Fourth of five articles on a history of trouble in the Kansas Republican party
Quarrels are inflamed in most political parties, a product of the beast, especially if the beast is dominant in a state. But in recent years, the struggles for attention and power among Kansas Republicans have turned venomous and vindictive. For many members, their party has soured.
Earlier this year at a GOP convention in Topeka, delegates elected a new state chairman, Mike Brown, a hard-right election denier and conspiracy theorist. Brown won a nasty fight by the thinnest margin over a longtime moderate who had preached “inclusion.”
In May, the state committee proposed exclusion. Groups representing women, Black, Hispanic and young Republicans were to be removed from the state party’s executive board. This would secure Brown’s power. The new order ‒ not yet enacted ‒ would also expunge Republicans holding state or federal office, including members of Congress, state executives and legislative leadership.
Brown’s bid for more power against the rising discontent of moderates is another chapter in the party’s legacy of dispute. It follows the trouble reignited during Sam Brownback’s first gubernatorial run in 2010 and the campaign hysterics of Kris Kobach, who was a candidate for secretary of state.
By 2010, Brownback had been Kansas Secretary of Agriculture (1986-’93), a member of congress (’95-’96) and a United States Senator for 14 years. He was unremarkable in Washington, a minor Republican voice known mostly for his pious fervor and his boorish staff.
In Kansas Brownback preached trickle-down economics, abolishing income taxes, banning abortion, funding faith-based education, cutting state aid, and privatizing the state’s social welfare, Medicaid and prison system, among other programs.
Kobach, a hard-right mercenary who had helped draft stringent voter and immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, was running for secretary of state; he warned of immigrant hordes invading Kansas to flood the polls with illegal ballots.
Both were elected.
Early in his first term, Brownback orchestrated primary election campaigns against Republicans deemed disloyal because they questioned his policies. Eight Senate incumbents were in his crosshairs; six, including the senate president, were purged in the 2012 GOP primary election, replaced with dutiful Brownbackers who won general elections.
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Over time, Brownback’s tenure and Kobach’s time in office were marked by trauma and embarrassment.
Brownback’s “Glide Path to Zero” income taxes brought the state a billion-dollar budget deficit and near-bankruptcy. Kobach’s charade was unmasked by courts that threw out his unconstitutional schemes, and by a federal judge who ordered him back to law school for a refresher course.
In Topeka the Speaker of the House and Senate President commanded loyalty, preferring to rule rather than lead. Dismayed Republicans, fearful, remained mum. The party had come under the authoritarian spell of special interest crusades and the hardened dogma of President Trump.
But by then Brownback, his popularity gone, left office to become the president’s special ambassador for international religious freedom. Kobach ran for governor.
Brownback was gone but his acolytes remained in Topeka. Republican leaders demanded loyalty to a stringent conservatism, their legislation and talking points scripted by distant cause lobbies and political action committees.
Local concerns were put aside. Immigrant invasions and voter fraud took priority over school finance, fixing bad roads, rising local taxes.
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For the 2018 primary elections, Republican officials measured candidates for their loyalty. They were to sign contracts that restricted debates to party-sanctioned events with questions screened or scripted in advance.
One candidate for governor, Jim Barnett, would not sign. He had been the Republican nominee in 2006 but was now banned from debates, blacklisted because he had changed. In 2006 he was as far right as Republican conservatives went, and campaigned for governor that way. He lost to incumbent Kathleen Sebelius. Over time, Barnett embraced moderation.
Kobach won the primary election, then lost to Laura Kelly. Voters had grown weary of Kobach’s sharp elbows, his fear-tactics, his authoritarian edge, his fists.
Kansans ‒ Republicans, Democrats and independents ‒ had elected a governor and legislators to pull the state from its pool of red ink, to rejuvenate local schools, restore the highway budget, to fix mangled welfare and Medicaid programs.
As the state turned moderate, the Republican party turned inward, stiffened. The spirit of traditional conservatives ‒ of Landon, Eisenhower and Dole ‒ was shoved aside for the national megaphone, its dogma imperious and absolute. Local matters, community concerns, no longer seemed important.
(Next: Good people, bad politics)
