January 2005

Jan. 27, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Jan. 24, 2005)

Next question, please...

The Kansas Legislature is into its third week and still the most popular question for Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is, "where’s your school finance plan?"

Maybe some of the press is missing the dynamics of this issue or failing to couple it with the upcoming 2006 election and the practical politics attendant thereto, but by this time, the governor’s probably getting a little tired of the question and wondering how much longer the press is going to ask it.

Let’s take a step back from the daily grind and production of news and look at school finance from a purely political viewpoint. OK, we hear the groans already about "too much politics" and "this issue is too important for politics." Those are logical but unsophisticated complaints. They omit the key issue that if you’re not in office, you aren’t making public policy, steering the state, binding wounds and fixing problems. You’re just a civilian like most of us.

The politics started last year, when a Shawnee County District Court judge ruled the state school finance system was messed up and should be fixed. It was a wide-ranging decision and nobody knew exactly where to start, so Sebelius proposed a $300 million sales, income and property tax increase to put new money into programs for children with disabilities. She leapt off the bench and into the game.

Did she know that a Legislature which was about to stand for reelection—both the House and Senate—wouldn’t be eager to raise taxes in an election year? Let’s hope so; everyone else in Kansas did. But, she offered the plan, got beat up for it by Republicans, and then watched as Republicans beat up two of their own for offering a similar school finance plan.

She can very logically and truthfully say she tried to fix school finance. It didn’t work, and she’ll not mention aloud that there was virtually no chance it would work, but she took her licks.

Now, we know that the Kansas Supreme Court says it’s the Legislature’s job–not the governor’s–to fix school finance. Would her plan of last session have averted the decision? Who knows? And as long as nobody knows, she may have been the truth and the light and the way... or not. Again, nobody knows.

Clearly, it’s up to the newly elected legislature which touted the no-new-tax stuff, the "grind savings out of waste" stuff, the "local control" stuff, to ante up. None of that, of course, means that the Legislature still doesn’t want the governor to float out a plan, stump for it, and take the criticism of the state’s voter pool for trying to raise taxes. Republican legislators would love her to enter the fray with a big tax proposal... and so far, she’s been smart enough to stay out of it, talk of her concern for the children, and remind them she tried last year to fix this.

Convenient for reporters, though, is that they just have to ask House Speaker and potential GOP gubernatorial nomination candidate Doug Mays, R-Topeka, if he wants the governor to offer a school finance proposal. Mays goes into a three- to four-paragraph spiel about how the governor should show leadership, get out in front, get a plan on the table.

After that spiel usually come some quotes about at least a bipartisan plan. One where legislative Democrats (who voted last year on the losing side of Sebelius’ school finance bill and were drubbed for it) come up with a school bill with their own DNA, and by implication, Sebelius’ DNA on it that Republicans can hammer.

Mays even has a quote somewhere in reporters’ notebooks or on their tapes about the schoolchildren of the state being better-served by a bipartisan school finance plan, as if that makes any difference, or even sense, at all.

Did the governor have the cunning to offer a solution last year that she knew couldn’t be approved? Did she intend to leave the more-conservative-this-year, more Republican-this-year Legislature to shed its own blood? Did she intend to corner Mays into sullying his political future with either no school plan or one that includes tax increases or which shrinks important social programs?

We’re thinking... probably.

And that’s why some observers aren’t asking the governor for her school finance plan anymore.

Jan. 20, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Jan. 17, 2005)

$40,000 bill & an upcoming prize fight...

Somewhere in a desk drawer in the Kansas Republican Party headquarters in Topeka is a bill for legal services for the last-chance effort by moderates in the party to dilute the power of the party’s social conservatives at the primary election in August 2004.

That bill, for about $40,000, didn’t show up on any campaign finance reports that the party is required by law to file with the Secretary of State’s office. This presents some problems of its own, but it is the most visible indication that the biggest political organization in Kansas is headed for a bitter fight next week.

Next week, remember, is the annual Republican Kansas Day convention/love-fest/celebration... and probably prize fight.

The legal bill was run up when Republican State Chairman Dennis Jones of Lakin took up Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh on his offer to both Republican and Democratic state party chairmen to allow registered-but-unaffiliated-with-any-political-party voters to cast ballots in each party’s primary election. Democratic State Chairman Larry Gates, Overland Park, checked with his party’s executive committee and fired back, sure, let them vote in our primary.

