Kansas City Star. February 8, 2023.
Editorial: AG Kris Kobach needs prosecutors. His focus should be Kansas, not national attention
When Kris Kobach ran for attorney general last fall, he was clear about his agenda. He would take on progressive enemies such as the Biden administration and the ACLU, and turn the office into a platform from which he would prosecute the nation’s culture wars. Kansans must have approved: They voted him into office.
Just a few weeks into his term, though, it is still worth questioning Kobach’s priorities.
During testimony last week before a Kansas House budget committee, Kobach said that his office has been forced to pull back from much of its criminal prosecution work because of a shortfall in lawyers — a situation that started under his predecessor, Derek Schmidt. As of now, the attorney general’s office is only taking on murders and the very worst child sex crimes.
In the last year, Kobach said, the 10-person criminal division of the attorney general’s office has lost seven prosecutors. Because of that, the office has had to kick 20 criminal cases back to local prosecutors over the last six months.
The problem, he said, is that lawyers can make more elsewhere — either in the attorney general offices of neighboring states, or sometimes even by going to work as local prosecutors in county and district attorney offices across the state. He asked legislators to increase salaries.
“The staffing shortage has made us unable to take on other serious cases or cases where, for example, the local prosecutor has a conflict of interest,” Kobach said in his written testimony. “Put simply, the attorney general’s office is unable to fulfill its core mission of supporting county and district attorneys in prosecuting criminal cases.”
To be clear, we don’t blame Kobach for the staffing shortage. And we’re not scoffing at his request to bump up the salaries of attorneys in his employ. But we do wonder if the new attorney general is using his existing resources wisely.Simply put: Should Kobach be paying so much attention to national politics and causes when his office can’t perform its most basic functions at home?
Consider all the crusades the attorney general has launched during his short stint in office.
Kobach has joined a coalition of Republican attorneys general challenging the environmental and social investing policies of two big financial firms, then later supported a lawsuit against a new Department of Labor rule allowing pension asset managers to make such investments. He has fired off a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding answers about President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. He has joined a Texas-led lawsuit against changes to immigration rules — and followed that up by joining an effort to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to encourage illegal immigration to the United States. He announced another lawsuit against federal government protections for lesser prairie chickens. And he sent a stern warning to Walgreens pharmacies, warning them against providing abortion pills to Kansans via mail.
That’s just one month of work. It’s a lot. And a good chunk of it involves — or is aimed at — entities outside Kansas borders.
Perhaps some of it is useful. Certainly, many Sunflower State politicians and farmers support his challenge to the prairie chicken protections. But some of it clearly lies outside his jurisdiction. What say does the Kansas attorney general have over records classified at the federal level? And some of it seems like bandwagon-hopping: If Texas is already challenging federal immigration rules, does it really need Kobach’s help?
All these efforts, though, must be balanced against one fact: Right now, the attorney general’s office is too short-handed to perform what Kobach himself calls a “core mission.”
“You can only do ‘more with less’ for so long — eventually you just get less with less. And that’s the point we’re at now,” Kobach said in his legislative testimony.
That is a tough challenge. Perhaps the attorney general can meet it by focusing less on the bright lights of the national scene, and focusing his office more on the work to be done at home.
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