July 2003
July 31, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 28, 2003)Money's not the issue
Kansans can start getting ready now for what is going to be an insulting debate about something that is either right or wrong, that the state ought to do or ought not to do.
The issue is, of course, capital punishment–now on the books a decade–for criminals who commit certain murders under certain circumstances.
In one of the most disappointing of decisions by the folks who run the Legislature, it has been determined that a summer study committee is going to hear testimony about whether the state can afford the death penalty.
Well, the answer is, of course the state can afford the death penalty. This is a state with billions of dollars coming in and while schoolteachers and state employees and college professors and local government leaders all say they don’t get enough money from the state, Kansas has plenty of money to prosecute, convict and then execute people who kill Kansans.
If it’s important to Kansans, you do it.
The concept, which arose from the Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Steve Morris, R-Hugoton, is that the state is in tough financial times and it just can’t afford the costly trials, preparation, the research, the expert witnesses, the bifurcated trial and the endless appeals and finally the actually killing of someone.
We’ll have to take for granted that because Morris is chairman of the committee that keeps trying to stretch the state’s limited resources across everything that the state should be doing for its citizens, he has just caught the wrong bus on this one. All those same interest groups (see above) are going to gripe anyway, and there is this unreasonable and almost childish concept that if the state saves money, that some specific agency or person (see above, again) is going to get it.
But first, the division of Legislative Post Audit will put a pencil to the death penalty, figure out what it might cost Kansas if any of the folks now apparently teed up for the death penalty actually are put to death. Post Audit is great at that stuff and can compare whether Kansas costs are going to be higher or lower than surrounding states and all the stuff that people who spend our tax money want to know. The problem is, it doesn’t matter what the death penalty costs, and people who ask what it costs or "can we afford it" or questions in that general vein sound a little less impressive every time they ask the question.
So we’ll get the dollars and cents about the death penalty from Post Audit. Someone might just as well have asked for an audit on the cost of falling in love or mourning a pet or saluting a flag.
That cost data will be the focus of a discussion before the Legislative Budget Committee where the dress for the day will be hair shirts.
Folks will testify that the death penalty costs too much and ought to be repealed, or at least put on hiatus until...there’s enough money for every kid to have a big breakfast before school.
Other folks will testify that the death penalty isn’t cheap, but that as numbers of executions increase, the unit cost will come down, we’ll all feel safer and be more productive in our work and lives.
There probably will be a relative or two of a murder victim, maybe also of someone in prison who has committed murder. We’re betting which way they’ll testify, and they’ll get quoted, of course, but they don’t have any special insights into whether capital punishment is priced right or too expensive; they’ll either like it or not.
Which is where the whole issue ought to be decided. There’s a lot of moral dust to be kicked up at this one, but the real issue doesn’t have anything to do with money. It is whether legislators, a majority of them in each house of the Legislature–maybe two-thirds if the governor vetoes a bill–believe that capital punishment is right or wrong. It’s one or the other. It doesn’t have anything to do with money or appropriations or much of anything except right or wrong.
It’s the law. The only meaningful change would be its repeal.
But the interesting piece will be whether grown-up legislators will use cost as a reason. That’s when it will become insulting.
July 24, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 21, 2003)No fudging
Big deal last week, the mayor of Topeka gets fined $7,500 for violating the state’s campaign finance act. Bigger deal is that the fine got reported statewide as the biggest ever by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission and it may have sounded an alarm that will ring through the next election cycle.
The fact is, while there was some yammering from Mayor Harry L. " Butch" Felker about being made an example by the Ethics Commission, the fine is probably fair, and the infraction is something that is dumb in terms of dollars but very important in substance.
What happened, and what Felker admitted to, is camouflaging the source of campaign contributions.
That’s the key. That’s why state law requires at the city, county and state level that candidates for public office disclose the source of their campaign funds.
Everything your mother ever told you about being measured by the company you keep is dead right. Whether you look or not, you ought to be able to find out who is financing a campaign for public office. Who wants this guy or gal in office, and why.
