Derek Schmidt

Schmidt was elected to the Kansas Senate in 2000.[2] In 2004, Schmidt was elected the Senate majority leader,[2] holding this post through 2010.[3]

During his time in the Kansas Senate, Schmidt sponsored an unsuccessful proposal to repeal a state ban on for-profit prisons. Schmidt was a supporter of the highly popular Kansas version of Jessica's Law, but "almost single-handedly killed the final bill by demanding inclusion of a provision allowing private prisons in Kansas" as the town of Yates Center, in Schmidt's district, sought to bring a private prison to the town.[4]

According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, top contributors to Schmidt's campaigns included the Community Bankers Association, AT&T, the Kansas Association of Realtors, the Kansas Optometric Association, Cox Enterprises, Koch Industries, Monsanto, the Kansas Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association, the Associated General Contractors of Kansas, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, and Sprint.[5]

Schmidt was the Republican nominee for Kansas Attorney General, defeating Ralph DeZago in the Republican Primary on August 3, 2010.[6] He won the general election against the incumbent, Democrat Steve Six[7] and took office on January 10, 2011. A key issue in Schmidt's first campaign for attorney general the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the health care reform law. Six chose not to join 25 other states in challenging the constitutionality of the ACA, while Schmidt pledged to join the lawsuit challenging the law, if elected.[8]

Schmidt won re-election in 2014, defeating Democratic nominee A.J. Kotich, a labor lawyer and former chief attorney for the Kansas Department of Labor.[9]

In 2018, Schmidt defeated Democratic nominee Sarah G. Swain, winning election to a third term.[10]

In April 2020, Democratic Governor Laura Kelly instituted orders to restrict the rapid spread of COVID-19 that limited public gatherings to a maximum of ten persons. As this would have applied to Easter Sunday celebrations in churches, the Republican-majority Legislative Coordinating Council reversed her order. Republican Schmidt also opposed Kelly's order, contending that it violated the Kansas Constitution and Kansas law.[11] He issued a memo calling the order likely unconstitutional and urged law enforcement not to enforce it.[11] Of the first eleven loci of contagion in Kansas, three had already been traced to religious gatherings.[12] The Kansas Supreme Court reinstated Kelly's orders on April 11, in expedited proceedings. [13]

As attorney general, Schmidt joined with other Republican state attorneys general in challenging federal regulatory actions adopted by the Obama administration that Schmidt contended were illegal federal overreach. Schmidt and his colleagues were successful in blocking many of these regulations, particularly those proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.[14][15][16] Kansas challenged Obama-era regulations on the oil and gas industry, including a regulation controlling emissions of the greenhouse gas methane;[15] in 2015, Schmidt also joined Kansas in a suit challenging the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.[16][17] In the latter case, the Supreme Court issued in 2016 a stay of implementation in a 5–4 decision along ideological lines.[16]

One of Schmidt's first acts as state attorney general was to add Kansas as a plaintiff to the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 in Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services; in a letter, Schmidt wrote that the ACA's individual mandate would "encroach on the sovereignty of the State of Kansas and on the rights of our citizens."[18][19] The U.S. Supreme Court, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), ultimately upheld most of the ACA as constitutional, while striking down a portion of the law which would have required states to implement Medicaid expansion.[20][21][22]

In July 2017, Schmidt joined a group of eight other Republican state attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, as well as Idaho Governor Butch Otter, in sending a letter to President Donald Trump saying that they would litigate if Trump did not terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that had been put into place by the Obama administration. (One of the signatories, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III, subsequently reversed his position and urged passage of the DREAM Act.)[23][24][25]

Schmidt has given oral argument several times on behalf of the State of Kansas in the United States Supreme Court.[26]

Schmidt successfully argued several Supreme Court cases involving the death penalty: Kansas v. Cheever (argued and decided in 2013)[27] and Kansas v. Carr (argued in 2015 and decided in 2016),[28] Schmidt's deputy, state solicitor general Toby Crouse, gave oral argument in another death-penalty case in the Supreme Court, Kahler v. Kansas (argued 2019 and decided 2020),[29] as well as Kansas v. Glover (argued 2019 and argued 2012), a case involving the reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment of a police investigative stop.[30]

Schmidt gave oral argument in the Supreme Court case Kansas v. Garcia (argued 2019 and 2020), in which the Court held, 5–4, that the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) does not preempt "Kansas's application of its state identity-theft and fraud statutes to the noncitizens in this case."[31]

