United States Governors

May 28, 2017

So, to sum up the last few embarrassments from my state, Governor Abbot wants to shoot reporters, "Taliban Dan" is still shaking in his boots over trans folks relieving themselves in public bathrooms, and Texas's gun laws are so strict that we need to switch on over to “constitutional carry” .

Hell's bells, I go on a media-lite diet for a few days to let my overtaxed adrenal system rest a bit, and this is what I come back to?!?

May 28, 2017

@Cartmann99 I'm sorry, I know how it is when your state seems to be going in a bad direction. I remember when Bob McDonnell was Governor here in Virginia, and he was pushing his stupid anti-abortion agenda, trying to ram through a requirement that any woman who wanted to have an abortion first have a trans-vaginal ultrasound. He became known as "Transvag Bob". It wasn't too far away from passing, but luckily enough state reps decided to listen to constituents. Man, I despise that piece of human waste, McDonnell. Of course, being a reich wing lackey, he kissed the NRA's ass too.

June 4, 2017

I don't know much about Stacey Abrams, but I hope she can win: "Georgia Democrat aims to be nation’s first female African American governor"

Spoiler

ALBANY, Ga. — Stacey Abrams, a Georgia politician who embodies what many progressives argue is the future of the Democratic Party, launched what she hopes will be a history-making campaign Saturday when she officially announced her candidacy for governor of the Peach State.

The 43-year-old Democratic leader of the Georgia State House, who enters as the front-runner for her party’s nomination, is aiming to become the first African American woman to be elected governor in U.S. history. Abrams is widely considered to be one of the most skilled and savvy political leaders in the state legislature and hopes to replace term-limited Gov. Nathan Deal (R), who has served since 2011. But it won’t be easy: No Democrat has won statewide office in Georgia since 2006, and just 11 black women have ever been elected to statewide positions nationwide.

“Pray for me and work with me,” Abrams told about 100 supporters who braved persistent swarms of gnats to help her kick off her campaign at a barbecue at Chehaw Park in Albany, a small city about three hours south of Atlanta. “I want government to work everyday, for everyone.”

Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer and business executive who writes romance novels on the side, has an army of supporters across the country eager to prove Democrats can win if the party puts its energy into expanding its base among the increasingly diverse state population rather than fretting over white swing voters. That is what Abrams has tried to do as founder of an organization that says it has registered 200,000 new voters in Georgia — along with her work in the state’s House, often while cooperating with Republicans on key legislation and policies — has made her popular with progressives who say the party should rebuild and strengthen the coalition that elected and reelected President Barack Obama.

The rapidly changing complexion of the South, which has seen the percentages of African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans increase, creates the potential for a political makeover. Abrams and other progressive political activists of color believe new voters will want candidates who look more like them.

“Democrats in the South have to reject the notion that our geography requires that politicians soften our commitment to equality and opportunity and that you have to look a certain way,” Abrams said in an interview Friday. “We have to be architects of progressive solutions, and that means leadership that believes we can defy the odds. I believe Democrats have the ability to win, because we have the votes.”

Steve Phillips, a progressive strategist who makes the case for a “new American majority” coalition of people of color and liberal whites, said there are more than 1 million eligible but unregistered voters of color in Georgia — more than enough to close the gap for Democrats, who have narrowed the margins of their losses in the past several elections.

“Georgia is getting more diverse every year. Those numbers are trending in favor of somebody like Stacey,” said Phillips, who is also founder of Democracy in Color, a multimedia effort to push the idea that the Democratic Party’s future is in the growing diversity of the country.

The daughter of United Methodist ministers, Abrams said she is running for governor because she thinks “every Georgian deserves the freedom and the opportunity to thrive, and too many of us are being left behind and left out.”

Abrams arrived in Georgia as a child, when her parents moved with their five children from Gulfport, Miss., looking for better educational opportunities. Abrams earned degrees from Spelman College, the University of Texas and Yale Law School. She is the first female leader of either party in the Georgia General Assembly and the first African American leader in the Georgia House.

“My life is proof that where you begin doesn’t dictate who you become,” she said.

At her kickoff, she told the crowd that she launched her campaign outside the metro Atlanta area because “Albany is just like where I grew up. I’m from a town that is about 150 miles from the capital. Sometimes that 150 miles is a lifetime away. I’m from a place that can also be forgotten because it’s not where we think politics and business should happen.”

Five women — four white and two black — from Thomasville, a small town near the Georgia-Florida line, drove up together to cheer on Abrams. They call themselves Indivisible Women of Southern Georgia and say they are united in their opposition to President Trump. They say that as governor, Abrams could perhaps stem some of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut services for vulnerable children and roll back environmental protections. They also applaud Abrams’s efforts to register more voters and plan to launch a drive in their home county.

