Wisconsin voters made the news this week by doing something Kansans would never think of doing: They voted out one of the state’s supreme court justices. It was something that hadn’t been done in Wisconsin in decades. It’s also something that hasn’t been done in Kansas since forever.

John Fund, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, explains the significance of what happened in cheesehead country:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court certainly bent the rule of law over the past four years, as a 4-3 liberal majority became the nation's premier trailblazer in overturning its own precedents and abandoning deference to the legislature's policy choices. Thus the defeat of Justice Louis Butler at the hands of Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman has national implications. A recent study in the University of California-Davis Law Review found that Wisconsin is the eighth most-cited state supreme court by other judicial bodies. Its rulings play a larger role in shaping court decisions elsewhere than those of courts in states such as New York, Florida or Texas. In addition, 38 states elect all or part of their appellate-level judges by popular vote. Judge Butler's defeat sends a signal that a judge who dramatically oversteps traditional boundaries can be brought to account.

For those in Kansas, this story has only the most tenuous of connections. Just for starters, imagine voting for a supreme court justice! Not in Kansas. In Kansas, justices of the state supreme court are nominated by the Supreme Court Nominating Commission.

And who are they? They're lawyers, mostly, along with some other friends of the governor. According to the Kansas Judicial Center’s website, here's how the great state of Kansas finds its greatest judicial minds:

“Four of the Commission's members are non-attorneys appointed by the Governor; four others are attorneys selected by attorneys in each of the State's four Congressional Districts. The Chair of the Commission is an attorney elected by attorneys in a statewide vote.”

The commission picks three candidates, the governor picks the one she likes best, and that is the closest any Kansas Supreme Court justice ever comes to being vetted by the representatives of the people.

In many states, government operates with a little more humility. In some, the senate confirms nominations made by the governor, just like in Washington, DC. But not in Kansas.

In other states, such as Wisconsin, voters choose between judicial candidates with competing views. But not in Kansas.

In Kansas, lawyers and the governor decide who interprets the laws you have to live with. When that commission comes up with its little list, no one else in the state has the slightest idea of what the nominees on it believe or stand for. In fact, Kansans know nothing about the appointees who populate their state supreme court, until it's too late.

Although it's hard to believe lawyers would ever be tempted to do the wrong thing, the process reeks of insider scamming, and it’s all made comfortable by the apathy most voters feel toward issues that are impossible to follow. Most Kansans have no clue where their supreme court justices come from. They're like mildew or thistles. They're just there.

It's true that once appointed, a new justice faces the voters in the first general election following his or her first year in office. But since voters know nothing about them except what the state's editorialists say about them, they are always voted a full six-year term. Always. And every six years after that, they're routinely voted back into office on “retention” ballots, unless they decide to retire or resign.

There are a few problems with this system, as you may have noticed.

• Because there has never been a conservative governor of Kansas, the high court tilts to the left and is largely out of touch with a substantial number of citizens; Democrats and liberal Republicans are the only appointments ever made to the court.
• Because Kansas is the only state in the nation to give lawyers such enormous power over the judiciary, an entrenched class of citizens has come to exert a disproportional influence over other citizens. You shouldn't have to be a lawyer to vote in Kansas. Somebody ought to take this to court, except...
• Because the defenders of this closed system pretend it’s based on merit and ignore the obvious political implications of the selection process, voters are suspicious of and often hostile to every supreme court decision, resulting in a diminished respect for the rule of law. Because the supreme court reflects only liberal beliefs and values in its rulings, nobody else in the state takes them seriously.
• Because the state lacks a way of measuring judicial performance, citizens have no way of making an informed choice when it comes time to vote on retentions. The influence of the state supreme court on other states is worrisome, since virtually every state is caught up in legal swindles, like court-mandated funding for "education."
• And because the system defies conventional methods of accountability, the supreme court selection process strikes many as being extremely undemocratic.

As Kansas law professor Stephen Ware suggests in a recent and oft-cited report for the Federalist Society, the process now in place in Kansas resembles an elitist club more than a responsible method of insuring a fair and independent judiciary.

The runaway activism of Kansas’ Supreme Court should surprise no one. As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Kansas’ Supreme Court operates with a magnified sense of unaccountability and arrogance, holding secret proceedings and usurping the role of the legislature when it feels like it. It's like a star chamber, but without the stars. Instead, it's run by robed cronies. The 2005 decision by the state supreme court to tax the citizens of the state hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of “education” was a spectacular example of the court’s cynical shut-up-and-pay mentality.

What happens with the Kansas Supreme Court matters, not just to Kansans, but to all Americans. As Fund observes, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is the eighth most influential state court in the country. But the UC Davis report  that shows the importance of the Wisconsin court also notes Kansas’ significance. Kansas ranks sixth. A vote similar to the one in Wisconsin would mean even more if it took place in Kansas.

Fat chance of that. Liberals infest Kansas’ judicial apparatus; change can only mean they would lose some of their judicial monopoly, so their affection for democratic processes isn’t very great.

“In the wake of Justice Butler's defeat, some liberals have declared that elections for the state's supreme court should end, and its members be appointed by the governor,” Fund writes.

Sure enough, as Fund reports, the president of the Wisconsin bar is now claiming that "judges are different from other elected officials" and "that means some of the standards voters typically use when evaluating candidates don't apply to judges."

Lawyers in Wisconsin want what lawyers in Kansas have: the power to manipulate the judiciary. Of course they'll argue people shouldn't have the right to vote. But, writes Fund:

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the distinction between judicial and legislative elections. In expanding the political free speech rights of judicial candidates, it declared in 2002 (Republican Party of Minnesota v. White) that completely separating the judiciary from the notion of "representative government" ignores the fact that state-court judges possess the power to "make" common law as well as to shape their state constitutions. Thus it is entirely appropriate for voters to have a say in whether that "immense power," as the Supreme Court called it, will be used with restraint or abandon.

There’s a simple way to remedy all of this. In every single retention vote, starting in 2008 with Eric Rosen, vote the rascals out.

You were never given a chance to know them anyway, so what the heck? Kansas Judicial Review of Johnson County maintains a website that helps voters become more aware of these give-them-the-boot elections. In 2010, for example, voters will be able to say goodbye to Carol Beier, Marla Luckert, and, notably, Lawton Nuss, the Salina lawyer-turned-justice who was caught at lunch with Senators Steve Morris and Pete Brungardt—and a spreadsheet to help them all determine exactly how much to soak the taxpayers on behalf of Nuss' former client, the local school district and its overpaid superintendent.

So since there’s no plausible way to measure the performance of any of the state’s justices, and nobody was given a chance to find out anything about these people in the first place, throw them all out, one after another. Vote against retention in every election until a process is in place that will make the state’s supreme court a conventional, responsible, independent partner in state government.

Of course the chances of this coming to pass in Kansas are admittedly slim. It would require a kind of unity unknown in the state: Kansas’ conservatives agree on very little except who and what they don’t like, and they rarely work together to achieve shared goals. The state’s press would heap scorn on such a simple plan and apathy's a hard habit to break.

But Kansans voted on justices until just 50 years ago, when politicians and judges conspired to undermine public confidence in the judiciary. That’s when the lawyers took over. Maybe it’s time they let go and returned the state supreme court to the people of Kansas.

“Monday Monday” columnist Denis Boyles is the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently,  Superior, Nebraska, a book mostly about Kansas named by the New York publisher after a nice town in Nebraska because, “you know, Kansas, Nebraska—they’re all the same.”