July 2004

July 29, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 26, 2004)

Toto, we're not in Kansas...

BOSTON—For Kansas’ 41 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, this is full-immersion baptism in national politics–the week in Boston is about as good as it gets for Democrats who, except for a handful of legislative districts, are badly outnumbered by Republicans back home.

A Democratic town in a Democratic state flooded with even more Democrats from across the country. Doesn’t sound like anywhere in Kansas, does it...

Kansans are assured of a minimum of 20 hours of seat time in the crowded Fleet Center downtown here, and their fair share of 100,000 red, white and blue balloons that will fall on the convention on Thursday night.

For most of them, it’s an expensive week of long speeches, of receptions and parties, and not much in the way of local news coverage in their hometowns. But that’s typically the lot of Kansas Democrats in a state that is safely Republican for the presidential election.

It is a week of more herding than most Kansans put in in a lifetime, and it’s a week in which you are what you wear around your neck. The bling-bling in Boston is the delegate badge that gets you in line to board the bus at the Cambridge Marriott, into the security checkpoint at the convention hall and onto the most heavily guarded real estate in the nation... save probably the White House Situation Room.

The delegates are part of the ceremony that is important in politics. There aren’t a lot of actual decisions that are going to be made by votes of the 4,353 delegates at the convention; the platform is already written and the candidates are well in place. Don’t look for any surprises. But just being there in the hall, casting votes, and hearing speeches by national leaders is a large part of the excitement. After all, those 41 delegates and six alternates get to return home after being at the hub of the biggest story of the week in the United States. Not often that happens to very many Kansans at once.

A delegate’s day? Start with a working breakfast at 7:30 a.m.–speakers, tips on the convention program for the evening and those inevitable warnings that security is tight, don’t carry much into the convention hall and be prepared for a long evening. For most delegates, the days are pretty free for wandering Boston. Some have caucuses to meet with, ranging from labor to local officials, and there’s the chance for taking in protests in a tightly controlled area near the convention center that is essentially a cage like those at the circus when they bring out the lions and tigers—15-foot-tall fences topped with barbed wire so that protesters can’t get out at the delegates and the delegates can’t get in to the protesters.

It’s probably also the best chance that the Kansas delegation will have to learn about issues that are raging nationwide or internationally, but don’t get a lot of traction at home.

Remember the last antiwar protest in Kinsley? The rallies for the plight of fish and whales on the banks of Tuttle Creek Reservoir? Or Falun Dafa (that’s the meditation-exercise cult that gets practitioners locked up and even tortured in China)? Probably the best deal for Kansas from the Democratic National Convention is the chance for people from across the state to have someone close, or at least within their congressional district, who has seen national politics from the top down. It’s something that most delegates find makes them all the more interested in politics lower on the ballot. Presidential level politics can seem pretty "other-worldly" with the November ballot filled with county commissioners, judges (in some counties) and state legislative races, and the toe-dipping in the national scene brings races for federal offices into closer focus.

It’s a heady week for the delegates, one most of them earned by decades of walking door-to-door on behalf of local candidates, of sinking hundreds of yard signs, of folding and stamping and licking envelopes for thousands of pieces of campaign mail. The mix is leavened by a few college students and relatively new-to-the-party activists who probably with the convention have cemented their future in participating in politics.

That’s the upside. Locking in future political party members, workers, activists, likely even candidates.

The downside? Probably that all clam chowder consumed by delegates in Kansas in the future is going to be compared to the clam chowder in Boston, where it was either invented outright, or at least perfected...

July 22, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 19, 2004)

" I'm not a politician..."

This is the time of year, with less than two weeks before primary election day, when you are going to be asked to take a giant leap of faith that the person on your doorstep–or whose flyer was wedged underneath your screen door or who somehow found your name and address and mailed you a letter–ought to represent you in the Kansas Legislature.

The fact is that legislative candidates are engaged in trying to get a job that is very serious business, that has some real effect on your life, and it’s time for you to disregard a bunch of stuff that is just silly.

