Newspaper Columns - March 2006

March 30, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 27, 2006)

Who's packing now?

Well, now we have a state law that allows pretty-well vetted Kansans to carry concealed weapons in places which don’t care and not carry them in places where they probably present a little problem, and it’s time to figure out the political winners in this fight.

In every major issue that makes the headlines, there are political winners and political losers.

This one is going to be tough, though, because the issue goes so many different directions. Plotting who gets more votes at this fall’s elections means some heavy thought.

Here we go:

Start, of course, with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who has vetoed concealed-carry in the past, sticking to her guns. She didn’t like the idea of Kansans carrying around guns under their coats or in their purses in the past, and she hasn’t changed her mind. Depending on whether you think she was wrong-headed on the issue or not, at least she is consistent.

It would have appeared—no, it would have been--wishy-washy and politically opportunistic for the governor to count the votes and decide all of a sudden that she likes concealed-carry.

You either believe in concealed-carry or you don’t.

Most of the field of potential GOP gubernatorial nomination candidates like concealed-carry, such as former House Speaker Robin Jennison, R-Healy, who has always liked it, and Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, who used to not like it before he was a candidate and likes it now that he is a candidate. Ken Canfield, another Republican gubernatorial nomination candidate, doesn’t have a track record on concealed-carry but he’s surely bright enough to figure that now it is law and something he ought to get on board with, but not do a lot of crowing about.

So, how does this play out at the top of the ticket? It really depends on whether concealed-carry is a big issue for individual voters. There are going to be thousands who sign up for their gun permits and who will be happy that at least for those who choose to legally carry guns, there’s some law on the books now to sort out the folks who even gun-carriers don’t want to carry guns. And there will be thousands more who won’t carry guns but at least have the comfort that those who do are pretty responsible people who just choose strange ways to accessorize their clothing.

The folks who don’t want anybody but cops to carry guns, well, they just flat lost on the deal. They can blame the governor for not marshalling enough support to make her veto stick or they can say they agree with the governor and, like the governor, just got out-voted.

It’s the legislative races where the concealed-carry deal gets more interesting. There are districts where polling shows that a majority of voters like concealed-carry and districts where voters don’t. If you presume that in districts where voters like concealed-carry--or at least enough of the voters like it to make it worthwhile to woo them—whoever voted for the bill picks up some votes. Where most don’t like concealed-carry, you have to wonder whether a legislative candidate who voted against concealed-carry is going to win a lot of support by saying he/she was outvoted. It’s going to be difficult to build a campaign around repeal of a law that won’t be in effect until after the elections. And in a district where the majority doesn’t want concealed-carry, why would a candidate who favors the law want to even bring the subject up?

How this all plays out on the campaign trail--in the brochures and on the doorstep--will be interesting to watch.

Correction: In last week’s column, I said that the terms of four members of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission had expired, with three of them continuing to serve anyway and one slot open. According to the commission, two of them--Robert Miller and Elon Torrence—were reappointed to serve until January 2008. That information hadn’t been updated on the agency’s website.

March 23, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 20, 2006)

A question of Ethics?

It made headlines when Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline was fined $1,500 last week for illegally soliciting campaign contributions from registered lobbyists, a violation of the state’s campaign finance laws.

It was pretty unintentional, by all accounts: Kline hired –surprisingly--a lobbyist, of all people, to compile the list of invitations to an expensive fund-raising event featuring former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to make sure the list didn’t contain the names of any registered lobbyists.

State Sen. Kay O’Connor, R-Olathe, got in the headlines, too, last year when she sent a pre-campaign fundraising letter during the legislative session to a list that included lobbyists. She was fined $3,000.

Most of the year, lobbyists can be asked to give money to candidates for state office but not during the time that the Legislature is in session. That solicitation just smacks of “vote for sale” or at least “vote for rent” in a legislative setting; for other statewide offices, ranging from governor to state treasurer, the same rules apply for the shutoff of solicitation of lobbyist contributions.

It’s hard to object to that law. It sounds right to most of us.

But the Ethics Commission itself is a commission made up of appointees of powerful political figures. The governor has an appointee, and the speaker of the House, attorney general and secretary of state are among the officials who have an appointee on the commission.

It didn’t make the headlines or even a mention in the stories underneath the headlines last year when Elon Torrence, a widely respected former Associated Press reporter/Statehouse legend who is an appointee of Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, voted for the $3,000 fine for O’Connor who is ginning up a Republican primary campaign to challenge Thornburgh.

