Two years ago, we offered an assessment of the Kansas
Legislature with the headline, A sinister session. “The temp-
tation is strong,” we said, “to describe the current session as
the most imperious, presumptuous, bone-headed assembly
in Kansas history … Certainly in more than a century of
legislating, Kansas has known a session that was even more
destructive.
“We just don’t know when it was.”
HOW NAIVE. After more than 40 years of watching legisla-
tive sessions in Topeka, we still had no idea how far the col-
lective intelligence of this group could fall. “Intelligence?”
Incapacity is more like it. This assembly is dominated,
cajoled, whip-sawed, extorted and bullied by ranks of people
– from the governor and Republican leadership to committee
chairmen and their lackeys – who show us almost daily that
they have no idea how stupid they really are.
This legislature is incapable of reasoned deliberation, or, for
that matter, any deliberation at all. Legislation, especially the
repressive kind (the entire state budget, and the frontal attacks
on teachers, the courts and public education, for starters) is
often packaged in parliamentary trickery to avoid committee
hearings or debate by the full House or Senate.
This legislature has become a repository for political hacks,
lackeys for ALEC, sycophants of the cash-laden Koch broth-
ers, tea party nut-bags, John Birchers, anti-abortion psychos,
religious fanatics, and countless other ham-fists who believe
the salvation of dear Ad Astra lies in guns for all, keeping
women barefoot and pregnant and their offspring away from
decent schools, and putting justice up for sale by putting
judges up for election.
When it comes to education, for one example, this legisla-
ture would return us to Dayton, Tenn., to put the moderates
on trial with John Stokes for even thinking to teach evolution,
or thinking at all. They would welcome, with open arms and
closed minds, yet another religious orgy, in which the law
yields to holy writ, the rule of shrill, inane Biblical squawk-
ing, the gurgling of The Rev. Brownback, ad hominem, seek-
ing the almighty to pull us penitents back from the fires of
hell. That’s schooling the old-fashioned way.
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material viewed by others as “harmful” to minors. The legis-
CONSIDER the plans, including:
– Our state budget, sink-hole of the Great Plains, was con-
ceived by a governor who has yet to discover beads missing
from his abacus. He continues to insist that something will
turn up to erase the $300 million and $700 million deficits in
the spending plans his legislative troops are to approve for the
next two years. Lacking any idea how to balance the accounts,
they have committed $3 million to pay an out-state consultant
to resolve the budget shortfalls.
– The great brains of the Legislature, with the governor’s
blessing, have issued $1 billion in revenue bonds to shore up
teachers’ and state employees’ pensions that were robbed to
fill part of the state budget hole. The plan is to sell bonds,
invest the proceeds in the stock market, and watch the profits
roll in. What will roll in, is history’s first Margin Call on a
Ponzi scheme.
– Legislation would prohibit job-related paycheck deduc-
tions, designed chiefly to forbid payroll contributions for
union dues. But language being tricky, the measure affects a
long list of deductions for other purposes, including charitable
and non-profit contributions.
– The House and Senate have blessed measures that freeze
the pay and positions of classified (protected) state employ-
ees. New or replacement employees will be unclassified with
few employment protections. Raises or promotions for cur-
rent classified workers would demand they resign their civil
service protection.
– Special targets are workers with unconventional gen-
der identity or sexual orientation. In February, Brownback
removed civil service protections (ordered by Gov. Kathleen
Sebelius) that prohibit discrimination based on gender or
sexual orientation.
– The Senate has passed a bill that subjects public and pri-
vate school educators to criminal charges for using curriculum
material viewed by others as “harmful” to minors. The legis-
lation is vague, largely without definition, leaving such terms
as “obscene” and “harmful” to the imagination.
– Another bill requires public school district employees to
undergo fingerprint and criminal background checks every
five years. It’s not clear who pays the $50 cost for the inves-
tigation. The measure affects 35,000 certified educators and
27,000 non licensed employees working in districts state-
wide. (Total cost: $3 million.) It was not explained why the
bill is silent on the legions of volunteers and college students
involved with children in local public schools.
– On March 25, Brownback signed legislation that abolishes
the state’s school finance law and replaces it with a system of
block grants that freeze state aid at current levels and subject
additional spending to local property taxes. The plan dooms
nearly every rural school district, leaving budgets dependant
on local taxes. The bill-signing was in secret, with no public
ceremony. The House and Senate passed this historic change
in only 12 days with little or no debate.
– The state budget itself is before the House in a Senate bill,
dissolving any chance for amendment or productive debate
over $14.5 billion in spending.
THE COURTS are the last hope between public schools and
their evisceration. Time and again the district and appel-
late courts have ruled that the Legislature has consistently
and unconstitutionally under-funded the state’s local public
schools.
The governor wants to remake the Kansas judiciary to
his own liking for two prime reasons: first, the courts have
thwarted his and his legislature’s plan to dismantle the educa-
tion system as we know it; second, the courts have ruled that
a wholesale prohibition of abortion in Kansas is not in the best
interest of women, families or the citizenry.
Brownback’s loathing for the courts is well-known. He
has muscled the legislature into granting him sole power to
appoint appellate judges, and seeks a bypass or repeal of the
constitutional amendment that provides the lay-lawyer selec-
tion process for Supreme Court justices. Naming justices, for
the governor, removes the messy obstacle of law from his plan
to rule almost at will.
He’s coming closer. In mid-March, the House Appropriations
Committee made it clear that the state’s judicial budget could
suffer if the courts order the Legislature to spend more money
on schools. The Senate has placed judiciary funding in a bill
apart from the rest of the state budget. The procedure would
allow lawmakers to tie the courts’ funding bill to various
policy changes that would otherwise run as separate legisla-
tion. (Put another way: The governor and legislators suggest
that the judiciary will suffer if court rulings continue to run
counter to their politics.)
THIS LEGISLATURE is content to draft only legislation that
injures certain citizens, harasses groups of them, or harms
their cities and counties.
Meanwhile, the governor is busy liquidating the past,
with all its government beneficence, its grand highways, its
excellent schools with equitable funding, a government that
guaranteed, at least, opportunities for those who want to work,
food for those who would otherwise starve, pensions for the
old and medical care for the sick.
Step by step the governor and his legislature are freeing
Kansans from the shackles of school finance, its statewide
uniform property tax. They are determined to release the citi-
zenry from the burdens of state aid in its many forms, leaving
them to the glories of independence, secure in the comfort
of the state’s religious freedom protection act, the right to
ignore law that withers before a “closely held religious tenant
or belief.”
Before us, thanks to the governor, is our version of
Gleichschaltung, which in an earlier, more evil era, was so
elegantly called the “co-ordination” of the state, or Reich.
The plan was deceptively simple, with the advantage of
cloaking the seizure of absolute power in legality through
“enabling acts.”
Sound familiar?
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– JOHN MARSHALL
