June 2006
June 29, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 26, 2006)A question of timing?
If you ask Kansans with school-aged children in the home how many seasons there are in a year, don’t be surprised to hear their answer: two.
There is one season while the kids are in school, everything is pretty much scheduled and life is pretty organized.
And, there is that summer season when the children are at home, when parents are trying to juggle jobs, care for the children, and take that frantic round of trips to the mall, to the baseball or soccer games, to the summer school, and to schedule vacations and everything else that happens under the summer sun.
The Aug. 1 primary election--not a big deal for Democrats because they generally avoid intra-party smack downs, but often the election that really matters for Republicans--falls at the end of the frantic summer season. It’s when families start their back-to-school shopping, wind up summer athletics and maybe try to find the time for a little vacation.
Oh, and time to tune in as best they can to campaigns and vote.
It might just be that Aug. 1 is too early to hold a primary election, that people’s lives are too busy, and that the GOP is actually distilling its primary into a “who is the most conservative” footrace that costs the party seats in the Legislature and possibly in statewide offices. Otherwise, with the big majorities in registration that Republicans have in all but a handful of legislative districts, there is no reason that any Democrat should win an election in a GOP-by-registration tilted district.
But, it happens.
Maybe generally pro-life, fiscally and socially conservative GOP primary voters who have almost every recent election cycle gotten their pro-life, fiscally and socially conservatives to the general election have figured out how to find time to vote or make the time or make their busy summer season schedules work better than moderate Republicans.
But, in many districts across the state, and even in the governor’s race, it’s apparent that the GOP primary often comes up with the wrong candidates, or at least the candidates who can’t beat a Democrat. Democrats, of course, gain some advantage by not spending their campaign money in primary elections in most districts and therefore don’t start the all-important general election race nearly broke.
And, there have been some efforts to broaden primary voting opportunities, early voting being the most notable, that would seem to allow even the busiest of primary voters to get to the polls before election day to make their votes. But clearly, the outcomes of the primary elections demonstrate that the broad spectrum of the GOP isn’t voting or Republican primary election picks would virtually sail into office.
It is the falloff of GOP registered voters to Democratic candidates in the general election that should be teaching the GOP a lesson.
Now there is, of course, the talk of “Republicans In Name Only” or RINOs. That’s the term that conservatives bandy about. It sounds great in the locker-room but in the real world, it just doesn’t matter. What matters is who gets elected in November, pure and simple. Even if conservatives hang a moderately pejorative label on them, those RINOs vote in November and in many districts frustrate the conservatives of the GOP.
Would a later primary election, say mid-September, turn out a broader mix of Republicans whose nomination would likely assure them election in November? It might. But for Republicans, something is clearly wrong because with registrations as they are, Democrats are right when they say that Democrats don’t elect Democrats to office, Republicans do.
Downside to Democrats for a primary election date change? They might face Republican candidates who are harder to label as “too conservative for Kansas.”
June 22, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 19, 2006)Payment strategies
The Kansas Legislature took some interesting steps this year to try to get parents—that noun is gender-neutral but generally it is fathers—to make their child support payments promptly.
The whole issue of child support is one that divorced parents either agree to amicably or battle over before judges. The amicable agreements pretty much take care of themselves, and the custodial parent is assured that there will be money available for the care and upbringing of the children and the non-custodial parent is assured that even though the marriage didn’t work out, the children are taken care of. It’s the best solution to a problem when it works,
When it doesn’t work, well, that’s the problem. No matter the parents’ feelings toward one another, there are children to be provided for.
The interesting part of the Legislature’s effort to make sure that the children are provided for is to keep close tabs on those child support payments and to impose some rather novel penalties on the parent who isn’t making the child support payments.
The first of this year’s novel penalties is a restriction of one’s driver license if child support arrearages reach $500. There are few sanctions more sensitive than limiting one’s right to drive. It’s one of those basic American instincts that grown-ups can drive wherever they want. Restricting that privilege is serious stuff…serious enough, the Legislature hopes, to get people serious about paying their child support.
The procedure is for the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to notify the non-paying parent and inform him/her that if he hasn’t’ made his payment within 30 days, his driver’s license will be restricted. If nothing happens, SRS tells the Department of Revenue which issues driver’s licenses to restrict the non-paying parent to driving two and from work, school or for medical emergencies only.
That’s pretty tough stuff right there and the ramifications are extensive. Not only is a drive to the movies or a restaurant or a grocery store out of the picture, but we’re betting that insurance coverage gets a little tricky when one is driving somewhere or at some time that the driver isn’t legally supposed to be driving. Remember, auto insurance covers licensed drivers.
If the driver license deal doesn’t get deadbeats’ attention, there’s another wrinkle to encourage paying child support.
If SRS, again, determines that you are behind in child support payments, you can’t get any license or permit that is issued by the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.
