!! Everyone's doing it now!)



These naysayers are discouraging. We can argue for days about how to best run the campaign to oust the justices. (I'll argue all day that instead of running a campaign through a conservative organization, we should be directing resources to Kansans for Justice, a nonpartisan group formed by victims of the Carr Brothers.) But we shouldn't be having an argument about whether to mount a campaign against the highly partisan Justices who are running our state. 

I am practical, and I am a realist, but this campaign over the justices is a fight worth having. It's also a fight we can win. There are a few ways to read the tea leaves of the Aug. 2 bloodletting. One school of thought says people were angry with conservatives, therefore, any conservative issue will lose. Another school of thought says people were voting out incumbents. I personally think there's probably a lot of truth to both schools of thought, and I believe the electorate looked a LOT different in August than it has in previous primary elections. Part of that was because conservative voters didn't go to the polls. THEY WERE DISCOURAGED! Even if you can't bring yourself to join the anti-retention fight, you shouldn't be discouraging the people in the ring. That will have a devastating effect on the turnout in November. 

There are a million reasons we can win this battle. Johnson County voters saved the justices last time, but that doesn't mean we'll do the same this time. (Clearly, Johnson County voters are some of the most schizo in the state. We don't know what we want; we're such a bunch of squishes, but if anti-incumbency is part of the voter mindset this election, that bodes well for the campaign to get rid of these partisan judges.)

Even if we lose, and I personally don't believe we will, it's a fight worth having and having right now. It's not about "balance" or "fairness" or whatever nonsense the liberals are spinning. It's not somehow against our state constitution. Tossing out the Justices IS the legal remedy to what ails us, and we should use it.












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