Jones didn’t check with many folks, but replied similarly. For Gates, whose party had only a handful of primary elections, letting more people vote was just a way to broaden the party, at least for the time it took those registered voters to ask for a Democratic ballot, vote it, and make their way back to their cars.

For Republicans, though, the issue was whether unaffiliated voters who generally would be less socially conservative than the usual GOP primary election voters might tip a primary election or two to produce a more moderate candidate to field in the November general election.

Fourth Congressional District Chairman Susan Estes of Wichita cried foul. She sued Jones on behalf of Republicans who believe that the important business of settling on the party’s general election candidates should be a task left to members of the GOP, and members only.

You know the result. A Shawnee County District Court judge agreed with Estes and prohibited voting place officials from handing a GOP ballot to anyone not a member or not willing to declare a Republican Party affiliation at the voting place.

Now, a roughly $40,000 legal bill for the Republican Party office of the red state of Kansas doesn’t sound like a big deal. One imagines that GOP members would merely flash some platinum cards and divvy up the check like you’d do at a dinner party with friends at a restaurant on top of the city’s tallest bank building.

But no.

The GOP is literally broke. During the same Oct. 25-Dec. 31 period when the Kansas Democratic Party took in $226,000 which was spent mostly on Democratic candidates for the Kansas Legislature in the days leading up to the November general election, Republicans took in just about $20,000 of which it spent several thousand to assist candidates.

Both parties are now low on funds, part of the normal post-election cycle that leads up to their state conventions when they make money and generate new enthusiasm for contributions. They’re just keeping the doors open and rent paid until that influx of money.

But that $40,000 GOP debt presents a problem not only for a party that is nearly broke, but which is about to be taken over by partisans–likely unsuccessful former GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Shallenburger of Baxter Springs and Susan Estes, who, recall, won that lawsuit that generated the $40,000 bill for the state party.

There’ll be some problem, probably, in the party not reporting the bill for legal services in its official filing Jan. 10 with the Secretary of State. But the real problem might be that the party leadership is about to be taken over by people who really don’t have much interest in settling up with the lawyer that they beat.

And when the new guys take over the GOP headquarters, they may just dump out the desk drawers–bills and all—and start fresh.

Jan. 13, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Jan. 10, 2005)

Your stuffy nose & the war on drugs

If they have their way, leaders of the Legislature would require Kansans with stuffy noses who use some nonprescription tablets for battling congestion to provide proof of identity and sign their names on a list at their drugstore or pharmacy or grocery store or convenience store in order to buy a bottle of decongestant tablets.

You could buy one bottle of the tablets a month and if you want or need more for some reason, a doctor has to give you a note to show to the clerk at the store in order for him or her to reach behind the counter for the tablets, probably from the same inaccessible rack where they keep cigarettes.

This is a new battlefield in the war on drugs–the checkout counter at your local drugstore or grocery.

The idea, of course, is to prevent illegal drug-makers from buying dozens of bottles of those decongestant tablets, grinding them up, cooking them with some other ingredients and turning them into methamphetamines–dangerous, addictive illegal drugs.

Nobody wants those drug-makers to have access to the ingredients for dangerous illegal drugs, of course. We read about police raiding drug manufacturers’ homes, apartments, cars and outbuildings, and seizing their equipment and, with a little luck, sending them to prison. And, predictably, it’s hard to get emotional about anyone who manufactures illegal drugs going to prison for a time. You don’t see yellow ribbons around the old oak tree for people getting out of prison for conviction of manufacturing meth.

But... are most Kansans– the ones who don’t manufacture illegal drugs, the ones who merely have a stuffy head because of a cold or allergy–willing to produce proof of identity and sign their names on a list that who-knows-whom is going to be reading, just to buy a product that used according to label directions, the United States Food and Drug Administration says is apparently safe and effective?

Now about that list you’re signing... Presumably police will periodically gather up the lists and read them. Maybe they’ll enter the names into a computer and somehow figure out that you’ve bought two bottles of tablets within a month. Maybe one for the bathroom medicine closet and another for the cabinet near the kitchen sink where people tend to take their vitamins. Are you in trouble? How much trouble? What if 50 people named Jones bought tablets at the same store? Or at 30 stores in the same town? Are 20 of them in trouble?