In the Felker case, the people who wanted Felker returned to the job of mayor were workers in a tourism office who apparently did some pretty shady misappropriation of funds to generate cash to give Felker. That’s a separate problem that the Ethics Commission doesn’t have anything to do with, but someone probably should.
Now, maybe this gets brightened a bit because, well, it’s the convention and visitors bureau that was funneling money to the mayor, but what if it had been something else?
Would you want to know whether, say, a guy who wants a waiver to pile trash a little higher than agreed to at the landfill is financing the election of a public official?
Would you want to know whether a real estate developer who needs to fudge a little on rainwater runoff control to get two extra building lots into a housing development is financing a campaign?
We thought so.
Not a lot of people watch who gives what to campaigns. More probably should, but most people have stuff to do. Often, there’s a reporter somewhere who, if he or she knows the business and the people of a community, may be able to link a name on a campaign finance report with an identifiable interest in the outcome of something or other in government that makes the campaign contribution make sense.
But the information ought to be there and ought to be right, and using false names for contributions wrecks that whole system. The right names, especially in a small town, are important because they allow voters to know who supports a candidate and just maybe...why. There’s nothing wrong with giving money to a candidate–it’s important to conducting elections. But, as your mother said, givers and receivers both get judged. Voting is a process of making judgments.
The mayor? Well, he said he camouflaged the names of contributors because they were afraid for their jobs if it was known that he received campaign money from them. Not to be too harsh here, but since the money they gave Felker essentially was stolen from a tax-supported agency, you gotta wonder whether that would have been a bad thing. And, again, not to be too harsh, you have to wonder whether if there wasn’t an election going on, employees would have just moved around money from the agency to buy nice hats or shoes or magazines.
To make this simpler, every candidate who runs for public office and who accepts campaign contributions probably ought to decide right now that fudging on campaign finance reports, while it might protect friends, is a mistake.
The mayor of Topeka probably will keep his job.
That’s something that is out of the hands of the Ethics Commission and into the hands of Topekans, who probably aren’t going to get very upset about it.
But it probably means that the mayor is in his last term. All over the silly part of the infraction–there was only about $700 worth of campaign contributions involved. That’s not a lot in the whole scheme of things, is it?
July 17, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 14, 2003)Let the campaigns begin
The Kansas Senate, which was the site of the heaviest fighting in the Legislature’s every-decade battle to reapportion its districts so that each legislator represented roughly the same number of Kansans–Kansans, not registered voters–is just a year away from taking a test drive of its new districts.
While the House last fall held elections in its new districts, the Senate won’t get to test its new district borders until the August 2004 primary and November 2004 general elections.
And, remember, the principle here is to equalize the population of districts which a decade of comings and goings and housing developments had left severely imbalanced. The concept of one-man, one-vote prevailed, and the brand new Senate districts are pretty close, within maybe 1,000 population of each other.
Fortunately, legislatures can’t force people to move around the state, so to get nearly equal numbers of people in each district, lawmakers move the boundary lines of the districts. Some took a lot of moving, some took just a little, and the real problem statewide was that Johnson County is growing so fast that it needed a whole new Senate district, which means a lot of districts had to see significant movements.
But, for practical purposes, senators have about a year to get familiar in their districts. For some, like Senate President Dave Kerr, R-Hutchinson, Sen. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, and Sen. David Corbin, R-Towanda, the reapportionment was painless. They saw some of their district carved off and given to others, but their new districts don’t expand into any new territory. They’ll be campaigning among friends, presumably, or at least campaigning among the same mix of friends and foes that elected them in 2000. That’s a good thing.
But look at what happens in some other districts.
Sen. Bob Lyons, R-Winchester, saw his Senate district pushed and pulled and nipped and tucked until if he runs again, he’s going to have just 42 percent familiar faces to campaign to. A whopping 58 percent of his district is area he hasn’t covered before, and presumably people he’s going to have to acquaint himself with. This is like having 58 percent of your constituents suddenly only able to read French. It means making new friends, fast. But, remember, in 2000 Lyons was making his first run for the Senate, so he had no familiar base of voters.