In 2014, Abrams founded the New Georgia Project, which focuses on voter registration and engagement with a goal of signing up 800,000 voters of color by 2024. Supporters hail the New Georgia Project for its efforts to urge civic engagement among voters of color, while detractors say it has not lived up to its ambitious promise to register hundreds of thousands of voters.

The group, along with other organizations, sued Georgia’s secretary of state for practices that have resulted in applications being rejected or not being processed in a timely fashion. It also joined a lawsuit to reopen the voter rolls to new registrants for the June 20 runoff in the special election for the state’s 6th Congressional District.

Brian Kemp, the secretary of state who has criticized the group’s lawsuits and in 2014 launched an investigation of the New Georgia Project for allegedly submitting fraudulent voter applications, is running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Abrams, who was first elected to the state House in 2007, representing part of Atlanta and suburban DeKalb County, says her most important legislative achievement was getting more money and support for grandparents or other family members who take in children whose parents can’t care for them. She is intimately familiar with the challenge because her parents are caring for her niece. Abrams said her brother was addicted to drugs and incarcerated.

She drew some criticism for brokering a deal with Republicans that resulted in cuts to a popular state-funded college scholarship program. Abrams said she was trying to save the program from total elimination.

The rise of Abrams’s political career seems to have curtailed her other passion — writing romance novels. Between 2001 and 2009, she published eight books under the nom de plume Selena Montgomery. Abrams said she got her love of writing fiction from her father, who would spin intricate serial bedtime stories for her and her siblings. She started out in the 1990s wanting to write spy novels, she said, but publishers weren’t interested in a black female heroine. “So I made my spy fall in love,” Abrams said, thus launching her literary career. Although she hasn’t published a novel since 2009, Abrams, who also has published nonfiction books about policy, said she plans to continue to write, even if she becomes governor. “I don’t think anything will stop me from writing,” she said, although she acknowledged that it might be hard to keep deadlines.

Despite her growing national profile, which will probably attract cash and volunteers from across the country, Abrams is not the only female Democrat eyeing the state’s top executive job. State Rep. Stacey Evans, who is white, announced her candidacy last month. The 39-year-old lawyer is taking a similar approach in touting her success overcoming a tumultuous childhood and becoming the first in her family to go to college.

Emily’s List, which promotes female candidates who support abortion rights, is backing Abrams, who in 2014 received the organization’s first Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award, named in honor of the former Arizona congresswoman who was seriously wounded when a gunman opened fire, killing six people, as she met with constituents at a Tucson shopping center.

Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, described Abrams as “a strong, powerful woman who has a vision for the future of Georgia.” She said Abrams is a doer as well as a dreamer: “Her ability, particularly as leader in the legislature, and what will make her a great governor, is the ability to pull folks together to really come to solutions even if they all don’t agree with each other.”

Charles Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said that many believe Abrams is the smartest member of the General Assembly, noting that “most Republicans would not want to be quoted on that, but in private many will acknowledge her intellect and hard work.”

But Bullock said Abrams might be slightly ahead of her time. “Despite her abilities, she may be running four to eight years too early,” he said, pointing out that in 2014, Michelle Nunn, daughter of a popular former U.S. senator, had a well-funded campaign but got just 45 percent of the vote in the race with David Perdue (R-Ga.) for the U.S. Senate.

Abrams analyzes the race differently. In 2006, she said, the Democratic nominee for governor lost to his Republican opponent by 400,000 votes; in 2010, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate lost by less than 260,000 votes; in 2014, Nunn lost by 197,000 votes.

“We’ve been able to cut their margin of victory in half in two cycles, but what we have never done is reach out to those voters who’ve been left out and been forgotten,” Abrams said. “What we haven’t done is register hundreds of thousands of new voters who come to the election wanting to see progress, wanting to see opportunity. And what we have not done is build a coalition of voters who have a shared ambition for success. I’ve done that.”

June 4, 2017

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“Despite her abilities, she may be running four to eight years too early,” he said, pointing out that in 2014, Michelle Nunn, daughter of a popular former U.S. senator, had a well-funded campaign but got just 45 percent of the vote in the race with David Perdue (R-Ga.) for the U.S. Senate.

*sighs heavily*

Yes, she may not be successful this time, but even a failed attempt will help the state of Georgia get closer to the day when an African-American woman will be Governor. You'll never win anything if you don't get out there and try your best.

Good luck to you, Ms. Abrams!

