March 2004
March 25, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 22, 2004)Classic pool
We’ve just started the part of the Kansas Legislature of 2004 where there are very few straight shots left.
Huh?
Yes, there are enough bills in play that have passed one house of the Legislature or the other that it makes sense now for canny legislators to start making connections between support for one bill and support for another. It’s the classic pool bank shot where you may have to hit a rail or another ball to sink the ball you are after.
That’s what makes politics and the Legislature interesting, trying to figure out what linkages there are out there on the debate calendars between two seemingly unrelated bills.
An example: last week, an unprecedented number of senators voted for an amendment that has been floating around the Statehouse for years, the so-called "Scruffy" bill. It’s called Scruffy because there was a dog in Wyandotte County named Scruffy which was tormented and finally killed by a group of kids a few years back.
The kids probably should have been beaten, but we don’t do that anymore, so instead Sen. David Haley, D-Kansas City, has had a bill and more often an amendment to another bill to make tormenting pets a crime. Not a bad idea, really, but the concept never had the 21 votes it needed in the Senate to pass on its own or to get attached to another bill.
This year? There were 28 votes for the Scruffy amendment, all of a sudden on a warm afternoon in the Senate.
Now, it’s probably good public policy to make it a crime to torment a pet. Many believe that it is and they even gussy up what just feels right in your heart with information that a lot of infamous criminals started out showing their lack of respect for life in general by tormenting pets. Fair enough. We were on board just at the thought of people tormenting pets.
But the change in Senate sensibilities probably means that we’re seeing the first of the session’s bank shots, where a vote for one bill or amendment probably means that there has been a deal made for votes on another bill or amendment.
And that’s where the guessing game begins.
Things get even more complicated when you factor in that this is an election year and some legislators’ voting behavior shifts–my stars and garters!–when otherwise straightforward votes have to be considered in light of how they are going to look on the campaign trail or how they may be twisted and taken out of context on an opponent’s campaign brochures. Does stumbling over the cat in the dark while on the way to the bathroom at night become tormenting a pet?
Is there an animal rights activist, or merely a cat fancier, with an interest in an incumbent legislator’s winter job at the Statehouse?
Lots of questions, not many answers until the votes are all tabulated and sorted and compared against previous votes by legislators. Oh, and there’s also the complicating factor that maybe a legislator just had a change of heart, learned something new or the neighbor down the street kicked his or her dog in the front yard.
Sudden changes in legislative votes instantly become topics of conversation in the Statehouse, where legislators and lobbyists gossip like car wash attendants about the strong odor of perfume in a bachelor’s car.
Is there a deal? For what?
Or, did a whole bunch of senators just decide they’d seen the Scruffy amendment often enough they wanted to get it passed just to get rid of it. There’s always that possibility.
It’s just that sort of thing that makes the Legislature interesting to watch and gossip about.
March 18, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 15, 2004)Business vs. business?
What happens if you take the state’s largest business lobbying group and try to diminish its effectiveness by undercutting its influence with, well, business and the Legislature that business lobbies?
We’re about to find out.
The prime battle is higher taxes for schools, and the governor wants them and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce doesn’t. It’s about that simple.
It is a big battle because business is, well, very important to Kansas. It produces the jobs, it buys commodities and turns them into finished products, it is really the engine of the state’s economy. Without business, we’d be running down our food on foot and trading stuff among ourselves.
We’d be prehistoric.
Well, it’s probably a little less drastic than that, but business is important to Kansas and on the biggest issue of the year this legislative session–education–business isn’t on the side of the Democratic governor.
So, Kathleen Sebelius is attempting to loosen the hold of the KCCI on the tax issue by creating her own corps of business executives who will not only talk about the benefits of a top flight K-12 education system in Kansas, but will convince other business leaders and the public to ante up some more money to finance it.
If you were betting on whether the governor can break KCCI into just a benevolent bunch of business people who hang around the Statehouse in dark suits, chances are Sebelius is not going to win this one, or at least not win it decisively.
