April 2004
April 29, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 26, 2004)A fight over abortion
Deep among the numbers and the provisos and "notwithstanding" of what is the Legislature’s last spending bill of the session, there’s a little right-to-life politics playing out well outside the view of most Kansans who follow the issue.
The issue is virtually the same issue that is key to the debate over whether abortion should be legal in Kansas (under most circumstances, it is). It’s when does life, or at least health-insurable life, begin.
The venue this time is a section of the bill dealing with the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, the state’s welfare agency, and its insurance program for children whose parents can’t afford health insurance. That’s a good program; nobody wants to see a child not have health insurance.
Well, under the House version that will be debated this week, the child can be covered for health problems from conception. That means a bunch of cells that probably will grow up to be a Kansan.
The Senate is hesitant about designating a not-yet-born fetus as a person with insurance coverage. The concept there is that if you take care of the mother, you’re taking care of the fetus. The House version, of course, sees two people eligible for health insurance coverage, the mother and the not-yet-born life she is carrying.
This isn’t the big abortion debate that most of us expect when the issue pops up. It’s a niche issue, but one that feminists don’t like because it essentially disregards the interests or choices that a pregnant woman may make. Pro-choice people generally believe that if you load up a fetus with rights and insurance coverage and such, that at some point, the fetus becomes essentially a person, which means that at some time, there will be enough rights held by the fetus that mothers won’t have a choice about whether to deliver the baby or to abort it for any reason.
It’s a way to move the debate over abortion to a relatively remote location, well downstream from the real issue of abortion but still with some likely legal and political movement on the issue.
The Senate panel considering the issue is trying to think up language that would provide the heath coverage for the mother by thinking up situations (say, the likelihood of a low birth weight baby that might benefit from some medical procedure) in a way that pulls the pregnant woman into the discussion instead of making her just a bystander, like the next person in line for care...
By covering health problems, or even doing preventative care for a fetus, the House committee has essentially divided the pregnant woman into two separate clients. And there is the real possibility that a decision made by a pregnant woman will have an effect on the fetus, which means that at some point it may be possible, or at least legally feasible, for opponents of abortion to find a health care reason to challenge a pregnant woman’s decisions. Whether those decisions are to drink, to smoke, eat a lot of carbohydrates, to not exercise, or to have an abortion, proponents of the "from conception" health coverage probably have some potential to veto those decisions in the interest of the health of the fetus.
See how complicated this all gets when the issue is really just making sure that a pregnant woman and her unborn child have health insurance in case of illness?
Legislatively, this issue plays out likely in a conference committee, where three members of the House and three from the Senate meet probably next weekend to hammer out differences in the omnibus appropriations bill that each chamber has passed. They’ll be trying to agree on a single bill, with a bunch of other issues in it, so that the House and Senate can pass the bill with identical language–thereby creating the law of the state.
It’s a sidelight, not the big business at hand, but another fight over abortion.
April 22, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 19, 2004)A simple problem?
Every now and again in the Legislature a problem pops up that is so simple to solve that we regular people wind up watching this august body of 165 duly elected state senators and state representatives and wonder how many of them need help to get their shoes tied each morning.
Well, such a problem has popped up, the answer is simple, but the Legislature keeps getting sidetracked about solving it.
The best part of this problem is that it’s not something that matters to most of us Kansas citizens, just legislators. So if they don’t solve it, well, we’re not really going to care, but they will.
The problem is a Kansas Supreme Court decision of Dec. 12 that very simply states that candidates for public office should tell people whom they ask for campaign contributions just what office they intend to seek.
It’s only a little more complicated than that. Really. The Supreme Court decision grew out of a case involving a state representative who took his legislative campaign warchest and wanted to use it for the race for mayor of Wichita. The court held essentially that he couldn’t do that. The court said he should have returned the money to the folks who supported his legislative campaigns and asked them whether they wanted to re-give it to him for his race for mayor.
Actually, that’s probably not a bad suggestion. Folks who contribute money to a campaign ought to know what office its recipient is going to run for just in care they don’t have any interest in who, for example, becomes mayor of Wichita.
Well, the court decision was read by the Legislature, and the Senate put together a bill that would allow candidates to move contributions from one office to another without a lot of mailing checks back to people. Right or wrong, it was a solution.
So the Senate passes the bill and the House adds some amendments to it that deal essentially with whether lobbyists should have to report the names of legislators they buy meals for... if the meal costs less than $25. Controversy erupts when the bill is returned to the Senate, and by now, negotiators from both chambers have settled on no lobbyist having to report individual meals bought for individual legislators if the meal costs less than $15. Oh, and there’s some keeping of receipts involved that lobbyists have to do now anyway, but which has ballooned into some major fracas, that doesn’t seem to involve the general public.
And so now the House and Senate are scuffling over lobbyist paperwork and the price of meals that shouldn’t be reported and which nobody pays much attention to anyway except for rubes who figure that a $15 meal puts a legislator permanently in the debt of a lobbyist. Legislators know that doesn’t happen, but even though they know that, they hate to see unreported $15 meals show up on the public record anywhere.