June 7, 2017

Good grief: "Texas Governor Revives Stalled Transgender Bathroom Bill"

Spoiler

HOUSTON — Gov. Greg Abbott reignited one of the most divisive issues in Texas politics on Tuesday, calling lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature in part to consider a bill that would reinforce the state’s effort to regulate bathroom use by transgender people in public buildings.

An attempt during the regular session by conservative lawmakers and pastors to pass legislation to regulate bathroom use had been unsuccessful by the time the session ended on Memorial Day. But on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered a 30-day special session starting in July and put on the agenda a bathroom bill that would prevent municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances designed to protect transgender people. The special-session agenda also includes bills that would limit property taxes and keep several state agencies operating.

Opponents of bathroom restrictions, including moderate Republicans, say such rules are discriminatory and would cause economic damage similar to that in North Carolina last year after the state passed transgender bathroom restrictions that spurred widespread boycotts and the cancellation of concerts and sporting events. Supporters say the restrictions protect public safety and privacy in public buildings. They believe the predicted economic fallout has been exaggerated.

“At a minimum, we need a law that protects the privacy of our children in our public schools,” Mr. Abbott told reporters at the Capitol in Austin.

Chuck Smith, the chief executive of the gay rights group Equality Texas, said Mr. Abbott’s decision would harm already vulnerable transgender people. “This is a 100 percent political issue, and the only reason for it is to target, demonize and stigmatize transgender people,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Abbott’s announcement was one of his most closely watched and controversial decisions since he took office in 2015, and his move to order lawmakers back to Austin starting on July 18 represented a flexing of his political muscle. Because the Legislature failed to pass the bill during the regular session, it effectively died; its only chance for survival had been a special session, and only a governor has the authority to convene one.

In doing so, Mr. Abbott ignored the concerns of local and national business leaders but earned swift praise from social conservatives, some of whom had complained that he had remained largely on the sidelines in the debate. Critics said Mr. Abbott, a former judge who is viewed by many as more cautious than his predecessor, Rick Perry, had capitulated to the extreme right, and to one of his Republican colleagues, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who led the push for the restrictions.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Patrick praised what he called the “big and bold special-session agenda,” which he said “solidly reflects the priorities of the people of Texas.”

But in recent days, the chief executives of more than a dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, warned Mr. Abbott in a letter that they were “gravely concerned” that any bathroom-related legislation would hurt the state’s business-friendly reputation. On Tuesday, the gay rights organization Glaad denounced the special session. Democrats criticized the governor for jeopardizing the state’s business-oriented brand.

“My take is that he is clearly panicked about the far right, and he feels the need to shovel as much red meat to the far right of his party as he can,” said State Representative Chris Turner, a Democrat who was the campaign manager for Wendy Davis, Mr. Abbott’s Democratic rival in 2014.

In a recent interview at his Capitol office, Mr. Abbott pushed back against that idea. “The positions that I’ve fought for in my first session and in this session are unalterable conservative principles, so it’s just who I am,” he said.

Special sessions are not uncommon in Texas. Mr. Perry convened 12 during his tenure, on dozens of topics. But this one is likely to be unusually tense, fueled by an already heated debate between two top Republicans.

Mr. Patrick and State Representative Joe Straus III, the speaker of the House and a moderate Republican who said a bathroom bill could hurt the Texas economy, traded barbs as the session drew to a close last month in a rare public display of infighting.

Mr. Straus’s attempt to loosen the bathroom restrictions in the House was rejected by Mr. Patrick and Senate leaders. The resulting stalemate threatened the operation of several state agencies, including the one that licenses doctors. The failure by the Legislature to pass legislation to keep those agencies operating put added pressure on Mr. Abbott to call a special session.

“A special session was entirely avoidable,” he said on Tuesday. “There was plenty of time for the House and Senate to forge compromises.”

The original bathroom bill was much tougher in restricting which bathrooms transgender people could use in government buildings. The new bill, House Bill 2899, is far less detailed and sweeping, and it would take effect in September if it passes.

It would effectively ban local regulation of discrimination. The bill would prohibit cities, counties and school districts from passing anti-discrimination measures to protect any class of people already protected under state law. And it would nullify existing policies in San Antonio, Dallas and other cities that allow transgender people to use the public bathroom that matches their gender identity.

You couldn't make this crap up.

June 8, 2017

13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Good grief: "Texas Governor Revives Stalled Transgender Bathroom Bill"

Reveal hidden contents

HOUSTON — Gov. Greg Abbott reignited one of the most divisive issues in Texas politics on Tuesday, calling lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature in part to consider a bill that would reinforce the state’s effort to regulate bathroom use by transgender people in public buildings.