The reason is that in this election year legislators don’t want to return home to campaign for reelection based on votes to raise your taxes. They figure that it is safer to return home without doing anything or by doing something cheap than by raising taxes to spend more money on elementary and secondary schools.
Although the KCCI doesn’t have a thing to do with it, it appears that Republicans in the House and Senate, the natural allies of KCCI, have come up with a solution that is cheap and actually is a pretty good idea.
They’re planning to scrape together a little money and spend it on two areas of the school finance plan that, whether it is constitutional or not, are good places to spend money. One is for pupils who are at-risk, which is a technical term that means little other than that they qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. The other is more money for pupils who don’t speak English at home, the English as Second Language programs, which makes sense because it is tough to make much progress in school if you don’t understand what the teacher is saying or what the words in the books mean.
What’s this have to do with the KCCI? Virtually nothing, except that the GOP education plans can be done without raising taxes or raising such minimal amounts that nobody is likely to notice. But it will provide the "no new taxes" that KCCI wants, and even without any active role in the debate, KCCI can claim a win.
So what happens to Sebelius’ business-suited troops? Well, they’re going to be supporting K-12 education at least and that’s not a bad thing, but just a couple weeks from first adjournment of the Kansas Legislature’s 2004 regular session, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to turn around the KCCI or the Legislature for that matter.
Which means that KCCI lives to lobby on behalf of businesses for another year.
We’ll have this battle again, probably next year, and the remainder of Sebelius’ term or terms in office, and it’ll always be fun to watch but it’s likely to end in a draw every time.
March 11, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 8, 2004)Hardball politics
Set aside all this morality business and you’ll find serious political hardball being played in connection with the House-passed resolution to put a ban on same-sex marriage in the Kansas Constitution.
The hardball is being played at the national and state levels, but this is Kansas, so let’s talk about what’s happening here.
The resolution? Pretty straightforward, it puts in the Kansas Constitution a section that says the state will not recognize–and therefore businesses doing business under the laws of Kansas won’t recognize–a marriage between two men or two women.
Kansas won’t have to provide, say, health-care benefits or pension benefits to same-sex spouses of employees. Businesses can use that constitutional provision as a defense in not making what are generally considered spousal benefits to same-sex couples. Some businesses already do, many don’t, provide those same-sex spousal benefits but if the constitutional amendment gets on the Kansas ballot and passes, no business will have to provide those benefits.
Anyhow, the measure, which is now in the Kansas Senate for consideration, is at this point slated for the November general election ballot. A lot of Democrats and a lot of socially conservative Republicans in the Legislature would like the gay-marriage vote, if it comes to a vote, on the August primary election ballot.
Why? Pure politics.
For socially conservative Republicans, it means that folks who really don’t care for gay marriages are likely to turn out in large numbers whenever the resolution is up for a vote. In a primary election–and that’s where the majority of Kansas legislative elections are really decided, in the GOP primary–conservatives stand a good chance of unseating some moderate-to-liberal Republicans who may not have voted to put the resolution on the ballot or who can be painted by conservatives as wanting, or not strongly enough opposing, same-sex marriages.
This is an issue that just begs for mass mailings to Kansans who have some reason to believe that a gay married couple down the block is going to somehow threaten their marriages. Other Kansans may not be exactly sure how that happens, but if people believe it, it doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s sort of like scientists saying they found traces of water on Mars, so there must be Martians somewhere there, while others would have taken the discovery of, say, a hat, as real proof.
Big turnout in the GOP primary and there’s good reason to believe that conservatives will be in the majority, they’ll beat the moderates and in most districts in Kansas face relatively weak Democratic opposition...that’s just how the numbers play out in most House and Senate districts in Kansas.
So conservative Republicans would like an August primary vote to increase their numbers to stand a better chance of controlling the Legislature next session. Democrats? What’s their interest in a primary? Well, gay marriage isn’t a big issue for Democrats. Some feel strongly about it, others figure that it’s none of their business.