Despite numerous judges across the U.S. having rejected challenges to the natural born citizenship of Barack Obama, since before he was elected president in 2008,[32] Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach persistently demanded proof of citizenship before allowing Obama's name to appear on the 2012 Kansas presidential ballot. In September 2012, while leading the three-person State Objections Board, and supported by its other members, Kansas Secretary of State Jeff Colyer and Schmidt, Kobach requested additional evidence that Obama was actually born in Hawaii.[33] In September 2012, the three heard arguments on a claim from a Manhattan, Kansas, resident that President Barack Obama was not eligible to be president because his father was from Kenya. The resident, Joe Montgomery, also questioned whether Obama has a valid birth certificate. As head of the Board, Kobach requested additional evidence that Obama was actually born in Hawaii.[33] According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Board said it lacked sufficient evidence as to whether or not Obama was eligible to appear on the Kansas ballot as a candidate in the 2012 presidential election. They stated a need to review his birth certificate and other documents from Hawaii, as well as Arizona and Mississippi before they could respond to a complaint alleging that the president was not a "natural born citizen." "Given the cursory response from President Obama, the Board is merely attempting to obtain additional information before making a decision," said Kobach's spokesperson.[34] In an editorial, The New York Times characterized the actions of the Kansas authorities as having "reignited long-running conspiracy theories that the president was not born in the United States." CNN reported that "the Kansas ballot measure is one of several examples of the birther movement's still-persistent presence."[35]

Schmidt also opposed allowing same-sex couples from changing names on state drivers licenses, from receiving spousal health benefits, or from filing state taxes as married couples. The ACLU sought an injunction against Schmidt's initiatives to continue bans in most of the state's counties despite adversarial rulings from a federal district court in Kansas and from the U.S. Supreme Court.[36]

Schmidt joined forces with Republican Kris Kobach, then-Kansas Secretary of State, in filing a brief in support of a lawsuit seeking to force the Kansas Democratic Party to field a candidate in the 2014 U.S. Senate general election. If the Democrats were forced to field a candidate, it was anticipated to have decreased the chances of independent candidate Greg Orman (who was supported by Democrats) of defeating incumbent Republican Pat Roberts in the 2014 election.[37][38] The suit was unanimously rejected by a three-judge panel of the Kansas District Court in Shawnee County.[38]

In Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri v. Andersen (2018), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood, who challenged the decision of Kansas government officials to terminate Medicaid contracts with the organization. The court of appeals held that "States may not terminate providers from their Medicaid program for any reason they see fit, especially when that reason is unrelated to the provider's competence and the quality of the health care it provides."[39] Schmidt strongly opposed the decision, as well as a similar one made by the Fifth Circuit in the Louisiana case of Gee v. Planned Parenthood of Gulf Coast. Schmidt asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the Tenth Circuit's decision, but in December 2018, the Supreme Court denied his petition for a writ of certiorari.[40][39]

In 2015, Schmidt asked the Kansas Supreme Court to strike down a ballot measure, approved by voters in Wichita, that created a city ordinance reducing marijuana possession enforcement in the city. The measure specifically reduced the penalty for persons over 21 charged with a first marijuana possession offense (moving it from a Class A criminal misdemeanor to a civil infraction carrying a $50 fine). Schmidt asserted that the voter imitative was barred because it conflicted with uniform state law, a claim that the city disputed.[41] The Kansas Supreme Court struck down the city ordinance in 2016; the court did not address Schmidt's argument that the local law conflicted with state law, but rather based its decision on a technical error, ruling that the petitioners' filing of the proposed ordinance with the city clerk was improper.[42]

In January 2018, Schmidt issued an opinion stating that all forms of marijuana, including cannabidiol (CBD oil) are unlawful in Kansas.[43][44] Later in 2018, the state legislature voted to amend the state-law definition of marijuana to exclude CBD products without THC.[43][45]

In 2019, Schmidt was one of 17 state attorneys general who did not sign onto a letter from 33 state attorneys general in support of U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter's Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act (H.R. 1595), a bill to allow marijuana-related businesses in states and territories in which marijuana is legal to use the banking system. The bill would facilitate collection of taxes levied on the $8.3 billion industry, reduce the danger of operating cash-only businesses and more effectively monitor the industry.[46]

On December 8, 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where certified results showed Joe Biden the electoral victor over President Donald Trump. Paxton, Schmidt,[47] and 16 other states' Attorneys General who support Paxton's challenge of the election results alleged numerous instances of unconstitutional actions in the four states' presidential ballot tallies, arguments that had already been rejected in other state and federal courts.[48] In Texas v. Pennsylvania, Paxton asked the United States Supreme Court to invalidate the states' sixty-two electoral votes, allowing Trump to be declared the winner of a second presidential term.[49] Because the suit has been characterized as a dispute between states, the Supreme Court retains original jurisdiction, though it frequently declines to hear such suits.[50] There was no evidence of consequential illegal voting in the election.[51] Paxton's lawsuit included claims that had been tried unsuccessfully in other courts and shown to be false.[52] Officials from each of the four states described Paxton's lawsuit as having recycled false and disproven claims of irregularity.[53] The merits of the objections were sharply criticized by legal experts and politicians.[54][55] Election law expert Rick Hasen described the lawsuit as "the dumbest case I've ever seen filed on an emergency basis at the Supreme Court."[56][57] Republican Senator Ben Sasse said the situation of Paxton initiating the lawsuit "looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt", in reference to Paxton's own state and federal legal issues (securities fraud charges and abuse of office allegations).[58] On December 11, the U.S. Supreme Court quickly rejected the suit which Schmidt had joined, in an unsigned opinion.[59]

In 2016, Schmidt created a new Fraud and Abuse Litigation Division to prosecute financial crimes and elder abuse.[60]

In 2017, Schmidt's colleagues elected him to serve as president of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).[61][62][63]