And it didn’t make the headlines last week, or even the stories in the general media, when the designee of the attorney general’s office, Julie Lind, participated in the vote and also made the motion to fine Kline $1,500, half the amount an admittedly unrepentant O’Connor was fined. Lind is an appointee of former Attorney General Carla Stovall and though her term has expired, she continues to serve as the designee of the office of attorney general. Kline hasn’t replaced her or re-appointed her.

Most of us would figure that an appointee—or even just someone hanging around on the commission—would not participate in deliberations on a case in which the appointee, or at least the appointing authority of the appointee, is involved. It just doesn’t sound quite right or fair or…maybe ethical?

The terms on the commission of Retired Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court William Miller, Lind and Torrence all have expired, or at least they haven’t been formally reappointed. House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka, hasn’t made his appointment to the Ethics Commission for several years and that chair remains vacant.

At some point, the commission is going to lose that mantle of authority to enforce ethics laws if it becomes neglected by those who designate its members.

Maybe that gradual erosion of authority is intentional.

It is possible in the political culture to diminish the Ethics Commission’s role in elections and campaigns, to relegate it to just a troublesome nuisance, a “pay the fine and continue” speed bump in the political process.

That would be a bad thing. But it can happen with a little neglect.

It’s time for the legislative morality debate, again, and this time it’s probably about more than just people opposing gambling or any expansion of gambling in Kansas.

This time, a whole lot of other issues revolve around whether Kansas allows anyone but Indian tribes to operate gambling facilities here.

We’ve all gotten a little tired of the lame “it’s for the children” stuff about the possibility that if gambling is expanded and the state winds up profiting from thousands of slot machines that much of the state’s take will be spent on public education.

That argument for gaming this year goes: Kansas needs the revenue for the second or third year of a giant school spending increase demanded by the Kansas Supreme Court. Practically it does, but there are other ways to raise money. One of the simplest is to just raise taxes, which the people who oppose gaming—with a handful of exceptions—don’t want to do either. So, if funding for schools doesn’t increase over the next few years, the court is either going to find a way to demand that the state raise taxes or the Legislature is going to find some way to reduce the authority of the court--and that is likely to be the real issue here: who wins.

There are some costs to preparing for that future battle, of course. A child is generally just in second grade once, and what he or she doesn’t learn in second grade, he or she probably won’t pick up in third or fourth grade, either. At some point, a child who requires a little more time and support than the “normal” pupil is going to wind up being a less-than-optimal prospective employee for Kansas business. But that’s likely to take so long to show up, or it will create a whole new class of low-wage and low-expectations workers, that folks fighting gaming today needn’t think about it.

The moral arguments are there, too. There are probably always going to be people who will over-gamble if it is convenient. And there’s probably an argument that making gaming relatively inaccessible—it’s pretty much a northeast Kansas avocation now--will reduce the number of over-gamblers whose cars won’t make the trip or who don’t like to ride buses from distant points. That accessibility issue is being solved for Kansans, though, with Oklahoma casinos sprouting just across the state line, and Missouri already heavily involved.

There’s always the argument that a few already-rich guys are going to make all the money from gaming and the state won’t be getting enough of the money. That argument is probably the easiest to make because folks are ginning up financial spreadsheets showing who gets how much and why isn’t the state’s take bigger.

Not a bad argument, really, it gets greed into the game. It would, of course, be a better argument if anyone knew how much money tribes are making and determining whether they are making unconscionable amounts of money, which we suppose would fit the definition of greed. There are guesses, but frankly, nobody who isn’t sworn to secrecy or a member of a tribal board of directors has a clue. That’s the way the compacts with the tribes were written, so that argument stands pretty much alone, like complaining that your neighbor drives a better car than you do or buys nicer cuts of meat than you typically bring home.

Yes, this may just come down to people not liking other people gambling, a moral issue. If gaming is immoral, and it might be, then we guess that not expanding it any further in Kansas is as relatively moral thing to do, but it’s a half-measure that isn’t really satisfying, we imagine. The full-boat morality play is probably to shut down the Lottery and the pari-mutuel tracks and buy out the Indians’ interest in their casino compacts.

Financing public education is a complicated undertaking for the Kansas Legislature.

It’s the biggest-money item in the state budget. There are 299 school districts scattered across the state which look first to Topeka to see how much money they’ll have to educate the state’s schoolchildren.

One thing that the Kansas Legislature is going to get fussy about this year is receiving credit—hopefully from the Kansas Supreme Court, which has held that the state isn’t making “suitable provision” for the financing of public schools—for the money that it does spend or at least makes available for spending.

So that’s why you can expect to read a lot about the transfer of Local Option Budget money into the column on school district budgets that has been the home of state aid to schools.

