First of five articles on the history of trouble in the Kansas Republican party
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Although Kansans frequently elect Democratic governors, we are seen as a Republican state because the party holds a cherished roster of celebrities ‒ Landon, Eisenhower and Dole among them ‒ and because it remains the big broker of influence in Topeka.
With few exceptions, Republicans are elected routinely to the statewide offices and to the Congress and U.S. Senate. The party has held majorities in the State Senate and House of Representatives for more than 70 years ‒ with a couple of brief interruptions, when Democrats controlled the House (65-60) in 1977-’79 and in 1991-’93 (63-62).
Republicans have since built Statehouse super majorities over Democrats, 85-40 in the House and 29-11 in the Senate. Control is unlikely to change soon. Nor is the inclination to feud with itself. The party is big enough that it provokes its own culture wars.
Meanwhile, Democratic governors have interpreted Republican legislatures better than the Republicans have. Democrats Docking, Carlin, Finney, Sebelius and Kelly deemed it more important to understand Republicans than to fight them. All but Finney, who declined to seek reelection, were elected to multiple terms.
Over the years, Kansas has been governed mostly by Republicans (in spirit if not registration) who strongly believed in the party as a mechanism to coordinate the executive and legislative branches.
But when Republicans fail to unify, their connective tissue in Topeka is weakened; their majority statewide is reduced to a confederacy of tribal warlords seeking either to protect their own turf or expand their little empires.
Government then becomes a battleground for coalitions moved more by primal instinct and feudal skirmishes than by political planning. The chief mission, the solving substantive problems, goes walkabout.
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Today’s squabbles are typical, extending a long legacy of dispute, mostly over power. Early this year Republican delegates narrowly elected Mike Brown, a hard-right election denier, as state chairman. Months later, in May, the state committee moved to consolidate Brown’s power by proposing that groups representing women, Black, Hispanic and young Republicans be removed from the state party’s executive board.
This ignited unrest among old-line conservatives and moderates.
Kelly Arnold, a former GOP chairman, said the banishment would disavow groups vital to the health of the party. “What is it going to look like if the Republican Party tells these groups of women and minority groups and young Republicans ‘sorry, we don’t need you to be part of the Republican Party?’” he said. “You will have a very divided Republican Party.”
The new order would also remove party leaders who have won state and federal elections, including members of Congress and Republicans elected to statewide office and GOP leaders in the legislature.
Brown’s bid for power waits for approval and enactment. Republican discontent simmers.
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This episode adds to the party’s heated past. In 1987 Gov. Mike Hayden, only months after his election, pulled two thick-witted stunts: He insisted the legislature approve a death penalty, and called a special session to demand his version of a $2.7 billion pork barrel highway program.
Republicans simply refused to go along; Hayden’s demands were reckless and rude, and his Republicans in the House and Senate did their governor a favor by canning both of them.
Meanwhile the state’s Attorney General, Bob Stephan, was facing trial in a civil suit tainted with sex and hush money, slush funds and bagmen. He was accused of breaking a contract not to talk about his payoff to a woman who sued him for sexual harassment. (The case was settled.)
And Dave Owen, former lieutenant governor, state GOP chairman, candidate for governor and national finance chairman for Bob Dole became a central figure in state and federal campaign finance violations, influence peddling and rigging government contracts for business associates. (He later bargained for a year in prison for violating federal tax law.)
All of this piled on the disquiet that had riddled Republican wards for more than a generation:
‒ The bitter discord of 1956 when Warren Shaw, a Topeka attorney and businessman, challenged the party’s incumbent governor, Fred Hall, on grounds that he was a lunatic, and won. Shaw lost the general election to Democrat George Docking.
‒ Later resentments split into factions led by former GOP Chairman Don Concannon, a Hugoton attorney and Senate President Robert Bennett, an Overland Park attorney. Bennett defeated Concannon in the 1974 GOP primary by only 299 votes. Bennett was elected governor, but the wounds did not heal.
(Next: A secession movement)