But Democrats could benefit from a primary referendum because there is this persistent trend of Republicans doing their fighting over moral issues at primary elections and coming up with the most conservative candidate for the general election. That’s often a candidate conservative enough for the conservative wing of the GOP but too conservative for the moderate and liberal Republicans, who in November respond by voting for Democrats.
Last time that happened? In 2002, when Democrats, of course–but most importantly, moderate-to-liberal Republicans–voted for Kathleen Sebelius. Who, by the way is now the Democratic governor of Kansas, one of the most Republican states in the nation...
We’ll see how the politics play out.
March 4, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 1, 2004)Kansans first?
There is an interesting little run of bills introduced into the 2004 Legislature that, at the halfway point, has made no progress. And that’s either good or bad, and figuring out which it is probably is an individual decision.
The genre of bills might be labeled "Kansans first." Most of them didn’t even get approved by the first committee that heard them, which means that they are probably dead for this election year session or will surprise us when they pop up later in the session.
What’s a "Kansans (or Americans) first" bill?
Well, take one in the House that would prohibit the state from contracting for services or goods from companies that "out-source" work to another country. It means, for example, that if a company that offers, say, computer monitoring services or even 24-hour hotline monitoring decides to use the marvel of the Internet to hire a company in India to provide some of that service, well, the contract is broken. It’s an attempt to have Kansans, or at least Americans, get the jobs or salaries that Kansas taxpayers finance.
Problem is, the state does have some computer services contractors who send some of their work to foreign nations, partly because of time zones and partly because they can pay less for that part of the work they perform for the state. That outsourcing probably saves the contractor money which can translate into either lower bids for state contracts or more profit for the contractors or maybe some of both.
Another bill would have souped up the penalties for firms that hire illegal aliens–the politically correct term is "undocumented workers"–to work for either government or private businesses. The concept is that a contractor, or even more hard to catch, a subcontractor, who hires those undocumented workers at generally lower wages to roof houses or lay tile or wax cars, is displacing American citizens or maybe Kansans.
There are thousands of foreign nationals in Kansas who take those jobs, probably are over-worked and under-paid, and support families here and in their home countries, and while that’s laudable, it also means that out-of-work Kansans or Americans aren’t doing those jobs. That’s why there are Kansans living on unemployment insurance benefits.
Catching those contractors, or the subcontractors whom they bid out contracts to, is difficult. Kansas doesn’t run the nation’s immigration service and the local sheriff may not be up to speed on immigration law. And even if they raided a job site where foreign nationals are working, what do they do with them? Just run them off and hope the contractor replaces them with Americans or Kansans? It doesn’t happen.
It’s not surprising that businesses and their lobbyists complain that they don’t knowingly hire illegal workers and that the guy who got the bid to build an office building or strip mall doesn’t know everyone whom subcontractors on the job hired.
But...there’s that little area in the back of your mind that wonders whether a company contracting for a building or a contractor who bids to build the building says to himself or herself, wow, these prices are low, awfully low, but let’s not try to find out why.
How often has anyone in business, serious competitive business, turned down a deal that is just a dab too good? Not outright robbery, but say that $125,000 house you’ve planned gets built for $110,000 or that $2.3 million strip shopping center comes in for $2.1 million? Are you going to complain? Probably not. And are you going to go to the job site and meet everyone working? Ask them what they’re getting paid? Ask them if they are paid in cash or whether they get a check with deductions for taxes and insurance? Probably not.
Sometimes, not knowing apparently is a good thing as long as prices aren’t so low that a person of common intelligence would know that something’s not right here, and the boards and steel and the paint all cost about the same amount and assembling it or applying the paint is too cheap.
Well, the "Americans or Kansans first" bills didn’t make any headway.
Maybe it’s because some people are getting deals that are too good to double-check.