Here are some of those things you probably ought to weigh before making a vote:

• "I’m not a politician" is one of the most weary of all catch lines that you’re likely to hear.

Somehow, not being a politician is supposed to be a virtue. Dissect that phrase a little. Is the person not a politician because he or she finds politics distasteful? If so, why in the world is that person running for an elective office? When it comes to representing you in the Legislature, do you want someone who isn’t a politician representing you in a committee or in a House or Senate chamber that is full of politicians? Chances are good that you want a politician or someone who has followed politics closely or who aspires to become a politician on your side. It might sound cute and bashful and fresh and untainted, but the fact is, you want a politician representing you.

• "I don’t have enough money for a real campaign."

We’ve heard that one a time or two, and practically, few people can just write checks to finance their campaigns. With some social skills, some effort (yes, raising money for a political campaign is a tough job that might tell us whether the candidate is capable of performing tough jobs), nearly everyone who wants to do good things can find people to contribute to their campaigns. It isn’t easy, but it probably shouldn’t be, either.

• The close friend of "I don’t have enough money" is "my opponent is being financed by special interest groups and political action committees."

It’s supposed to be some sort of criticism. Fact is, we all have special interests. Groups of people with the same interest band together to help finance campaigns. Now, that sounds fairly logical, doesn’t it? And if a candidate holds the same views that a special interest group holds, why in the world wouldn’t that candidate take that special interest group’s money? If the highway lobby wants the roads built as promised, and you drive on roads, then is a highway PAC contribution something bad? Probably not.

***

Running for office and serving in office are very serious undertakings. The people running and serving are representing you, on issues ranging from tax policy to financing schools to whether the county can annex your home to how long to lock up criminals to whether water
should be piped from the river basin where you live to somewhere else. And there are so-called "moral issues" that the Legislature deals with, though some wonder whether on sober reflection they want 63 members of the House and 21 members of the Senate deciding what’s right and wrong morally...

Chances are good that you want someone very serious representing you, someone who knows issues, or at least appears bright enough to learn them and to figure out how they impact you and your district.

***
One-issue candidates? Think this one over carefully, because it is not as simple as you think. Some candidates this year are running because they are against gay marriages which are, by the way, illegal in Kansas now. That’s why you don’t see a lot of "Bruce weds Harry" headlines in the Sunday wedding announcements in your newspaper. Now, that’s a good issue and something you’ll want to ask about. But that’s not much work to accomplish in a two-year House term or four-year Senate term, is it? You’ll probably want your representative to have some additional goals in mind to fill out the rest of his or her term.

Size ‘em up, ask questions, but chances are good some of the stuff you’ll hear really isn’t relevant to the job of a state legislator. If it isn’t, don’t spend much time thinking about it... but spend some time wondering why candidates would think that anyone would vote for them because they’re "not a politician."

July 15, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 12, 2004)

About a truck

A family noted not only in Kansas but across the nation for its controversial and graphic protests against homosexuality got reined in a dab last week by the Kansas Court of Appeals in a little case about a pickup truck.

The Phelps family of Topeka, which has made an avocation of protesting homosexuality from street corners with signs, sought a ruling from the Kansas Board of Tax Appeals that the 1995 Ford pickup truck it uses to haul its signs around Topeka and the state should be exempted from property taxes because it is used by a church in its ministry.

Now, maybe there’s a case there, maybe not, but the Phelpses took the unusual step of demanding that the members of the Board of Tax Appeals undergo questioning to determine whether they had a bias against the Phelpses or the family’s anti-homosexual crusade that would make them unable to apply state law to the use of their pickup truck to determine whether it should be tax exempt or not.

The questioning, called voir dire, is the same deal you see in trials in real courts and on TV, where lawyers ask potential jurors whether they have made up their minds about a case or whether they harbor feelings that would make them incapable of rendering a fair and impartial decision based on the facts of the case.

