February 2005
Feb. 24, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 21, 2005)Judging the Supremes?
Chances are excellent–judging from results in other states–that Kansas voters at the April 5 election are going to overwhelmingly approve a proposed Kansas constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages in the state, marriages that are already illegal in Kansas and that the Kansas Supreme Court has said are illegal.
Look for a massive turnout at the polls.
But the interesting spin-off of that adventure is going to be a political decision made by the Kansas Legislature, likely this session or maybe next. The decision? Whether this constitution-amending business is so empowering for conservative Kansans that legislators decide to tee-up a constitutional amendment for the November 2006 ballot that would require the Kansas Senate to confirm gubernatorial appointees to the Kansas Supreme Court.
Now, the Supreme Court Nominating Commission, a group blending lawyers and lay people, sifts through applicants for the top court job and sends a list of three top nominees to the governor, and she (or he) decides who gets the job. Once the governor approves a nominee, he or she goes directly onto the payroll and starts work.
Governors for decades have uniformly said–and surely most of them were truthful–that they read the nominees’ resumes and quizzed them on nonspecific topics to get a feel for how they handle themselves, their demeanor, their ability to grasp concepts and be fair.
A vote to allow the State Senate to grill Supreme Court nominees is powerful stuff. Don’t look for senators to be as selective in their questioning.
The resolution proposing Senate confirmation comes at a time when the state court has overturned Kansas’ death penalty statute on a 4-3 decision for good but hard-to-simply-explain reasons. Something about "equipoise" and adding up aggravating and mitigating factors to determine whether the sentence is death or a whole lot of years. The problem has been hanging in plain view for at least five years.
The death penalty case has the state’s top prosecutors, including the attorney general, figuring that since they can’t change where they work, they’ll change the people who judge their work. It’s sort of the opposite of forum-shopping (which conservatives oppose). The venue doesn’t change, just possibly the judges.
Oh, and then there’s the most bandied-about phrase: "activist judges." That’s what drove the same-sex marriage debate... the off-chance that Kansas judges might reverse themselves on gay marriage and suddenly allow it, as Massachusetts judges did. Not that Kansas is knee-deep in "activist judges" but on the possibility that four justices (one more than a majority of the court) have activist tendencies, well, surely the Senate could sift out those who have that activist-potential look in their eyes... or at least those who might be activist on specific issues such as the death penalty, abortion, water rights or something else in the headlines that morning of the confirmation hearings.
The judicial confirmation issue also may bleed into the 2006 gubernatorial elections. After all, the only Kansas Supreme Court justice appointed by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius voted with the majority to hold the state’s capital punishment law unconstitutional. Is that a trend-of-one that legislators may exploit? Any chance that the appointment of a justice who concurred that the state’s death penalty statute is unconstitutional becomes an issue for a Republican candidate for governor in 2006? You’d have to rate chances as good to excellent, wouldn’t you?
So, how do you handicap this effort to put Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees on the ballot? First is probably whether the same-sex marriage proposition passes in April, by what percentage of the vote, and by the size of the turnout compared to other interesting-but-not-riveting spring elections for city officials and school board members.
Watch the run-up to the same-sex marriage vote.
Is the campaign about saving marriage, which seems to be a fairly durable institution anyway, or is it to protect Kansans from activist judges who might tilt the most commonly held view of marriage?
And after the vote, would a defeat of the same-sex marriage ban be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the Supreme Court? Would passage be a vote of no confidence?
We’ll have to wait and see...
Feb. 17, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 14, 2005)It's all political...
It is becoming clearer by the talk in the halls of the Statehouse that the Kansas Supreme Court is not going to get an all-at-once, we-fixed-it answer to the school finance lawsuit that the court held requires the state to clean up its system of handing money to local school districts with which to educate Kansas’ children.
The court wanted a studied, rational basis for financing schools, and that is very likely beyond the Legislature’s power this session–and surely by the April 12 deadline by which the court wants a plan passed by the Legislature.
So we appear to be in a waiting game, a game of negotiation with the court which spoke once, and not very clearly, with its Jan. 3 missive to the Legislature.
