Editor’s note: This is the second of two interviews with lawyers who are intimately involved in legal cases that are shaping public policy in Kansas on both sides of the political spectrum. Today, we publish our interview with Dan Burrows, the chief deputy for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. On Tuesday, we published an interview with Sharon Brett, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.
If you want to get a sense about Attorney General Kris Kobach’s top deputy, you can look back to his college days when he played in a metal band at the University of Virginia.
Dan Burrows concedes he was much different back then, although he says it may have shaped his views on government and formed the foundation of his conservative political outlook today as he leads the litigation team for the attorney general.
Burrows, a native of Belle Plaine, recently sat down for a lengthy interview with the Sunflower State Journal.
He talked about what led him back to Kansas, his undergraduate degree in drama, his relationship with the governor’s office and his connections to former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who has been a supporter of Kobach’s in the past.
Burrows has been a major in the Army Reserves where he’s worked as an environmental law attorney for the U.S. Army Legal Services Agency and as an assistant command judge advocate for the 209th Regional Support Group.
He also worked as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the economic crimes section in the District of Colorado.
He also was acounsel for the
Also, Burrows clerked for Judge Margaret Ryan on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
He has a bachelor’s degree in government and drama from the University of Virginia and a law degree from the University of Iowa.
Now, here’s Burrow in his own words. We left his quotes intact, although some of the interview was edited for clarity and brevity. In some cases, bio material was paraphrased.
How did you end up in Kansas?
“I had grown up here. I left to go to undergrad (at the University of Virginia), worked in Washington, D.C., moved to Iowa for law school with the plan that I was going to come back to Kansas. This is where I was from. The complication was that I started dating my wife two weeks before law school. She was from Colorado. We ended up in Colorado afterward. The girl I was dating became my wife. We moved out there where she was from and where her family lived. I’ve been practicing out there for 14 years since 2008.
“I had done a bunch of stuff, most recently litigating conservative public interest cases against the state. I think people who knew people who knew people knew the attorney general, and he was looking for staff and especially given the stuff he’d run on in his campaign wanted somebody who had handled sort of public interest cases before and was an experienced litigator. I had been at the U.S. attorney’s office before, I had been at the Social Security Administration before. I had litigated about every sort of case that a person could except maybe bankruptcy.”
Kobach “was looking for staff and was making inquiries. They called me out of the blue. They convinced me to come out for an interview. I interviewed, did my own sort of checks on what the job was going to be like and what it was like to work with Kris. Eventually, I took the position and ended up in Topeka.
“I grew up here. Half my family is still here. I have a love for a Kansas. I’m a third-generation Kansan. The opportunity to do something in Kansas to sort of maintain the rule of law and advance conservative policies was attractive.”
Why did you want to work with Kris?
“Republicans take a lot of different approaches to the attorney general’s office, and it was certainly attractive that Kris had explicitly run on the grounds that he wanted to be active rather than passive and proactive rather than reactive in his approach to the law and his approach to defending Kansas and the federal constitutions.
“For a guy who was a litigator, that’s what I wanted to do. It’s not that it’s dishonorable or anything to just sort of be the government’s general counsel, which is the approach that I think a lot of attorneys general take. That’s a long and time-tested role.
“The thing that interested me was that it wasn’t just going to be that. Kris had a vision for what he wanted to do with the office, things that he wanted to approach from the perspective of the attorney general.
“I think a lot of guys run for office, their entire goal in being attorney general is simply to be attorney general. That is not Kris Kobach. I think he has at least an outline of how he views the job and the things he wants to accomplish. That was certainly attractive.”
What’s your role in the office?
“I’m the chief deputy attorney general, which is a jack-of-all-trades in some sense. The easiest way to describe it is that I’m in charge of all the attorneys and all the litigation. My job is to make sure cases get litigated in court and make sure the massive range of things that this office does are adequately managed.
“When the attorney general described it to me, he said, ‘I need somebody who’s going to make the trains run on time,’ and that’s essentially my job with regard to all of our litigation activities.
“How in-depth my involvement is in any particular thing waxes and wanes. It’s really difficult for me to take and litigate a case myself from start to end just because the administrative and oversight duties of the job have me working 13 hour days, especially when the Legislature is in session. It’s really difficult to work a 13-hour day and then turn on a computer and write a brief.
“Obviously, there are cases where the attorney general’s policy interests have some important public policy angle to them, and I am more involved in those than I am in an average debt collection action or something like that.”
You came to Kansas from Advance Colorado.
What is Advance Colorado and what did you do there?
“It started as an organization called the Public Trust Institute, which was solely a litigation-oriented shop. They started this 501(c)(3) to get involved in state-based litigation. I was working at the U.S. attorney’s office, which I thought was my dream job. Then a guy who ended up being one of my board members at the Public Trust Institute convinced me that I needed different dreams and that I should come run the litigation shop at the Public Trust Institute.”
The Public Trust Institute later merged with Advance Colorado. He compared Advance Colorado to the Kansas Justice Institute, which is part of the free-market-oriented Kansas Policy Institute. His work there included representing a construction company that challenged Colorado’s family and medical leave program because it violated the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in the state constitution because of a premium charged to fund the program. The state Supreme Court dismissed the challenge.
“We were interested in defending the constitution. Public officers take an oath to protect and defend the constitution. It really stuck in my craw that they would say things like, ‘Well, we don’t know whether this is constitutional or not, but we’ll let the courts sort it out.’ We were interested in the rule of law. The law says what it says.
“If you want to change it, there’s a very simple way to do that, and that’s pass a new law or amend the constitution. But what you can’t do is go around and just do whatever you want and figure out the legal back-and-forth later. That’s not how our system works. It’s not how it’s designed to work.
“Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, people who take an oath and then do that, they were liars. They had no intention to follow that oath. If this was 1776, they would have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. We live in more polite times now.”
What’s your political outlook
and how’s that influenced the law you practice?
“Politically, I’m a conservative. I’m about as Libertarian friendly as a conservative can be while still still being a conservative. I’m not a Libertarian because I live in a world that actually exists and not some theoretical world that I might dream up as an ideal situation. I think Libertarianism in general is focused much on the theoretical and little on the practical.
“How that’s affected the law I practice? I mean I don’t know. I’ve got to be honest. I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to do. I jumped from job that sounded cool to job that sounded cool. Early in my career, I jumped from job that would pay the bills to job that would pay the bills without caring much about what would be cool.
“Before law school, I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and I remember being struck by how impotent politicians were but almost willfully like it was easier for them to just go on the TV and have a political issue to rail about than it was to actually do anything about it despite the fact that they were the ones with the power to do something most of the time. In going to law school, there was perhaps an element of I want to do something where I could actually see an effect from what I was doing day to day. I have certainly done that. My wife’s a planner. Not me. I didn’t have a plan of like, ‘Oh yeah, in 2023 I’m going to be the chief deputy attorney general.’
“I think that there is something to being the government’s attorney that is gratifying. I’m not really a money-motivated person. I could have gone to a firm out of law school. That was not interesting to me. I worked at a firm for like eight months. It was fine. The people were great. The work was super boring. I have found working for the government to be more gratifying to me. I don’t know that necessarily my political leanings have had strong influences on the jobs that I have taken.
“Kris Kobach is not going around hiring somebody who is not a conservative Republican as his chief deputy. And a person who is not a conservative Republican is unlikely to enjoy being Kris Kobach’s chief deputy. But that said, I think the influence has been more on jobs that I won’t take versus jobs that I do.
“I believe in providence. My dad was a minister. I’m a Christian. I really believe that in some sense, there’s a divine hand in what we do in our life and that there’s a plan. I try – and it’s not always easy – to have a more stoic approach to how that’s gone out and just understand that whatever I’m doing, that’s where I’ve providentially been led and not spend too much time worrying about, like, how does this fit with my political plan for my life.”
Did you have concerns about the attorney general’s
reputation when you decided to come here?
“I think it helped that my wife worked for Tom Tancredo for six years who was sort of a firebrand congressman from Colorado. I didn’t know Tom from Adam when I met my wife. But I got to know him. He was super nice, one of the nicest guys I ever met. Sort of my wife’s surrogate dad or grandfather in a way. He was at my wedding. An incredibly nice guy who believed some political things passionately, but was not like some sort of crazy person or any of the caricatures that had been in the media.
“I think that experience sort of inoculated me to politics is politics and the whole point of politics sometimes is to paint your opponent as unacceptable in some way. Kris has been in politics for a long time, and he’s going to be painted as unacceptable.
“That’s not to say, I came into this blindly. Nobody accepts a job without researching the job, and I spent time talking to people who had worked for Kris. Almost universally, they said he’s very easy to work for, that he’s nice and that he’s extremely smart, which is what I assumed based on his background. And it has played out that way.
“Did I have worries? Yeah, in the sense that you always have a worry when you’re starting a new job. I don’t think there was anything particularly concerning about Kris. I had known from past experience that a lot of that is just sort of the balderdash that gets tossed around in politics, and I wasn’t going to take it too seriously.”
How did you come to major in drama
at the University of Virginia?
“I think a lot of lawyers are failed actors on some level. I was a good-ish actor when I went to college. Then I got into directing, and I’m certainly a better director. I spent two years sort of on the side doing acting stuff. I was a stage manager for a summer Shakespeare thing in Nevada and helped with a children’s theater in Virginia.
“Then I decided I liked to eat and I didn’t want to sleep on my friends’ couches for the rest of my life. Unless you become a Hollywood star, you make a pittance. There were a couple of people one year ahead of me in my graduating class at UVA that did quite well for themselves. One of them was on ‘The O.C.’ for a long time and the other one was on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ They were better actors than I ever was. I didn’t have much hope.
“The whole reason I went to law school, I still thought, ‘Well, I’ll get into arts management.’ Or I’ll go to L.A. and be an agent. I took Contracts 1 and 2 and did well. I think they’re two the best grades I got in law school. But they were really boring. As an agent or entertainment lawyer, that’s kind of what you do is contracts. Luckily, I liked law school anyway so I figured it out.”
The band
“I played in a band in undergrad. I do miss performing somewhat. It was a metal band. I was a singer. I was very different in undergrad.
“When I was an undergrad, I had a mohawk. My lips were pierced twice. My ears were pierced. I looked very different.
“My politics were not substantially different than they are now. That was sort of the punk in me that made me distrust government, I guess.
“I just kind of wanted to do my own thing back then and now. There’s an intellectual element to it now that I did not have when I was younger.
What kind of relationship do you have
with the governor’s office?
“A lot of people don’t believe this when I say it, but the staff-to-staff relationships over there are really good.
“When you’ve got a governor of one party and the attorney general of another party, I think you have a choice between you can just be at loggerheads perpetually or you can say what things can we accomplish that we agree on and what things can we just say we’re going to disagree on those and we’re going to fight on those.
“They may have a different story. I think we have been able to do a good job of separating the things that we can agree on from the things we don’t agree on. They are, frankly, pretty good about talking to us about things they’re thinking about that they think we might have a concern with and trying to work through if we can or can’t agree on it.”
“Frankly, that’s good staff work. I think politicians are ill served by staff that don’t do that.
“The same voter pool that elected Laura Kelly elected Kris Kobach. I think we have a duty to Kansans to try and find a way through that (in) what at least on the surface seems a contradictory idea.”