An attempt during the regular session by conservative lawmakers and pastors to pass legislation to regulate bathroom use had been unsuccessful by the time the session ended on Memorial Day. But on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered a 30-day special session starting in July and put on the agenda a bathroom bill that would prevent municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances designed to protect transgender people. The special-session agenda also includes bills that would limit property taxes and keep several state agencies operating.

Opponents of bathroom restrictions, including moderate Republicans, say such rules are discriminatory and would cause economic damage similar to that in North Carolina last year after the state passed transgender bathroom restrictions that spurred widespread boycotts and the cancellation of concerts and sporting events. Supporters say the restrictions protect public safety and privacy in public buildings. They believe the predicted economic fallout has been exaggerated.

“At a minimum, we need a law that protects the privacy of our children in our public schools,” Mr. Abbott told reporters at the Capitol in Austin.

Chuck Smith, the chief executive of the gay rights group Equality Texas, said Mr. Abbott’s decision would harm already vulnerable transgender people. “This is a 100 percent political issue, and the only reason for it is to target, demonize and stigmatize transgender people,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Abbott’s announcement was one of his most closely watched and controversial decisions since he took office in 2015, and his move to order lawmakers back to Austin starting on July 18 represented a flexing of his political muscle. Because the Legislature failed to pass the bill during the regular session, it effectively died; its only chance for survival had been a special session, and only a governor has the authority to convene one.

In doing so, Mr. Abbott ignored the concerns of local and national business leaders but earned swift praise from social conservatives, some of whom had complained that he had remained largely on the sidelines in the debate. Critics said Mr. Abbott, a former judge who is viewed by many as more cautious than his predecessor, Rick Perry, had capitulated to the extreme right, and to one of his Republican colleagues, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who led the push for the restrictions.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Patrick praised what he called the “big and bold special-session agenda,” which he said “solidly reflects the priorities of the people of Texas.”

But in recent days, the chief executives of more than a dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, warned Mr. Abbott in a letter that they were “gravely concerned” that any bathroom-related legislation would hurt the state’s business-friendly reputation. On Tuesday, the gay rights organization Glaad denounced the special session. Democrats criticized the governor for jeopardizing the state’s business-oriented brand.

“My take is that he is clearly panicked about the far right, and he feels the need to shovel as much red meat to the far right of his party as he can,” said State Representative Chris Turner, a Democrat who was the campaign manager for Wendy Davis, Mr. Abbott’s Democratic rival in 2014.

In a recent interview at his Capitol office, Mr. Abbott pushed back against that idea. “The positions that I’ve fought for in my first session and in this session are unalterable conservative principles, so it’s just who I am,” he said.

Special sessions are not uncommon in Texas. Mr. Perry convened 12 during his tenure, on dozens of topics. But this one is likely to be unusually tense, fueled by an already heated debate between two top Republicans.

Mr. Patrick and State Representative Joe Straus III, the speaker of the House and a moderate Republican who said a bathroom bill could hurt the Texas economy, traded barbs as the session drew to a close last month in a rare public display of infighting.

Mr. Straus’s attempt to loosen the bathroom restrictions in the House was rejected by Mr. Patrick and Senate leaders. The resulting stalemate threatened the operation of several state agencies, including the one that licenses doctors. The failure by the Legislature to pass legislation to keep those agencies operating put added pressure on Mr. Abbott to call a special session.

“A special session was entirely avoidable,” he said on Tuesday. “There was plenty of time for the House and Senate to forge compromises.”

The original bathroom bill was much tougher in restricting which bathrooms transgender people could use in government buildings. The new bill, House Bill 2899, is far less detailed and sweeping, and it would take effect in September if it passes.

It would effectively ban local regulation of discrimination. The bill would prohibit cities, counties and school districts from passing anti-discrimination measures to protect any class of people already protected under state law. And it would nullify existing policies in San Antonio, Dallas and other cities that allow transgender people to use the public bathroom that matches their gender identity.

You couldn't make this crap up.

Just wanted to add what the taxpayers of Texas will have to pay for this special session:

Quote

Lawmakers each get a per diem of $190 a day. With 182 lawmakers for 30 days, a special session will cost more than $1,000,000, not including overhead costs like printing and utilities.

http://www.kvue.com/news/politics/rules-of-a-texas-legislature-special-session/446659068

June 8, 2017

As a Texan, I do not want to pay these people one dime for this special session.