In this instance, the Phelpses wanted to interrogate the three members of the quasi-judicial Board of Tax Appeals to determine whether they had heard of the Phelps family–chances are excellent they had–and whether the Phelps church’s crusade against homosexuality would color the panel’s decision on application of pretty straightforward property tax exemption law in regard to the Phelps pickup truck, which we believe is red.

The request was probably a little... cheeky. And it’s not hard to see where the Phelpses might have taken that examination of members of the Board of Tax Appeals, who are appointed by the governor and who are confirmed by the State Senate to take their roughly $100,000-a-year jobs. They make decisions on tax issues ranging from the valuation of your home to the percentage of a natural gas pipeline’s property that is taxable in Kansas.

The board does big stuff, we just don’t hear much about it because it is fairly technical. And... we can’t recall, for example, whether any natural gas pipeline company has ever asked a BOTA member whether he lives in an all-electric house or an electric company has asked BOTA members whether they’ve ever lost ice cream in the refrigerator during a power outage.

Now, if you wanted a property tax exemption on a pickup truck primarily used to haul around anti-gay picket signs, it is likely that members of the board would have been asked whether they are gay, or their children or friends are, and indeed, whether the BOTA members believe that the wages of sin are death. Oh, and why, or why not, and cite scripture in your answer, please...

The Appeals Court decision was pretty tightly written around the provisions of the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. What the court essentially said is that the Phelpses should have gone ahead and presented their case to BOTA. One possibility is that they might have won, got the exemption for their pickup truck and been done with it. The other is that they might have been denied the exemption for the pickup truck, figured BOTA was wrong in its application of law or wrong-headed in its decision because of the controversial nature of the Phelps anti-gay protest, and then appealed the decision to court... just as does everyone who brings a case to BOTA and either wins or loses and pursues other options.

Does the Court of Appeals decision make the ground shake? No. But it does a couple things. It keeps everyone with a case about their taxes on the same footing, whether they are a protesting Baptist Church or natural gas pipeline company. It prevents what is essentially bullying of state employees by protesters for any particular issue. And, it turns a simple tax-the-pickup-or-don’t case back into a simple tax-the-pickup-or-don’t case.

That sounds like what the case should be about, doesn’t it?

July 8, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 5, 2004)

News from the pews?

In the next few weeks, there are likely to be some unfamiliar faces in certain churches around the state... political liberals-to-moderates who are going to be listening intently to sermons instead of taking the early Sunday brunch deals, to try to learn whether churches in the state are stepping over a fuzzy line to become political action groups.

The issue is, of course, gay marriage–and legislators who voted for or against putting the issue on the November general election ballot.

It’s come to this.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a church family supporting a candidate who is a member of the church or who shares the ideas of a church community on gay marriage. Some churches vehemently oppose same-sex marriages, which are currently outlawed in Kansas. Some churches don’t make a big deal about it. No law is ever going to force a church to sanction a same-sex marriage or perform same-sex marriages.

But there are limits on what a nonprofit, tax-exempt entity can do politically... such as spend money on political campaigns without registering as a political action committee, just like, say, a nonprofit industry group that conducts research and education and encourages best-practices in the use of plywood.

Now, the lines on what constitutes campaigning or supporting or opposing the election of a candidate, as the Campaign Finance Law jargon has it, are fairly clear but they’re not often applied to churches. It’s a whole ‘nother deal when you apply state laws, or federal laws, to churches.

The federal laws on tax-exempt organizations are fairly tight, but you can imagine that the first time the Internal Revenue Service decides that any church has crossed the line, there will be a furor unequaled since the Crusades. And the first time a county appraiser wanders into a church with a tape measure to take down the square footage of a sanctuary, well, that’s not going to be a pretty sight.

Church leaders say they know the rules, know the lines, know how to stay out of secular trouble, and you’d imagine that religious aspects aside, anyone running a church, like anyone running a foundry or a movie house, will take precautions to make sure that nothing illegal happens or that the ongoing business concern he or she leads doesn’t get compromised to the detriment of stockholders or parishioners.

