To the editor:

Kansas is currently in a budget crisis necessitating the closing of nine Social and Rehabilitative Services offices statewide, one of which serves Lawrence and Douglas County with over 110,000 residents, Lawrence having over 87,500 of those. This closure is supposedly fiscal in nature.

It’s odd that given the fiscal crisis and the necessity to close nine SRS offices, Gov. Brownback has found money to hire an expensive Koch legal team to defend the state against Planned Parenthood (Huffington Post, July 12, 2011). Kansas passed a measure to prevent Planned Parenthood from getting federal family planning funds. Planned Parenthood sued to block the measure.

Kansas has as attorney general, Derek Schmidt, who can and should defend the state in court at no cost as that is his job. By hiring Koch attorneys, Brownback is engaging in waste of state money to support an ideological goal, Brownback is abusing his office, and Brownback is perpetrating fraud by backing his attorney general, then saying to the state that Derek Schmidt cannot do his job.