June 8, 2017

Oh my stars. Kris Kobach has announced his candacy for Kansas Governor

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article155063589.html

June 8, 2017

6 hours ago, clueliss said:

Oh my stars. Kris Kobach has announced his candacy for Kansas Governor

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article155063589.html

Oh good gravy. First Brownback, then Kobach? I can't imagine a sum of money I'd have to be paid to move to Kansas.

June 8, 2017

Kobach?

'Let's see how many voters we can disenfranchise' Kobach?

Kansas - get off your asses and vote against him!

June 9, 2017

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh good gravy. First Brownback, then Kobach? I can't imagine a sum of money I'd have to be paid to move to Kansas.

My condolences to the sane people of Kansas.

June 9, 2017

Wait! Wait! This gets BETTER. Kobach is claiming that he turned a job with the Trump administration down. (two even!)

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article155152994.html

(had to go look for the piece - video at the link)

June 10, 2017

Interesting perspective: "Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas"

Spoiler

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

Kansas’s moderate ascendance may portend problems for Republicans in Washington, where many in the party, including President Trump, are pushing to adopt federal tax policies similar to the ones Brownback has installed in Kansas. But while Brownback had hoped what he called Kansas’s “real-live experiment” in conservative economic policy would become a national model, it has instead become a cautionary example.

Brownback and his promised tax cuts were expected to spur enough economic growth to keep the government well funded, but when that economic boom never materialized, state lawmakers faced perennial deficits and had to implement spending reductions to close the gap. And when they did, some lawmakers found that while promising to cut spending plays well during a campaign, the subsequent loss of public services often proves far more unpopular.

“Kansas seems to be ahead of the curve,” said Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Republican who represents a suburb of Kansas City. “If you look at the national political scene right now, I think it seems to me we’re about ready for a course correction.”

That conclusion will be tested in the upcoming gubernatorial Republican primary, when representatives of the party’s more moderate and more conservative wings will square off to replace Brownback when his term expires.

“Nobody wants to pay more taxes, but they also don’t want to live in a state that is fiscally reckless,” said Republican Ed O’Malley, a former state representative and now a primary candidate.

Kris Kobach, Brownback’s secretary of state who was once thought likely to join the Trump administration, entered the contest this week and is decrying the new tax increase. “It is time to drain the swamp in Topeka,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, borrowing a phrase from President Trump.

“This state does not need more money, and the people of Kansas do not need to keep feeding the government monster with year after year of increased taxes,” Kobach told supporters in a speech announcing his candidacy. “Kansas does not have a revenue problem. Kansas has a spending problem.”

The state’s deep spending cuts to schools and programs aimed at helping the poor have been especially controversial. Michael Speer, a schools superintendent and business manager in Coffeyville — a town near Kansas’s border with Oklahoma — says he previously voted for Brownback, but is now troubled by the changes forced on his profession.

“We’re trying to make all the money stretch as far as it can,” Speer said. “We made a conscious effort to not impact the classroom. But I can’t continue to cut custodial staff.”

“I can no longer support him,” Speer said of Brownback.

The gubernatorial primary will involve competition for voters like Judith Deedy. A registered Republican who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills, Deedy said that she was never very interested in politics until she and parents at their local public school started to notice a shift.

The school increased its class sizes and scaled back gifted education. Teachers, worried about their wages and future, began fleeing the Kansas City, Kansas school system for jobs across the state line in Missouri. Now she is an avid opponent of Brownback’s tax cuts.

“In 2016, enough people woke up and said, ‘We have to fix this. The guys in office are refusing to fix this, and come on, the evidence is plain,’” she said. “I really don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, I just want someone reasonable.”

Meanwhile, Brownback’s remaining supporters have been quick to lambaste moderate Republicans for enacting what they have termed the largest tax increase in Kansas history.

Jeff Glendening, the state director for Americans for Prosperity, pledged retaliation. The conservative organization, funded in part by the wealthy Koch brothers, will campaign against Republican lawmakers who voted to raise taxes, he said.

“We’ll be busy with our activists holding those legislators accountable for raising those taxes,“ Glendening said. “This issue is not going to go away.”

“What happens in Kansas breaks so significantly with Republican orthodoxy on taxes,” said Stephen Moore, a former adviser to both Trump and Brownback.

“There’s one thing that unifies the Republican Party today more than anything else. We are a tax-cutting party. We are not a tax-increasing party,” Moore said. “I think Republicans across the country have to be paying attention to this.”

The return to more centrist policies could foreshadow trouble for Trump’s tax plan, which is based on the same concepts that guided Brownback’s overhaul beginning in 2012. Trump has proposed reducing the number of different rates on marginal income and setting all of them at lower levels, as Brownback did.