So where are we? Remember that Supreme Court decision that essentially says, if you are a representative and want to use money from people who wanted you to be elected to the House of Representatives, that you can’t use that money to run for the Senate? Well, that is the dog that the tail is now wagging.
The meal money is interesting and sort of insider stuff, but the real issue here is campaign money, or at least that was the issue.
What was very simple became very complicated, and the problem there is that if passing a simple law that would help legislators run for higher office gets tangled up in the price of meals, what are the chances that the Legislature can solve a real problem that matters to the rest of us who aren’t in the Legislature?
Having our doubts? Keep reading about all these bills being passed and signed into law and wonder whether they traveled the same complicated trail? Make you wonder how anything ever gets passed by the Legislature?
Actually, maybe it’s a good thing that all the problems the Legislature faces each year aren’t simple.
April 15, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 12, 2004)Safeguarding Kansas' economy
In the tumult over budget, taxes, school finance, even concealed-carry of weapons and gay marriage, a bill made its way to the governor’s desk that is going to have a major impact on the state’s economy.
If you missed it, don’t be upset, there wasn’t much written about it and if you’re not up before sunrise to hear the farm radio reports, you probably never noticed the phrase "animal identification."
But in terms of safeguarding the state’s economy–especially its rural economy–and the health of beef eaters and Kansas’ big stake in international agricultural trade, animal identification is a big deal.
What the Legislature did is empower the Kansas livestock commissioner–that’s George Teagarden–to get the state ready to start identifying beef cattle. It’s technical, it’s going to be complicated and it’s going to be unpopular with some cattle raisers. But for large-scale feeders and packing plants where cattle walk in one end and come out as steaks and hamburger at the other, identifying cattle is going to become important to the industry and to beefeaters here and abroad.
It is important because for foreign countries, the United States is all just one big market for cattle. It’s as if cattle in Washington, in Texas and Kansas and other states were all munching away at one big trough.
If mad cow disease is found in a cow in Washington state, as it was just before last Christmas, foreign buyers just stop buying cattle from the United States. All the United States...
Nobody wants to chance eating a steak from a cow that was standing beside the cow that came down with mad cow disease. Most of us don’t even like to paw through the beef case at the grocery store alongside someone who is sneezing.
The problem is that cattle move. They don’t walk from state to state much, but one farmer raises cows that have calves, those calves are sold to other farmers who bring them to a certain weight when they are sold to ranchers who feed them some more, maybe pasture them, then send them to feedlots to be topped off in weight before they are sold to packing houses for slaughter. They move around a lot, they don’t have names, and you can’t tell–once they are in a pen of 5,000 cattle in a feedlot–where they’ve been.
Identifying the cattle individually and being able to track their movements allow animal health officials to figure out, for example, in a mad cow situation whether the cattle in a feedlot in Kansas have ever been within a state or two of sick cattle. That identification helps track the sick cattle so others which may have eaten the same contaminated feed can be identified and destroyed and the cattle which have been far away can be confidently identified as safe to buy and safe to eat.
Kansas will start by identifying premises where cattle congregate, feedlots, packing plants and such, and eventually will be helping the United States Department of Agriculture nationally to put little radio gizmos that identify the cattle to computerized gizmo-readers on the ears of cattle soon after birth. Eventually–and fast is better than slow here because you never know when the next mad cow is going to be discovered–food safety officials will be able to identify cattle that have been to the same places the mad mow has been and very importantly those that have not.
That essentially creates two herds of cattle in the United States: those which are safe to export and process and eat and those that are suspect. No reason that foreign buyers should fear the first and no reason that foreign buyers should even consider buying the second. It’s that simple.
There are cattlemen who don’t like the system, don’t want to go to the expense of buying those eartags and getting their cattle identified. But unless all cattle are tagged and identified and monitored as they move from farm to farm or feedlot or packing plant, the whole system doesn’t work.
Don’t want to identify your cattle? Then no feedlot or packing plant is going to buy them. They become, well, pets, we guess.
April 8, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 5, 2004)It's an election year...
The most high-pressure weeks of the 2004 Kansas legislative session are, this year, likely to be the weeks that lawmakers are not in Topeka, but at home living among their friends and families until returning for the veto session of the Legislature April 28.
It’s because:
• There isn’t a good plan yet for financing elementary and secondary schools;
• It’s an election year for all members of the Legislature;
• There’s a canny district court judge who just may issue later this month his solution for the state’s school finance formula he has determined to be unconstitutional;
• There isn’t much money in the budget, and;
• Oh, did we mention that it’s an election year for all members of the Legislature?
If ever there was a tornado heading toward the Statehouse, it’s the school finance issue, more powerful this year than in a decade. Legislators are out amongst the people who have sharply divided themselves on what is increasingly becoming known as either the "school finance bill" or the "tax bill."