The concept by some legislators is that because the state made possible the Local Option Budget, and most school districts levy a local property tax for that LOB, that the state ought to get credit for it. So, at least two proposals for financing schools include transferring some of that Local Option Budget money into the column of state aid to schools.

It doesn’t create any new money, of course. It’s moving money from one pocket to another and winding up with about the same amount, so it really doesn’t add to spendable money by school districts. But, it sure makes the state look like it is spending a lot more money when actually, the state is just taking credit for money that is already there.

The upside? It may induce the Supreme Court to take notice that through the LOB, the state is actually making a suitable provision for finance of public education. One thought is that the Supreme Court must have believed that districts spend that LOB money on band instruments, cheerleader uniforms and courses that aren’t required to be taught. Frills.

Most district superintendents will tell you that the LOB is practically required to be spent on things like lights and heat and teacher salaries because the state payments to district won’t cover the necessities for their operations. So the “option” part of that LOB that sounds a lot like spending on optional stuff really is a misnomer.

Renaming money that is already there and which is being spent for day-to-day operations of schools probably doesn’t hurt anything. And there is a stipend from the state called “equalization” aid to make sure that for most districts a mill of local property taxes raises the same amount of money regardless of the property wealth of the district.

This renaming of money, then, may be--in the lingo of urbanites--money laundering. In the slang of rural folks, it might be called rustling.

But, while the swapping of names for the money may impress the Supreme Court, it doesn’t really create any new money for schools. If you think schools spend too much money now, that renaming of funds may be all you care to see happen. If you think schools need more money, the renaming of funds doesn’t solve your problem and means that you have to find other ways to get real, new spendable money to districts.

For most of us, it means that there is just another level of complexity in trying to figure out school finance, what’s real new money, what is renamed money. We’re figuring the Kansas Supreme Court is going to determine the difference pretty quickly.

And that means, likely, if the Legislature calls renamed money “new” money, some lawmakers may have their summer campaign for reelection interrupted by a special session of the Legislature, just like last year.

Sometimes, if you watch the Legislature long enough, it becomes apparent that there are serious problems that the Legislature just can’t figure out how to solve. It tries its best but just falls short.

One of those problems that legislators are wrestling with this session is domestic battery, which sounds pretty clinical but it is beating up a spouse.

It is a big problem that makes most of us uneasy to talk about because the simple solutions that spring to mind involve long prison terms or maybe just extreme violence against the offender.

It is generally women and mothers who suffer from the offenders, though a few men are victims, and when they are, it makes the newspapers as a “man bites dog” story. But the neat-and-clean bills that the Legislature debates and sometimes passes just don’t seem to solve the problem. The efforts are laudable, the arguments are good, but the problems just don’t get solved.

Last week, the Senate, for example, passed a bill that would allow one diversion in a lifetime for anyone convicted of abuse of a spouse. Abuse is a polite term for beating up, pounding, tying up, abusing and maybe even killing a spouse.

Tough stuff. This is really serious and one of the problems is that victims, again mostly women, either don’t report the abuse or it happens, well, at home where there are rarely witnesses. It’s “he said/she said.”

There are provisions in law for diversion of batterers, generally men, charged with spousal abuse. They can be ordered to get counseling, be ordered to stay away from the victim, that sort of thing, and maybe one diversion will solve the problem, teach anger management and so on. But maybe it won’t.

That means prosecutors, for the prosecution that will send the batterer to prison, need a good case, evidence, a brave witness/victim, and a jury that will convict. Failing that, the batterer is free to batter again. The prosecutor is out of tricks and maybe the batterer goes to prison, but generally he doesn’t, and the batterer and the victim are back together again.

It’s going to mean that prosecutors are occasionally going to have to tell a battered spouse that no charges will be filed because chances of winning are poor and that the victim will probably be victimized again and again until the right evidence, the right circumstances and the right jury can be found.

It must be emotionally devastating to a victim to learn that not all the stars lined up correctly for a conviction of someone who beat them up. Imagine the frustration, the fear, the anger, and the frantic decisions of how to reorder one’s life, find support, protect the children and start again.

But, practically, one diversion means that a broad range of less-that-prison sanctions aren’t available to prosecutors until that “right” beating occurs when a conviction is likely.

It sounds simple, the one-strike, you’re in prison theory, but it is likely that there will be multiple beatings that are essentially lamented but un-prosecuted until that conviction occurs.

One lifetime diversion sounds good, but prosecutors will tell you that when it works, marriages are saved, battering ends, fear eases, but that one diversion doesn’t do the trick often.

There may be a way to solve this, but the Legislature hasn’t found it yet. Victims of domestic violence, their families and friends have all the right emotions about the crime. So do legislators who have seen the pictures of battered women and keep trying to find ways to stop the violence.