But just the concept of church-watchers chills the politics of the upcoming primary election in Kansas, and probably the general election after that. You’ve got to assume that anyone bold enough to take notes during a sermon and pick up every reachable piece of church literature that mentions same-sex marriage or voting records isn’t going to be bashful about matching it up to permissible and impermissible activities of tax-exempt organizations.

What happens next is going to be interesting.

If there is some campaign violation by a church, look for that case to become page-one news around the nation. If there isn’t a campaign violation by a church, then it’s going to be hard to focus the gay marriage issue just on most churches’ opposition to same-sex
marriages.

Since social conservatives are among the most faithful of primary election voters in Kansas, if there are no campaign law violations and legislators who voted against putting the same-sex marriage ban on the ballot are swamped at the primaries, then it might be a sign that churches have become a more potent political force than ever before in Kansas politics. And whether on the gay marriage issue or some other, Kansas politicians are going to have to find a way to campaign either with, or apart, from them.

July 1, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 28, 2004)

Business taxes

There’s an interesting little wrinkle planned for one of this summer’s legislative interim committee study committees: just how hard to get on people and businesses that aren’t paying their taxes.

The idea started as a pet project of Senate Majority Leader Lana Oleen, R-Manhattan, who noticed that quite a few liquor stores aren’t, according to what is possible to learn under the state’s tightly held revenue code, paying their state income, excise and other taxes.

The issue has already spilled over to used car lots where legislation last session lets the Department of Revenue pull the licenses of those "this was a vacant lot on Tuesday" car sales outfits that pop into business, sell some cars, and then disappear, or at least relocate.

The whole issue is, of course, just how friendly and profitable business can be if it doesn’t have to pay its taxes. It would be a nice world out there if business owners could merely pay the staff and pocket the remainder of profit and call it good.

But obviously that’s not fair, not to competing businesses, not to cities which levy local option sales taxes, not to taxpayers of the state who pay up not only their fair share but eventually the shares of businesses that skate on their taxes...

Now, it sounds like it would be a pretty simple affair, but, unfortunately, it really isn’t.

Shutting down a liquor store is probably no big deal, requiring that before it opens again, it gets straight with the state on taxes, but there are a lot of other businesses, and businesspeople, who may find themselves in the same situation, being behind on their taxes.

Should the state, say, pull the license of a dentist who is behind in property taxes on his business personal property tax, or who hasn’t made the tax withholding on his or her employees or who hasn’t filed the business income tax properly? Probably, but what if that
dentist is the only one in town? Does that make a difference? Not to the state, but it probably does to the community.

The state has the equipment and the computer programs to match up names of people with state-issued licenses with those who are delinquent in paying taxes. While that list is never going to become public, we’re guessing that there are surveyors, landscape
architects, cardiologists, lawyers, registered nurses and others who get to practice their professions because the state has essentially vouched for their education, training and skills. Should they have to pay taxes before they can practice? Probably.

But you can bet that the arguments that are going to be floated will be based on "a bad year" or oversight or an unexpected expense. And look for the sharing of private tax information among state regulatory agencies to lend itself to the spectre of "big brother" state government.

Someone, on behalf of some industry, is going to try to create a "balancing act" out of what is a simple effort of the state to collect the money that is owed in taxes. And while that balancing act–the surgeon sidelined while someone’s appendix is inflamed–probably can be made to sound pretty eloquent and heart-wrenching, the issue shouldn’t play well for legislators.

Because it’s a small step from the state allowing the licensure of a professional who isn’t paying taxes to the state making decisions about whether some little start-up business ought to get a tax holiday while it gets on its feet, or that a small town’s only coffee shop serves an important community service that would be denied mocha latte-lovers if the business was closed until its owners came up with the tax money.

It’s going to be interesting to see what the arguments are for paying taxes in order to stay in business and be licensed and whether folks who are seeking some leniency in fact want someone who works for the state to decide who has to pay taxes and who doesn’t.

That’s not a decision that many Kansans would be comfortable leaving up to state employees...

That is, unless we’re going to let Department of Revenue employees supplement their salaries with tips.