Trump has also proposed slashing taxes for small businesses. Brownback exempted small-business income from taxation entirely, opening what analysts described as a loophole, in which individuals represented themselves as small businesses to qualify for the tax break.

Trump has not issued a detailed proposal since taking office, but in April the White House released a one-page document on tax policy that reiterated these basic principles.

A plan put forward a year ago by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), contains some similar provisions. The resemblance points to the connections between Brownback and the conservative establishment in Washington. Before becoming a congressman himself, Ryan served on Brownback’s staff when the governor represented Kansas in the Senate.

Trump and Brownback have relied on the same advisers, including the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who famously laid out the principle of supply side economics on a cocktail napkin. Laffer argued that excessive taxation could slow the economy by discouraging people from working. His signature theory was that the government, by cutting taxes, could encourage people to earn more, maintaining or increasing overall tax revenue. Yet most economists believe that U.S. tax rates are already far too low to benefit from Laffer’s curve.

The tax cuts for the wealthy frequently advocated by Republican politicians are viewed unfavorably by many voters, polls show. The Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that conducts public-opinion surveys, found that 57 percent of Americans nationally, including over a third of Republicans, support increasing taxes on those earning at least $250,000 a year. By contrast, Brownback’s policies reduced them drastically.

Yet Dan Cox, the institute’s research director, said that Brownback’s defeat did not augur more victories for Republicans pursuing more moderate economic policies. He said Republican policymakers and their advisers around the country are likely to view the example of Kansas as a failure of implementation, rather than one of principle, and they will argue that Kansas’s experiment would have succeeded had the legislature reduced spending even more.

Moreover, Cox said, the business lobby remains more influential in the party than those who support centrist or populist points of view.

“Trump was supposed to upend that, but it looks like he’s not going to,” Cox said. “Despite the rebuke that conservative economic policy received in the last election, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to see the same thing happen on the national stage.”

I didn't realize Ryan had worked for Brownback. No wonder he's such a creep. They deserve each other. We should elect them both to the uncharted desert isle we've been dreaming of sending the TT and his minions to. They could cut the taxes and services on said island.

June 11, 2017

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I didn't realize Ryan had worked for Brownback. No wonder he's such a creep. They deserve each other. We should elect them both to the uncharted desert isle we've been dreaming of sending the TT and his minions to. They could cut the taxes and services on said island.

That island is going to be a complete disaster! None of their household help will be there to do the grunt work, and all of the "stars" will be whining and complaining about having to fend for themselves.

June 11, 2017

4 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

That island is going to be a complete disaster! None of their household help will be there to do the grunt work, and all of the "stars" will be whining and complaining about having to fend for themselves.

But boy, would we all watch that particular reality series!

June 13, 2017

If you have the stomach for it, the NYT published a lengthy article about Kobach: "The Man Behind Trump’s Voter Fraud Obsession"

Spoiler

Kris Kobach likes to bill himself as “the A.C.L.U.’s worst nightmare.” The Kansas secretary of state, who was a champion debater in high school, speaks quickly for a rural Midwesterner, with the confidence of a man who holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale Law School, and until January he hosted his own local radio show, which used that line about the A.C.L.U. to introduce each episode. On March 3 he strode into the Robert J. Dole Federal Courthouse in Kansas City, Kan., to face the latest lawsuit filed against him by the civil-liberties organization. In an unusual arrangement for a secretary of state, Kobach, 51, personally argues all of his cases. He seems to see it as a perk of the job — and a mission.

The A.C.L.U. has filed four suits against Kobach since he was elected in 2010. All of them challenge some aspect of his signature piece of legislation, the Secure and Fair Elections Act, or SAFE Act, a 2011 state law that requires people to show a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers to register to vote. Kobach has long argued that such a law is necessary to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, a phenomenon that he has repeatedly claimed is both pervasive and a threat to democracy. The A.C.L.U. has countered that the real purpose of the law is not to prevent fraud but to stop the existing electorate from expanding and shifting demographically. The same principle informed the “grandfather clauses” of the Jim Crow era, which exempted most white voters from literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise black voters. Even a seemingly small impediment to registration, like a new ID requirement, favors the status quo, and in Kansas, and indeed nationally, the status quo favors the Republican Party.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But for decades, Republicans have fought to circumvent the law by describing their proposed restrictions — requiring specific forms of identification to vote, preventing early voting, purging voting rolls — as colorblind security measures, even though there is little evidence of any individual voter fraud in the United States. The A.C.L.U. has repeatedly argued that the Kansas law discriminated against minorities, young people and low-income people, all of whom are more likely to be registering for the first time and less likely to have immediate access to citizenship papers, because they can’t afford them or were more transient and don’t have copies of their documents at hand. No state has been as aggressive as Kansas in restricting ballot access, and no elected official has been as dogged as Kobach.