Look what happened out west when two districts had to be shoved together. Sen. Janis Lee, D-Kensington, and Sen. Bob Salmans, R-Hanston, both live in what will be the 36th Senate District. Both like coming to Topeka in the winter. Lee winds up with a district in which her current constituents represent just 44 percent of the voters of the new district. Salmans has as his current constituents 56 percent of the voters of the district. Both need to make a lot of new friends.
Surprisingly when you look at the political party registration in the new district where two incumbents will run against each other, the Republican slant of the district makes Salmans look like a hands-down winner. The break-out: 51 percent of the voters of the new district are registered Republicans, 27 percent are Democrats and 22 percent are unaffiliated. That’s good for Salmans because he got elected in 2000 in a district where just 48 percent of registered voters were Republican. But, while things got better for Salmans, things also got better for Lee. Huh? Yes, you see, Lee, a Democrat has been elected three times in a district that was more Republican than Salmans’. In fact, Lee has never had the pleasure of running in a Senate district with less than 59 percent of the voters registered as Republican. For Salmans, the race will be like bulking up, getting an additional 3 percent of voters who presumably will naturally vote for him. And for Lee, shedding Republican voters ought to feel about as good as losing weight!
Now, the average new-constituent proportion of Senate districts is just about 15 percent, but it means significant making of new friends for most senators. That’s why you might see some of them in places that they haven’t been to before, at county fairs where they’ve never before attended, and at coffees and candidate forums where they may look unfamiliar.
That’s why the campaigns for Senate seats really start this year. Making friends, one registered voter at a time.
July 10, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 7, 2003)At last...
It’s been a long six months for Kansas conservative Republicans, waiting for their leader in state government, Attorney General Phill Kline, to do something—anything— that they could get behind for purposes of next year’s legislative elections.
They waited through the legislative session where Kline’s major triumph was off-site, winning a good share of the proceeds from the sale of a Kansas City-area hospital chain, Health Midwest, to Hospital Corporation of America. It was a success that nobody very far west of Johnson County heard about or had much reason to care about. But it was a success.
And, Kline did have some bills before the Legislature early in the session, some of the usual attorney general "tough on crime" stuff that might well have been left in the top right-hand drawer of his desk by previous attorneys general. They are all against crime. It’s the job description.
But it took the Legislature’s going home for Kline to throw red meat to the hard-core conservatives, with his redefinition of sex involving unmarried girls under the age of 16 as a crime that needs to be reported to state officials–especially if an abortion is involved.
And last week, Kline pulled the trigger on a high-profile (higher in the Wichita area than statewide) effort to catch more people who have failed to live up to their conditions of parole by not checking in with corrections officers and in many cases committing new crimes.
The interesting twist is that these high-profile actions come at a time when the state is in poor financial condition and the real answers to the real or imagined problems that Kline has brought up are going to take significant amounts of money.
For the sex deal, it’s going to take–if Kline is right on his reading of state law–a lot more social workers, a lot more child abuse investigators, a lot of time running down just the level of criminal activity involved in those pregnancies. On the parole violators, it’s going to take not only more time from state officials tracking down those errant parolees, but it is, if Kline is lucky enough to catch a bunch of them, going to take more prison cells. Buy or rent, prison cells are expensive to operate.
Which brings us to just what may be the real, behind the curtain, issue here.
Conservatives have been telling us for years that we have too much government and we spend too much money on it and they have had very little luck ginning up support to shrink the size of government and the budget that supports it. They all talk a good game, but it never gets done.
Railsters have a hunch that downsizing government isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes. But by redirecting money that is already being spent to things that have some popular appeal among a lot of Kansans, then parts of government conservatives aren’t enthused about would get squeezed while money is spent on higher-profile projects...like making sure that young girls who become pregnant weren’t assaulted–we’re all for that–and that parolees don’t rove the streets threatening us.
How are you going to be against that?
Are those issue more important than, say, eliminating out-district tuition paid by counties on behalf of their students who go across the county line to attend a community college? Is it more important than health insurance for schoolteachers? Is it more important than inspecting meat for sale within the state?