The only thing known for sure is that the state is undoubtedly going to have to allocate more of its money to public education. Another thing known for sure is that the state doesn’t know precisely what it costs to educate each Kansas pupil, but somehow, the vast majority of them seem to be getting a workable or passable education.
So what’s likely to happen in the next few weeks? What will satisfy the court, what will buy time for the Legislature to continue to wrestle with school finance?
A few things are fairly obvious so far. The court specifically mentioned three areas of special need: special education for pupils with learning disabilities, assistance for children who aren’t fluent in English and help for those who are categorized as "at-risk" for poor performance due to poverty.
Fixing those obvious problems is relatively simple, and chances are good that the Legislature can shuffle existing revenues to meet those immediate goals.
For example, just $11 million will double the amount spent on English as Second Language programs; another $52 million would double the at-risk pupil expenditures by the state. The complicated area of special education could see a 10 percent increase in funding for about $42 million.
Those are sizable increases, ones that many legislators believe would be a strong showing of good faith that would deter the Supreme Court from doing anything drastic to public schools. And, there’s just a chance if the crops are good, the economy continues to strengthen and the remainder of the state’s budget is field-stripped of non-mandatory spending, those increases might be accomplished without raising taxes.
The tricky part, though, is this concept of politics. The court mentioned that school funding formula changes in the past decade have been the result of "former spending levels and political compromise"–as if that’s a bad thing.
That’s going to be the problem for the Legislature. Sure, it’ll put together some sort of high-minded commission to study just what it costs to educate a Kansas school pupil. Depending on who are on the commission and what they consider is education and what is frills, the commission’s decision is going to be made, and it will be political.
That’s what they do here in the Statehouse... politics.
Without political compromise, no school funding bills get passed into law so that someone can actually write checks to school districts. Without political compromise, at least 21 senators and 63 House members won’t vote for a school finance bill. And chances are excellent that unless a majority of school districts in 21 Senate districts and 63 House districts see more money, or at least no less money however it is distributed, there won’t be "political compromise" to fund any Kansas schoolchild’s education.
The first round of new spending on special programs is the easy part. It’s the assessment of what it costs to educate everyone else, and the court’s determination that it isn’t based on "former spending levels and political compromise," that may be the tough standard to meet.
Gauging whether that new decision on costs is political is going to be up to the court... where every justice was appointed by a politician..
Feb. 10, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 7, 2005)Another health plan...
Yes, everyone is concerned about health care and health-care costs and rising insurance premiums and all of that stuff.
The governor has a health-care plan, the Senate Republicans have a health-care plan, or at least one reasonable idea and the rest of the stuff that has become the cut-and-paste lower-on-the-page bullet points for discussing health care.
But there’s a Democrat in Johnson County, Mike Boatright, whose ears are probably still ringing from the thrashing that Sen. Kay O’Connor, R-Olathe, gave him in the 9th Senate District general election, who had not a bad idea that nobody seems to be picking up on.
First, take a look at the forest of health care in Kansas. Notice that virtually everyone in Kansas who needs health care–acute health care, for serious health problems–gets that care.
It’s easy if you’re well-insured, you just present yourself at the doctor’s office with your health insurance card and get treatment. You pay your co-pay or deductible, the insurance company pays the rest, and you’re out the door.
If you’re poor, well there is Medicaid, the state/federal health care coverage that isn’t insurance, but really is just a bill-paying program.
If you’re what folks keep calling "working poor" or basically supporting yourself and your family but can’t afford health insurance, well, you’re pretty well stuck.
Something to keep in mind, though, that the insured and the poor get health care. It’s not pretty being poor and filling out forms and proving over and over again that your income is less than the federal poverty level in Kansas. That’s probably one reason that people tend to resist getting early treatment for illnesses that in many cases are cheaper to treat in early stages than when they become debilitating.
And the working poor... well, it’s probably some of the same runaround, and likely among the reasons that working poor people, along with the poor-poor, show up at emergency rooms for treatment of illnesses that could have been treated more effectively and more cheaply earlier.
Remember Boatright, who got 40% of the 9th District vote to O’Connor’s 60%?
Well, Boatright wanted the state to establish in every county low-cost (not free), walk-in clinics where the working poor and the poor-poor could go to get early treatment, low-hassle, low-cost preemptive treatment of maladies that if unattended eventually send people to emergency rooms.
