March 2005
March 31, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 28, 2005)Grab the remote
The 2005 legislative session has been entertaining in a basic-cable sort of way so far. But we’re about to get to the premium political channels in the last days of the session and during the first week or so after lawmakers go home for a three week-plus break.
What’s on tap for the political groupies’ premium political channels? It’s the veto show–the bills that the Legislature has passed and the governor has to decide whether to sign or veto or just ignore (after 10 days, bills that the governor hasn’t either signed or vetoed become law without her signature).
Governors deal with vetoes differently. The late Gov. Joan Finney, who tended to view the Legislature as an excitable group of high schoolers, would occasionally veto bills or specific sections of giant appropriations bills almost as a reality check. Did they really mean that? Are they sure? Finney’s vetoes were often overridden by the Legislature. She didn’t have hard feelings generally–she just wanted to make sure that the Legislature was sure of what it was doing.
Having a veto overridden can be embarrassing to some governors but Finney didn’t seem to mind. Some of her vetoes weren’t overridden when legislators apparently re-thought what they were proposing and decided that maybe all their ideas weren’t top-flight public policy.
For this session, though, with a governor who will be seeking reelection in 2006, the veto politics are hotter and heavier, plus there are more interest groups lobbing shells into the governor’s office.
There is a presumption that while 2006 is the year that special interest groups would like to barrage Gov. Kathleen Sebelius with what appear to be politically popular bills for one segment of the voters or another, this session is the warm-up. It’s a premium-channel hard ball warm-up, to be sure.
What’s likely headed to the governor’s desk?
• Well, enough worker compensation legislation that sorting it out is difficult but most of it is aimed at finding ways to deny employees injured on the job health care benefits. Worker compensation is complicated, dizzyingly technical, but the concept here is that "business friendly" means lower employer paid worker compensation insurance premiums.
• Abortion clinic licensing and inspection. The legislation is abortion clinic-specific. Now, it’s hard not to agree that abortion clinics ought be spotless and sanitary and well-staffed and equipped, but surprisingly, the Legislature doesn’t appear to care the conditions under which one might undergo oral surgery or cosmetic surgery or foot surgery or other invasive procedures.
• So-called tort reform ranging from lower appeals bonds (if you lose a case and damages are awarded, the amount of money you must put up to guarantee payment if a higher court affirms the judgment) to binding arbitration of some disputes that now are decided by a jury, not by arbitrators whose decisions are final.
• Budget issues ranging from not-enough money for elementary and secondary schools to too little money for state colleges and universities.
• A "trust fund" for dozens of western Kansas counties atop the emptying-out Hugoton natural gas field, paid for by withholding from severance tax payments to the state.
What piles up in the last week of the session is unpredictable. But every bill that this Democratic governor vetoes from a Republican-dominated Legislature will come at some political cost.
How many bills can the governor veto before some editorial writer or special interest group dubs her "Governor No" isn’t clear, of course. She could "win" that title from legislators or potential 2006 gubernatorial opponents or special interest groups which are winding up for political pitches at the next election.
What’s certain now is that it’s time for the politically immature or uninterested to leave the room because the remote control is about to be taken over by the political premium channel surfers..
March 24, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 21, 2005)Mark your calendar
Many legislators, soon as it’s time to flip their calendars to April, are going to quickly circle the 12th.
The reason for that is part of a sentence that the Kansas Supreme Court wrote Jan. 3.
"...we will withhold our formal opinion until corrective legislation has been enacted or April 12, 2005, whichever occurs first..." the court said in its brief opinion on school finance.
That opinion, of course, shook the Statehouse and state. The Supreme Court opinion affirmed in part and reversed in part the decision of Shawnee County District Court Judge Terry Bullock, who last spring with what he called "considerable regret," decided that the state’s system for funding elementary and secondary education was unconstitutional.
What the Supreme Court reversed that we know of for sure is that the school finance law itself is not unconstitutional.
What else the Legislature can deduce from the decision, well, that’s unclear.
The House and Senate have made some spirited stabs at school finance. Now a House-Senate panel is at work hammering out a bill that it hopes will meet some of the apparent goals sought by the high court.
A few things, from the legislative side of this issue, are clear:
• The Legislature won’t be raising taxes this year.
• The Legislature will toss some more money into special education, bilingual programs and programs for children who are at risk of not performing well in public schools.
• The Legislature will continue to send millions of dollars to school districts under the same formula that the Supreme Court says is questionable: the Base State Aid Per Pupil (BSAPP) formula that essentially lifts all boats, indiscriminately, instead of those the court believes need the most attention. That action, if it sounds, well, a little off-the-mark, is necessary to get the Legislature to vote for the rest of the plan. It doesn’t do any good to devise a way to finance K-12 education that the court likes if the bill to do it can’t pass the Legislature.
• Oh, and the Legislature will appoint a special task force to study school finance, to see what it actually costs and where the money comes from (federal, state, local) to finance schools now, what it ought to cost and to figure out how much of what it ought to cost the Legislature should be financing with state tax dollars.