If you cannot cut the amount of spending and taxing authorized by the Legislature–where conservatives haven’t had much luck–then maybe the other way to go about it is to consume state resources from the inside, moving money into programs that are so basic that it is politically uncomfortable to vote against them and moving less-emotional issues to the cold burners of the stove.
Is that the long-range goal here? You could certainly, and with a straight face, make the case that there is no ulterior motive at work here. Or demonize those who are looking for an ulterior motive.
It’s too early to tell which way this works out, but it’s probably worth keeping the possibilities in mind.
July 3, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 30, 2003)Considering K-12
The Legislature and the governor are in the first round of what might be a fairly interesting little fight over financing K-12 (that’s kindergarten through high school graduation).
The fight so far isn’t about spending or sweeping policy initiatives...it’s about the group that gets to consider spending and sweeping policy initiatives.
The Legislature this summer, as every summer, appoints committees to study complicated issues that will come up in the next session. Stuff like the social skills needed to be a bail bondsman and how to compute the property tax on homes that have been hit by tornadoes.
Well, this summer, among those juicy topics is going to be K-12 education.
And at the end of the summer, some K-12 study group will have proposals for the Legislature to consider next year—an election year by the way—when all legislators are going to want to look like they’re standing tall for K-12, but won’t have any serious money to use in that pursuit without a tax increase.
The governor has a plan for this K-12 investigation. She’s pitched a proposal to legislative leaders that would create a 30-member study committee made up of 10 legislators, 10 school superintendents and 10 members of the public. She proposes going halvsies on the appointments; she gets half and legislative leaders get half.
The group would study all summer and come up with a way to pump new money into K-12, rejigger the formula under which the same amount of money is pumped into K-12, or maybe find ways to economize, reducing the need for money by K-12— making even the same amount of money look like more.
That sounds like a reasonable plan on its face. You have superintendents who know the inside nitty-gritty on how to run schools, you have members of the public who we’re betting will all want better schools for their children and grandchildren...and then we’ll have 10 legislators.
Give yourself points if you have correctly defined the problem facing legislative leaders who display high levels of political cunning and public relations savvy.
While it’s fun to be part of high-visibility planning and study important issues, it is just the 10 members of the Legislature who will be graded on the work product of the study group–at the 2004 elections. Winners get to spend the winter of 2005 in Topeka deciding which lobbyist buys them lunch. Losers will be buying their own blue plate special at their hometown café.
Are we all starting to understand that the governor’s plan is, besides a broad-based investigation of school funding, a political intelligence test for legislative leaders? A low-publicity letter to Speaker of the House Doug Mays, R-Topeka, and President of the Senate Dave Kerr, R-Hutchinson, from Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-Everywhere Else, looks like Republicans and she divvy up the appointments, but she uses a phrase that tilts the balance.
"Appointments should be split evenly between my office and the four Legislative Leaders." It’s sometimes difficult in a Republican-heavy state to recall that there are Democrats in legislative leadership, too—Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, and House Minority Leader Dennis McKinney, D-Greensburg.
So, presumably, Sebelius gets five hand-picked members of the public, five hand-picked school superintendents and...no...Kerr and Mays aren’t going to let Sebelius choose half of the legislators on the committee. Political breakdowns rule here, but Democrats (McKinney and Hensley) will surely get three, maybe four legislative appointments, and get to choose three, maybe four of the remaining superintendents and members of the public.
At worst—for Sebelius—Democrats make 16 appointments to the 30-member committee; at best, 18. And, there is that little Johnson County factor: Republicans are going to have to choose someone from Johnson County in either the House or Senate, and Johnson County legislators typically favor throwing money at K-12 so their fire insurance rates don’t rise.
Now, if you’re a Republican legislative leader, do you want to get into a deal where—at best—on crucial votes, you gotta hope that a Democrat’s car won’t start?
We didn’t think so.
This is one of those times where the negotiations for the committee are as interesting as the negotiations by the committee.