A bill introduced this week in the Kansas Senate seems like either a threat or a promise.

The bill, which outlines additional specifics that justify impeachment of Kansas Supreme Court justices, may be a veiled threat to sitting justices or a sign that legislators are trying to get their ducks in a row for a direct attack on the court.

Either way, Kansans should be concerned.

The Kansas Constitution spells out the process and circumstances under which a justice can be impeached. The House has “the sole power” to impeach, and the Senate has the duty to try impeachment cases and decide whether to remove a justice from the court, a step that requires a two-thirds majority. According to the constitution, impeachment is justified if justices are guilty of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Sen. Mitch Holmes, R-St. John, has decided that the constitution doesn’t provide enough guidance to lawmakers and without additional guidelines, legislators would be unlikely to exercise their power to impeach and try justices. The drafters of the constitution probably intended for such action to be extremely rare. They provided for justices to stand for retention every six years, thereby giving voters an opportunity to cast out justices who didn’t measure up for any reason, and expected impeachment to be necessary only in extreme cases.

Nonetheless, at Holmes’ request, the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced a bill Tuesday that spells out additional grounds for impeachment, including breach of the public trust or judicial ethics and “attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power.” The bill also specifically targets “attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch.”

That last provision opens wide the opportunity for two branches of the Kansas government to gang up on the other in arbitrary, unethical and damaging ways. For instance, the governor and some legislators have been highly critical of Supreme Court rulings on funding for public schools. It’s understandable that they are frustrated with those rulings, but, if they want to change that situation, the proper action is to address the constitutional provision on which the court is basing its decisions. The Legislature has the power to initiate changes in the Kansas Constitution, but it shouldn’t have broad power to impeach Supreme Court justices whose interpretation of the constitution isn’t to their liking.

The three branches of government are intended to operate independently and provide checks and balances for one another. It’s natural for there to be some tension among those branches, but what this bill and other measures that would change the appointment process for Supreme Court justices would do is to fundamentally alter the balance of power among the branches and potentially make the court far more vulnerable to political agendas.

That’s not what Kansas needs. If legislators don’t like the way the court is interpreting constitutional or statutory provisions on school finance or any other issue, they should work to change the law, not attack the justices charged with upholding it.