That task force, called the "2010 Commission" because that’s when it is scheduled to go out of business, may actually be the part of whatever the Legislature comes up with by April 12, or actually by its scheduled April 1 or 2 first adjournment, that the court likes best. And it’s almost free, just a little mileage to members.
The big question, of course, is whether whatever the Legislature can come up with will keep the court from taking some drastic action.
Nobody knows what that could be. It could be relatively simple. The court could note that the Legislature has made good progress in its first year and order the Legislature to keep it up year after year until the court says "enough."
But whatever the court says April 12 is going to cost the state more money, this year or next..
And that means the Legislature is at some point either going to have to violate its first rule, raise no taxes... or start working on press releases that say that "under court order" the Legislature is raising your taxes.
If you think things are spinning now as the Legislature works to finish its session and finance schools, just wait until April 12.
March 17, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 14, 2005)To sign or not to sign?
Last year about this time, the House was passing what was essentially Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ school finance bill–a measure with at least $100 million in new taxes and more spending on special education programs, on pupils who are at-risk of not doing well and on students who speak little or no English.
It was the big deal of the session–taxes are always a big deal in what was an election year for all members of the Legislature. The Senate killed the House-passed measure.
The schools/tax bill was what could have been the state’s pre-emptive strike at the Kansas Supreme Court decision of January which held that the Legislature wasn’t living up to its duty to make adequate provision for the financing of elementary and secondary education.
There’s a lot of looking back, guessing that the Sebelius bill–which cost the political lives of two of its major Republican champions in the House–wouldn’t have "gotten the state out of trouble" with the court. Chances are good that the bill, had it become law, wouldn’t have solved all the problems that the high court identified in the school finance system. But there is good reason to believe that the high court decision would have been a lot different in scope and threat level if the Sebelius plan had been passed.
But that was last year and this is this year. The House and Senate each has its own school finance plans that envision spending $135 million and $147 million, respectively, on schools in the upcoming fiscal year which starts July 1.
Look for a bloody legislative fight over the House and Senate versions. Ultimately, both chambers–probably by narrow margins–will agree on a single bill to present to the governor.
Ahem... there’s the politically interesting part.
With just about 14 months until campaign yard signs start sprouting for the 2006 gubernatorial election race, does the governor sign or veto or "ignore into law" whatever solution the Legislature comes up with?
If she signs the bill into law and presents it to the Kansas Supreme Court, she’s essentially approving of the Legislature’s work and putting her office’s support behind it. Oh, she can criticize the bill, list its shortcomings and generally call it a mutt, but if she signs it, it’s her mutt, too.
If she vetoes the bill, well, the court doesn’t really have anything to look at on its deadline of April 12 for a legislative solution. Any pieces of the bill that might have won favor from the court just won’t exist in state law. That essentially turns the whole issue over to the Kansas Supreme Court and allows the court to write whatever new school finance plan it can devise... and send the bill to the Legislature to pay. That’s not likely a result that the governor would enjoy. It means even if the Legislature did schools right–or won some measure of praise from the court–Sebelius would have been an obstacle to the eventual solution of the school funding problem. Not a good role for a governor.
Or, the governor could just refuse to sign the bill and allow it automatically to become law without her signature. (There’s no "pocket veto" or, we guess, "purse veto" in Kansas law.)
It would be unusual, of course, but politically, what are the downside and the upside of allowing the bill to become law without a signature for a governor who is undoubtedly going to seek a second term?
Downside, of course, is it appears that she’s abandoning the school issue, leaving taxpayers and schoolchildren and the sizable educational industry to the mercy of the court (which will happen anyway).
Upside? If the legislative solution doesn’t solve the school problem, she can say then it’s time for a new Legislature (probably with more Democrats), oh, and of course, the reelection of the governor to lead a retooled Legislature after 2006.
It’s a tricky political problem, made less clear by how the media will view the action and relate it to the voting public in headlines and newscasts.
But then, this is politics and the governor may have a better outcome just forwarding unsigned whatever the Legislature does on school finance to the Kansas Supreme Court.
March 10, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 7, 2005)A new superhero?
Remember that old joke about the guy whose rope was too short to bind his load, and then he cut it to see if that would somehow help?
The most socially conservative wing of the Kansas Republican Party appears ready to repeat that exercise in the upcoming 2006 election cycle.
The most socially conservative wing of the party thought it had pretty much won the day when it elected former State Treasurer Tim Shallenburger of Baxter Springs as state party chairman.
Press reports notwithstanding, Kansas Republicans–or at least most of those elected to public office–didn’t really lose anything when the party elected Shallenburger.
Moderate Republicans whined, of course, and Democrats were jubilant that Shallenburger, whom Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius defeated in the 2002 gubernatorial election and who was painted as way too conservative for Kansas, would lead the opposition party.
But, the real effect was that Shallenburger, typically and without the general press’s hype, pencils out as a politician who really wasn’t any more conservative than he had to be to get elected to whatever office he was seeking. He’s conservative... enough.
But he saw the difference between a conservative who just makes noise and a conservative who gets elected–and can actually steer, if not control, public policy for the state.