Standing before Judge Julie Robinson in Kansas City, Orion Danjuma, one of the A.C.L.U. lawyers, noted that Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship law applied only to people registering or updating their registrations after 2013. “Tens of thousands of Kansans have already been prevented from registering to vote because of this requirement,” Danjuma said — one in seven new registrants. Close to half of those were under 30.

Today the A.C.L.U. was arguing that a new program called Birth Link — which crosschecked flagged names on the list of voter registrations with Kansas state birth records, conveniently automating the proof-of-citizenship process — discriminated against Kansas residents who were born outside the state. “The Birth Link policy is, in our view, a constitutional smoking gun,” Danjuma said. “There’s nothing wrong at all with the fact that the Kansas Department of Vital Records records people who were born in the state. The problem is when the state starts to distribute benefits — like the right to vote — based on whether or not you’re in that database.”

For Kobach, the question of citizenship, and who has a rightful claim to it, is at the heart of his lawsuits and legislation. Years before Donald Trump began talking about building a wall, the fate of America’s white majority was a matter of considerable interest to Kobach, who once agreed with a caller to his radio show that a rise in Latino immigration could lead to the “ethnic cleansing” of whites and has written scores of laws across the country to crack down on undocumented immigration. He told The Associated Press in May that he met Trump through his son Donald Trump Jr., with whom he has a mutual friend. Kobach has since become close to the White House inner circle, including the president and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Two weeks after the election, Kobach met with Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where the president-elect was auditioning potential members of his cabinet before the press, and was photographed holding a white paper outlining a “Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days.” Though partly obscured, what could be read of the document was a bullet-pointed wish-list of right-wing policies that included “extreme vetting” and tracking of “all aliens from high-risk areas,” reducing “intake of Syrian refugees to zero,” deporting a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year” and the “rapid build” of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Kobach did not go to work in the Trump administration: He said in May that he had turned down two offered positions, one in the White House and the other at the Department of Homeland Security, although The Wall Street Journal reported in January that John Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had balked at making Kobach his deputy. But on May 11 Trump named him vice chairman of a new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to be led by Vice President Mike Pence. The commission will examine “improper voter registrations and improper voting” — issues that Kobach, with his high-profile efforts in Kansas, almost single-handedly put on the Trump administration’s radar.

Kobach’s plans represent a radical reordering of American priorities. They would help preserve Republican majorities. But they could also reduce the size and influence of the country’s nonwhite population. For years, Republicans have used racially coded appeals to white voters as a means to win elections. Kobach has inverted the priorities, using elections, and advocating voting restrictions that make it easier for Republicans to win them, as the vehicle for implementing policies that protect the interests and aims of a shrinking white majority. This has made him one of the leading intellectual architects of a new nativist movement that is rapidly gaining influence not just in the United States but across the globe.

On June 8, Kobach announced his candidacy in the 2018 Kansas gubernatorial race, telling a room full of supporters in the Kansas City suburb of Lenexa that he had “the honor of personally advising President Trump, both before the election and after the election, on how to reduce illegal immigration. And is he doing a good job?” The crowd cheered. If Kobach wins, he could be positioned to run for president as the legal mind who can deliver the promise of Trumpism without the baggage of Trump himself.

At the A.C.L.U. hearing, Kobach argued that his restrictive measures were justified by the high stakes. “We are preventing noncitizens from voting in elections,” he said. “And when a few noncitizens vote, those can swing a close election.” Afterward, sipping a Diet Coke at the restaurant in the Hilton Garden Inn across the street from the courthouse, Kobach told me he wants his work in Kansas to become a model for the rest of the country. Other state and federal laws would follow, if only he could create “the absolute best legal framework,” he said. “That’s what I set out to do.”

No one better represents the kind of America that Kobach is promoting than Kobach himself. He is tall and broad-shouldered and looks like John Wayne. He was born in Wisconsin and moved to Topeka, Kan., when he was 7. In high school, he mowed lawns and worked at his father’s Buick dealership. After becoming class president, he went on to Harvard.

It was at Harvard that Kobach became a protégé of Prof. Samuel Huntington, then the director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Huntington had worked in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter, but he is now best known for his dire warnings about an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between various regional and religious groups, including Islam and the West. Under Huntington’s guidance, Kobach wrote his senior thesis on how the movement to divest from South Africa was misguided because international businesses were already leading the way against apartheid. (Huntington, who had advised South Africa’s government, argued that a transition away from white minority rule might require a period of “enlightened despotism.”)