The concept: because nearly everyone is getting health care anyway, why not deliver it at the lowest-cost venue available? We’ve all heard the mantra that emergency room care is the most expensive care, and it probably is, but for the wrong reasons. No-guilt, no-hassle clinics could divert patients from emergency rooms. Chances are good that nobody knows the math on cost-savings from early, pre-emergency treatment vs. full-bore emergency treatment, but it seems logical–and did to Boatright–that you could probably buy pre-emergency treatment for more of the walking ill than emergency room treatment for those who have let their conditions worsen.
The key to remember here is that someone, either taxpayers or health insurance premium payers, are financing the cost of health care for nearly everyone, anyway. That high-cost charitable care for the working poor gets paid for. So does the care for Medicaid clients. And some of that payment is through insurance premiums which pay a little more for services for the insured to provide enough cash flow for hospitals to provide care to the poor.
Maybe we’re spending enough money on health care–just that the wrong people are paying it to the wrong people for the wrong level of care. It’s an efficiency thing in Boatright’s view.
Could a guy that O’Connor thumped actually have a good idea?
Possibly..
Feb. 3, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Jan. 31, 2005)GOP's new tune
By this time, if you care about this sort of thing, you’ve read the headlines and maybe the stories about the Republican Kansas Day weekend and the new leadership of the party and the offhand comments that the Republican Party has "gone conservative" or "gone hard right."
If that’s all the further you read, you’ve missed a key element to the reorganization of the state’s largest political party, one that controls all the statewide offices except the one Democrat Gov. Kathleen Sebelius sits in, and three of four congressional districts, both U.S. Senate seats and 83 members of the Kansas House and 30 of the State Senate.
The Republican Party of Kansas, judging by the majority of Republican office holders, already is conservative, already is "hard right."
The real story coming out of the change of leadership elected Saturday in Topeka is that the Kansas Republican Party, according to those new leaders, is going to focus its efforts on one thing: electing to office whomever emerges from Republican primary elections in the next two years.
That means that the state party is not going to meddle in primary elections. The state party is not going to favor one candidate over another in what has become in many areas of the state "the election." How can the primary election, held in the heat of August, become "the election" which we all know is in November? It’s a matter of voter registration. In a handful of districts in the state, there are more registered Republicans who presumably vote a Republican ticket, than Democrats, Reform, Libertarian or unaffiliated voters combined.
In the Republican-tilted districts, the primary election winner would have to really mess up in a really public way to lose the election. Or... be way too conservative for the district, which happens now and again.
So for many of the state’s elective offices, the primary election is actually the big one. And with the election of former Kansas State Treasurer and House Speaker Tim Shallenburger of Baxter Springs as party chair Saturday, the state party apparatus is going to wait until after primary elections and then throw all its efforts toward electing the Republican nominee.
That’s the real story from Kansas Day Weekend.
If that all sounds logical, like what you’d expect the state party to do, well, you’re right, except that it hasn’t in the past.
Party officials have used their considerable influence and ability to encourage their friends to contribute to certain candidates, guaranteed adequate campaign funds for candidates they wanted to run against more socially conservative candidates, and tried to find ways to discourage conservatives.
Last summer, moderate leaders of the party even tried to allow registered voters who weren’t Republicans to vote in GOP primaries. It sounded pretty big-tentish, inclusive, expansive, and whatever other glowing terms could be thought up on the spur of the moment, but the clear intent was to draw enough unaffiliated voters into the primary elections to leaven the generally heavily conservative GOP turnout and possibly derail a social conservative or two in the effort.
So, what’s the big change in the GOP with its new leadership? Apparently, that to the best of its ability, it is going to sit out the primary elections, not use its influence or money or its ability to occasionally generate free news coverage, to favor one primary candidate over another.
So, what’s the big change? It’s going to be that the primary elections are where Republicans are either going to win or lose elections.
Remember, Democrats win elections in districts where Republicans elect at the primary candidates who are too conservative for many Republican general election voters, and all Democrats. It’ll be up to Republicans now to use their primaries to elect candidates who can win every Republican vote at the general.
That’s the new ball game.