Legislators probably can get a hint of the crowd they’re talking to, or even the people they bump into at the grocery store, by how constituents phrase their questions. People who talk "school finance" probably are interested in programs for schoolchildren and people who talk "tax bill," well, they are looking at the tax side of the equation.
And, not surprisingly, the "school finance" folks aren’t universally big fans of higher taxes, and the "tax bill" people aren’t totally oblivious to the needs of children who require some special help and additional expenditures to graduate and take their places in the Kansas work force and community life.
That’s the landscape for legislators who are on break now.
It’s also a little different when legislators are outside of the Statehouse, amongst their constituents. Inside the Statehouse, they have their fellow legislators, the lobbyists, the state agency people who hang around wanting to talk policy on issues ranging from annexation to radio eartags for cattle to speed limits on highways. They tend to find friends and stick with them.
At home, it’s a different ball game. And at home in an election year, it’s about taxes. Surprisingly, even the "tax bill" types, if you engage them, will put up with taxes if they see some immediate result of higher taxes... say a highway project or a new building or virtually anything that they like that they can point to and say they helped finance.
It’s the "off in the future" benefits that get a little shaky... like the possibility that children in school now will come out smart enough to earn enough money to keep their homes and yards up nicely and have nice families and generally blend in well with everyone else.
Chances are good that sometime during the break, Shawnee County District Court Judge Terry Bullock is going to release his order on how to fix the school finance formula. It’s not going to be cheap, you can count on that. That means tax increases, almost certainly. But Bullock is a clever judge and he writes well which means that even while legislators are puzzling over his remedy–what he wants the Legislature to do, and do now–they are still likely to be nudged in his direction.
Count on Bullock coming up with remedies that sound like things that the Legislature wishes it was doing now and would probably like to do more of if there was spare cash stashed around the state. The "school finance" crowd is eager for the decision because even though it will be appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, it’ll still be a "to do" list that sounds reasonable. The "tax bill" crowd is likely to agree with much of what Bullock orders, but they’ll come from a different, and reasonable direction, by asking if the state is spending billions on education, why isn’t that money deployed properly to do what Bullock may believe the state should be doing?
Oh, and the governor is going to be touring the state, touting her school finance plan that includes tax increases.
And, did we mention that all members of the Legislature are up for election this year?
April 1, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 29, 2004)A question from KAC
Something interesting is about to happen–or then again, may not–in the world of state government.
For years, the state has tossed around tax breaks and credits and such in an attempt to get businesses to either come to Kansas and hire Kansans as their employees, or expand in Kansas and, again, hire Kansans as their employees.
But rarely does anyone find out whether those tax breaks worked. Or even how much they amounted to in the Legislature’s good-faith attempt to assist business and bolster the state’s economy.
That’s probably something that the state ought to know, probably does, but isn’t telling.
So Kansas Action for Children, a group that for years has lobbied for more and better programs for the state’s children who will grow up to take those Kansas jobs, started wondering just how much the state is spending on tax breaks and credits and who or what is actually paying taxes in Kansas.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
Besides learning how much the state is spending on tax credits and rebates and such, there is a chance that the state may find out whether it is a better bargain to toss around tax credits or to spend money on children’s programs.
Remember, tax credits and deductions are essentially spending. It’s one thing for the state to write a business a check, but it is not a lot different for the state to allow a business or industry to merely pay less in taxes in order to encourage it to do something.
Oddly, the tax breaks and their cost to the state isn’t something that the Legislature usually considers as spending. But it surely is.
Kansas Action for Children isn’t making the link directly, but is raising the question about whether it is better to encourage business to come here or to bring a up a crop of Kansas children who are likely to be the sort of workers that businesses are going to want for their jobs.
It’s almost an even choice: spend money to bring business here or spend money to create a workforce that business will seek out on its own, knowing that it will do better in a state with a workforce that is productive and therefore profitable.
Nothing’s passed yet on the concept of looking at what the state is spending on tax breaks for business, and there’s a chance the Legislature will go home at the end of this session without having taken that closer look at what it is buying with its tax policy.
But it is a start, and a handful of legislators are interested in the concept.
It might turn out that the tax breaks are an excellent idea. They may generate business and jobs and if they do, that’s exactly what the state is paying your tax money to do... create a place where your children and grandchildren can work close to home. Wouldn’t that be great?
Or it might turn out that for the money that the state is spending in tax breaks, it could produce a generation of workers that are so skillful, so dedicated, so smart, that businesses will pay full freight just to be here where they can hire them.
Or there may be some combination of tax breaks and increased spending on children’s well-being (which also means their parents are likely to be less distracted) that produces the optimal benefit of more jobs and more workers who are productive.
Nobody at the Statehouse is expecting a great deal of activity on the issue this session, but next session, maybe the one after, we’re going to find out what tax breaks cost and whether they are a bargain for the state or merely a free meal for business.
Best guess is that some breaks are indeed money well not-collected and some are not and need to be reeled back in or at least refocused. But the option is there for tax breaks that aren’t really working to be spent at the other end of the issue: creating a better, more stable workforce that will be a draw to Kansas all of itself...