That’s a tricky area of personal privacy, and it’s just an obscure corner of the bigger issue, but it’s worth thinking about. And it’s not going to be popular for some legislators to say, well, this isn’t the best way to go on fighting the war on methamphetamines. Most probably won’t say that.

People sign for their nonprescription decongestant tablets in Oklahoma, and they’ll probably soon be signing for them in other states, all to prevent drug-makers from easily getting enough tablets to cook up a batch of methamphetamines. Cops in Oklahoma say since their law passed, fewer drug laboratories are being found. They figure that the sign-ups are the reason. Kansas legislators say they don’t want a bunch of Oklahoma drug-makers moving to Kansas to be near a supply of raw materials. We don’t want drug-makers moving here, either.

But... this is probably the closest that most Kansans are going to come to "fighting the war on drugs." An inconvenience. A small invasion of your personal privacy. Winding up on a list somewhere that someone is going to read or input into a computer database that someone, somewhere is going to read and sift through. Do you need to be on more official government computer databases? Do you want to be? Does someone erase the information after flu season? Allergy season?

This isn’t an earth-shaking deal for most Kansans... but then again, the Legislature is in session, so we’ll see...

Jan. 6, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Jan. 3, 2005)

Suspense mounts...

A suspense-thriller is in the offing for the 2005 Legislature–one that will happen quickly or not at all, but nevertheless is worth speculating about.

It is the possibility that a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages in Kansas–an area already covered by state law but which some conservatives want chiseled into the constitution in a belt-and-suspenders measure–could highball through the Legislature in its opening weeks. Enough speed, and it could wind up on the April 5 election ballot at which city and school district officials are elected.

Why is that a thriller? Because it would send to the polls that day a tidal wave of voters whose primary interest is the gay marriage amendment–they’ll be conservative voters and they’ll determine who runs the cities and who runs the schools across the state.

All that talk you hear about assigning something as important as another prohibition of gay marriage in Kansas to an election where there is a big turnout such as a presidential election (missed that one) or an election where the governor is going to be chosen, is basically, well, let’s say, bunk.

Put the gay marriage issue on a ballot, and voters will come... Especially those who oppose gay marriage and are probably more conservative philosophically than your run-of-the-mill voters at the generally poorly attended April elections. Look for maybe a million voters in an April election with gay marriage on the ballot. (About 1.2 million Kansans voted in the presidential election in November.)

Here’s the suspense: It would take fast action to get a resolution to ban gay marriage through the Legislature by Feb. 11, the date that the Secretary of State’s office says it needs the resolution to get it on the ballots so even Kansas soldiers in Iraq can vote on it. A little later if the Legislature is willing to let the soldiers slide...

Filing deadline for school board elections is noon Jan. 25, just 15 days after the Legislature convenes on Jan. 10. If anti-gay marriage fans want to get slates up for school boards, they’ll have to have faith in the Legislature to act quickly...these are people of faith, though. There are legislators who want the gay marriage proposal voted on by Kansans quickly to get it in place.

But there are those sensing the conservative wave that a gay marriage referendum will bring out and would rather it break on the November 2006 election in hopes of defeating Gov. Kathleen Sebelius for a second term.

Look for foot-dragging by the Legislature to be the topic of a lot of sermons in the next few weeks. The most-quoted-by-newspapers supporters of a gay marriage ban want it voted on quickly–in April.

What happens if conservatives in nonpartisan school board elections catch the wave of anti-gay marriage voters? Well, we’re probably looking at abstinence-only sex education in many of the state’s 300-plus school districts, probably a little more creationism vs. evolution teaching and likely some new textbooks with a little different world view than we’ve been seeing.

The Kansas Legislature can be a tediously slow institution, given to long, drawn-out hearings, delays while legislators get out one last press release, attend one more eggs-and–issues breakfast to preen themselves as popular leaders. Or it can strike as quickly as a snake.

The whole suspense-thriller just goes away, of course, if the Legislature misses the Feb. 11 deadline. Some people will be happy, some mad. Some conservatives who file for school board seats may win without the additional turnout that a gay marriage amendment would cause and some may lose without it, and that’s just nonpartisan politics at work.