Within days of the party’s convention in January, those on the further right wing decided that Shallenburger probably wasn’t as conservative as they’d hoped, when the issue came to abortion. And because politics abhors a vacuum, Attorney General Phill Kline appears on the scene with the hottest antiabortion issue of the day and potentially the authority as the state’s chief law enforcement officer to take existing Kansas law and find new ways to enforce it.
All of a sudden, for the party that tends to find reasons to fracture itself, Kline presented a new opportunity.
Here’s how that plays out. The most conservative Republican state chairman in a decade, Shallenburger, says he’s going to lend the party’s support to candidates who emerge from primary elections and are on the general election ballot. That’s the job of the state party. Whoever makes it onto the general election ballot with an R beside his or her name gets the party’s support.
But pro-life Republicans were initially upset at that pledge from Shallenburger, because they wanted a chairman who would dote on conservatives, and for the party’s pro-life-at-any-cost wing. "Fixing" the party by electing Shallenburger didn’t do the job because equally spreading the party’s resources among all general election candidates means that some pro-choice Republicans are going to get help, too.
That’s where Kline’s most recent effort to subpoena the medical records of abortion clinic patients puts a big-name Republican, with the most influential state job short of governor, into the tights of a new, tougher-on-abortion superhero.
Kline has redefined what it means to be on the cutting edge of the pro-life movement in Kansas... putting him several paces to the right of Shallenburger in the view of the party’s most socially conservative members. If he wins the right to examine the medical records of women who have undergone late-term abortions, he’s chilled the abortion business in Kansas, which is what the Republican Party’s far-right is after.
Where does that play for the party? Well, it means that for the most vigorous primary-election voting wing of the party, the social conservatives, Kline becomes the new standard-bearer, whether he solicits the role or not. And, anyone not as conservative or not as quotably conservative as Kline, becomes just another of those moderate Republicans that the conservatives rail against.
Kline has moved the Republican flag to the right, and for a significant number of Kansas Republicans, it just became easier to be labeled a "Republican in Name Only" or RINO, in the party’s shorthand.
March 3, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 28, 2005)Just a thought...
It looks like the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks didn’t spend all last year fishing and hunting or even picnicking... maybe it also spent a little time studying "education politics" and the work of Kansans for Prosperity.
Remember the fuss last fall about Kansans for Prosperity? That’s the conservative, educational, antitax group that made its point to voters that some candidates had voted to raise taxes, and if you didn’t like it, you could let them know about it by either sending them a note or calling them or... presumably... voting against them in the primary or general election.
You’ll also recall that Kansans for Prosperity didn’t once actually say vote for or vote against anyone, and therefore, it wasn’t really a campaign committee that had to report its receipts and expenses. Well, there is a dab of "under the Dome" controversy over a similar "educational" effort by Wildlife and Parks to mobilize boat owners to quietly support a proposal by, golly!, Wildlife and Parks to impose a refundable $5 fee increase on motor vehicle registrations to be spent on parks so that the agency wouldn’t have to charge boaters, or any Kansans, entrance fees to the parks. Sound like a good deal if you are a boater? Sure does....
The effort was simple: find a group of relatively hard-to-reach Kansans who would see an upside from passage of relatively obscure legislation and urge them to contact their legislators about the bill.
To make sure that the effort wasn’t political enough to show up on the radar screen, the "Attention Boaters" letter sent to those who have registered or renewed their boat registration included the phrase "If you feel strongly about his issue one way or the other, please contact your legislators and let them know your position." That sentence pretty much defuses what could be an out-and-out public lobbying campaign by a state agency.
But it still left a bad taste with legislators, using the boaters’ list to essentially campaign for a bill.
And, boat owners? How would you know who the boat owners are? Well, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks knows who the boat owners are, because that is the agency that registers boats in Kansas and it has all their names and addresses.
Now, this is inside-baseball stuff. Generally, if a state agency wants more money, it checks with the governor and proposes a bill, slugs it out in House Appropriations and Senate Ways and Means Committees to get the bill approved, and then hopes that the agency can convince a majority of legislators to vote for it.
The bill? It would raise probably about $10 million for the Wildlife and Parks fee fund and a couple million more for a local parks grant program. That is, if not very many Kansas vehicle owners went to their kitchen copying machine and made a copy of their vehicle registration receipt, hunted up an envelope, wrote a little note to Revenue Secretary Joan Wagnon asking for the $5 to be refunded, figured out where the Kansas Department of Revenue is, and mailed the refund request in. Sounds like a lot of work for $5, doesn’t it?
For now, it sounds like the last boat licensee has gotten the Wildlife and Parks letter. Wildlife and Parks has stopped the letter writing campaign. The bill itself? Looks a little weak, but don’t count it out because everyone likes nice state parks, whether you take your boat to them or just walk around in them, and the fee is a fairly quiet way to raise money. Who reads their car registration certificate, anyway?
We’re probably lucky on this one. What, for example, if for some reason Joan Wagnon didn’t like the Wildlife and Parks fee and started sending the roughly two million vehicle owners an "Attention Motorists" letter, saying "If you feel strongly about this issue...?" Lots of mail and probably lots of legislators with flat ears from being on the telephone.
That would make legislators easier to spot on the street, though. Their hats would sit crooked.