That’s hunting, fishing, boating and those stamps that allow you to hunt “big game” or ducks. You’re just about out of the outdoor sporting business or at least that part of it that requires a state permit.
Wildlife and Parks now has in operation a pretty sophisticated on-line permit and license system that has the capability of refusing to issue a license or permit. Wildlife and Parks and SRS will be setting up procedures for every three months, SRS letting W&P know who shouldn’t be getting a license.
There’s still the provision for catching up payments, working out a deal with the court on making up arrearages but it’s going to be embarrassing at the bait shop or sporting goods store to carry your stuff to the counter and find out that you can’t legally use it. And, there’s the chance that parents in arrears probably shouldn’t be driving to the lake or the woods to fish or hunt, anyway…
Will it work?
Well, those are probably two of the best attention-getters that the state has thought up to get parents to comply with child support orders.
It will be interesting probably in a year to see which sanction got the attention of parents with arrearages for their children’s support.
This may be one of those deals where, in mixed company, you won’t even want to bet which one works best at getting child support payments moving again…
June 15, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 12, 2006)That pesky civil liability is toast
While we were watching other things, Kansas got itself a brand new set of rules on “use of deadly force.”
Now, while we’re hoping that it doesn’t come up much, the new rule is that you no longer have to do what most of our parents told us to do—to try to escape when threatened.
There was an old English standard that you were supposed to retreat as far as you could before you were authorized to use deadly force. Something about going to the “last wall” of your castle, being cornered with no further chance for escape before you responded with deadly force to someone threatening you.
That’s all over now.
The new rule is that you can stand in your front hallway if someone is breaking in who you believe means to cause you serious harm and just fire away to protect yourself or your family or friends—that “third party” that the law refers to.
Currently? Well, people do use deadly force to protect themselves but it becomes a big deal in civil court. Did the person breaking in have a weapon he/she was aiming at you or did he/she just use it to break the window? Were you really threatened, were your life or health seriously in jeopardy?
The new law—as long as you aren’t shooting at a law enforcement officer who has clearly and reasonably identified himself—eliminates that pesky civil liability for shooting people threatening you or another.
Sounds a little like the old code of the West, doesn’t it? “…That guy bothering you, little lady?” as Marshall Dillon might have asked before beating up or shooting someone pestering a young woman at the Dodge City saloon.
You don’t even have to be in your home for the deadly force change to allow a shootout. You can be walking down the street and be threatened or you can be in your car and be threatened and then use deadly force.
There may be a tie-in, of course, with the new concealed-carry law that allows most law-abiding people in most places in the state to carry a concealed pistol.
There’s a decent chance that most robbers and muggers and others in that line of work have heard about the concealed-carry law that will take effect just after some Kansans receive pistols for Christmas, but chances are slim that those criminals are going to fully understand the use of the deadly force wrinkle now in law.
If it works out right, we’d figure that most criminals will be very, very picky about the clothes that their to-be-victims are wearing. Bulky clothes and there’s a chance for a gun in there; a swimming suit, probably not.
But for some of those well-clad Kansans, there’s likely to be a little more of a scrap involved when a robber waves a gun around to get people’s attention that they are about to be asked for their money.
Maybe this is a way to make the streets safer, our homes safer, and to give the road rage-inclined a little more reason to pull over to the side and take a deep breath.
There’s still some question about whether use of deadly force applies to someone who is threatening you in the yard but we’re betting that if you have to go inside to get your gun, or maybe even club, to ward off an attacker who follows you into your home, you’re in the clear.
We just never got clear about what happens legally if you shoot someone through the screen door…or what happens domestically if instead of reaching for the remote, you inadvertently grab a pistol and shoot your television instead of just changing channels…
June 8, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 5, 2006)Adding up the numbers
There’s a chance that the typical newspaper reader might have asked the same question that Supreme Court Justice Lawton Nuss posed at that now-storied March 1 Mexican restaurant lunch with Senate President Steve Morris, R-Hugoton, and Sen. Pete Brungardt, R-Salina.
Nuss’ question, as he recently explained it in an answer to a Judicial Qualifications Commission investigation into whether he violated judicial ethics by discussing a school finance bill with two senators, sounds like a pretty fair if untimely question.
Essentially, Nuss says he asked the legislators if two learned (or at least state-financed) studies on what Kansas ought to be spending on schools to “suitably finance” public education each proposed more than $1 billion in spending over three years, why was the House considering a bill that was reported in the newspapers as costing $499 million? That’s a pretty big gap. Was he missing something?
That’s not a bad question, and actually, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the court’s consideration of the just-passed (but different) school finance bill. That’s a pretty big difference in cost for a legislature that is trying to suitably finance public education and get the bill past the Supreme Court this summer.
Well, Nuss was missing something, and the way that news agencies describe school finance bills may be at the root of his question, which all of a sudden doesn’t seem quite as sinister as it has been portrayed.
News media—informally because we actually don’t huddle to decide how to portray issues no matter what you may believe—have settled on reporting the incremental increases in spending on school finance. There wasn’t any secret meeting but state agencies, legislative agencies, legislators, lobbyists and, yes, even the press, all talk about incremental increases over three years. So a bill that makes incremental increases of $500 million over three years is called a “$500 million plan.”
That plan Nuss was asking questions about raised spending by $175 million in its first year, $165 million in the second year and $159 million in its third year. (That’s actually $499 million, but we’re the news media, and we tend to round up to the nearest juicy figure.)
Actually, the plan would have added for schools $175 million in its first year and in each of the second and third years; $165 million in the second year and the third year; and $159 million in the third year. In millions, that’s three times $175 plus two times $165 and one time $159. That totals $1.014 billion over three years, cumulatively. That’s pretty much in the ballpark of the two school finance studies, maybe a dab low, but not outrageously low. But, you couldn’t tell it from the news media accounts. It’s not believed any newspaper reported that early House plan as a billion-dollar plan.
Was the reporting of the plan—and every school finance plan that followed—a distortion? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on your understanding of legislative jargon. As long as all the news media, legislators, staffers and such use the same language, we understand it. Probably the public—and at least one Supreme Court justice—didn’t.
Oh, and consider also that educators generally think the cumulative reporting—which yields the $1 billion figure—is a distortion in itself. They’d say, if you have a job that pays $30,000 a year, and you stay in the job for three years, would you tell your friends you have a $90,000 job? Probably not.
The manner of reporting school finance bills isn’t always clear, but not much of life is. At least the media accounts are consistent, for whatever that’s worth. Nuss still probably shouldn’t have raised the issue with senators. He might have asked another justice or maybe even a newspaper reporter. But he didn’t.
Strangely, in coverage of Nuss’ answer to the Judicial Qualifications Commission, many papers and TV and radio aren’t explaining how reporting of school finance legislation actually requires a little more explanation than it gets.
Oh, Nuss is still in trouble, of course. But, then, there are still some of us who are a little picky about eating Mexican food at lunch when we have to go back to the office…
June 1, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 29, 2006)Pretty clever
Sometimes there’s a glint of cleverness in something as cut-and-dried as the governor vetoing a bill.
No, we’re not talking about concealed-carry of weapons or the abortion information reporting bill but something that should make some waves in late July and again in late October.
What happened is that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill that made a lot of changes in election law, campaign finance rules and some other election-related business.
The bill did a lot of things, some probably good, some probably not so god, but for whatever reason, the governor vetoed it.
Here’s where things get interesting…
State campaign finance law now contains an 11-day “blackout” period, which means that candidates and their campaigns don’t have to report contributions received in the 11 days before the primary and general elections.
That blackout period probably made sense in the days when people were hand-delivering campaign finance reports, doing the math on what was taken in and from whom and what was spent on…well, what.
But as communications speed increased, the 11-day period provides too much time for campaign contributors who don’t want to be identified just before an election to get their checks into the campaigns without leaving any tracks in the days before an election.
Conservative contributors send their money to campaigns too late to be identified, liberal contributors do the same, lots of political action committees and special interest groups get to contribute to campaigns and presumably win favor from the candidate if he/she is elected. All pretty much under-the-sheets, out of the news. For primary elections, it means that it is 11 days before the general election when we learn who spent money on the primary election campaigns.
Doing away with that “dark period” before the elections probably is a good idea. It lets people know before Tuesday’s election who handed the candidate money on, say, Saturday.
That was part of the bill Sebelius vetoed.
But…she was clever enough to say that the quick reporting was one of the few good parts of the bill, and lamented that she had to nix that when she vetoed the larger measure, which included an increase in campaign contribution limits and a confusing system for early voting.
So, what does the governor propose? Well, she says she will make public her campaign’s late contributions, reporting contributions of more than $350 (the amount in the bill she vetoed) within 48 hours of receiving them even during the 11-day “dark period.”
Now, that sounds pretty fair, actually, but consider the havoc that Sebelius, who won’t have a serious primary election, if at all, may sow by urging other candidates to follow her voluntary lead.
There are three major campaigns for the GOP nomination for governor and they will be hotly competitive races. And while the governor might want to say where her late-in-the-campaign money is coming from for the primary election, anyone want to bet that the three Republican campaigns are going to be eager to reveal that information to their competitors? Nope, we didn’t think so.
For those who don’t live and breathe politics and campaigns, the governor sounds like she’s made a good-faith effort to do something nice, and most won’t realize the difficulty that the contribution announcements will cause Republican campaigns…except for every time the governor mentions it… And she will find occasions--count on it--to mention her voluntary late contribution reporting.
It’s just a vetoed bill, it’s not the law, but it may have a lot of political mileage in it.