Kobach says Huntington “touched on a lot of themes I’ve worked on with immigration law,” but he distances himself from some of Huntington’s more radical ideas. Two of those ideas, however, have played an important role in the direction of the larger reactionary movement that Kobach leads.

The first was that broad-based participation in a democracy was not always a good thing. “Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy,” Huntington wrote in a 1975 report called “The Crisis of Democracy,” and there are “potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.”

Huntington warned of the dangers of expanding the franchise to previously disenfranchised and marginalized groups of voters. “In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively,” Huntington wrote. “Marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system. Yet the danger of overloading the political system with demands which extend its functions and undermine its authority still remains.”

The second idea was that the changing demographics of the United States would lead to a culture war between Anglo-Protestants and newer immigrant groups, particularly Latinos. “While Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe,” Huntington wrote in his 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations,” “Mexicans pose the problem for the United States.”

He expanded on this view in his 2004 book “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” denouncing the “Hispanization” of the United States and claiming that many Mexican-American immigrants “do not appear to identify primarily with the United States” and were “often contemptuous of American culture.”

Huntington’s central thesis was that the country’s “Anglo-Protestant culture” was under siege: He warned that “the large and continuing influx of Hispanics threatens the pre-eminence of white Anglo-Protestant culture and the place of English as the only national language. White nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to these trends.” Five years later, in an essay in Foreign Policy, he amplified the point: “Demographically, socially and culturally, the reconquista (reconquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.”

Kobach enrolled at Yale Law School in 1992. In his final year, California voters approved Prop. 187, a sweeping law, also known as the Save Our State initiative, that for the first time restricted public benefits, including education and health care, for undocumented immigrants. The federal courts ultimately blocked the law, on the grounds that California was overstepping federal immigration authority, and it is now largely remembered as a political debacle. California had been predominately Republican for decades, but a backlash from the state’s growing Hispanic population pushed Gov. Pete Wilson out of office and flipped the state from more-or-less red to permanently blue.

Kobach says that it was not Huntington so much as Prop. 187 that sparked his interest in immigration law. “It was not popular at Yale Law School, but I defended it,” he said. “It just struck me as obvious that a state has the right to restrict its welfare benefits only to those people who are U.S. citizens or are visiting the state legally.”

Jed Shugerman, a legal historian at Fordham Law School, attended a debate at Yale as an undergraduate in which Kobach defended Prop. 187. “While the other pro-187 debaters were careful to distinguish between the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ process, Kobach struck me even then as far more xenophobic than other Yale conservatives,” Shugerman wrote on his personal blog in May. “His image at that moment is seared into my memory, because I remember thinking, This dude is really smart and really scary. Remember his name, because he’ll be back with a vengeance.”

In 2001, Kobach took a leave of absence from his job as a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to become a White House fellow in the George W. Bush administration. He was assigned to the Justice Department a week before Sept. 11. While much of the national-security establishment regarded the attacks as an intelligence failure, Kobach viewed them as a failure of border security. Mark Johnson, a partner at Dentons law firm in Kansas City who has known Kobach for 25 years, says, “It radicalized him on the issue of immigration.”

Kobach grew close to Attorney General John Ashcroft, and when the fellowship ended a year later, he stayed on as his chief adviser on immigration and border-security issues. One of his first tasks was to implement the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or Nseers, a program he designed that required all male visa holders over the age of 16 from 24 predominantly Muslim countries (and North Korea) to be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed by immigration authorities. The program was controversial inside and outside the government. The A.C.L.U. said in a statement that it “mandated ethnic profiling on a scale not seen in the United States since Japanese-American internment during World War II and the ‘Operation Wetback’ deportations to Mexico of 1954.” The Obama administration halted the program in 2011. Nseers did not result in a single known conviction on terrorism charges, but it did result in deportation proceedings for nearly 14,000 Muslim men, many for minor immigration violations. Today Kobach recalls it as a “great success.”

In 2003, Kobach returned to Kansas to challenge Dennis Moore, a Democrat, for his seat in Congress. The following year, he also represented students in a lawsuit sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a far-right advocacy group, in a lawsuit challenging a provision that allowed public universities to charge undocumented residents of Kansas in-state tuition rates. (The suit was unsuccessful.)

FAIR was founded in 1978 by John Tanton, an ophthalmologist in rural Michigan. Tanton was initially concerned about how human population growth was harming the environment, but increasingly embraced nativist arguments that demonized all kinds of immigration, illegal and legal. He was especially struck by a brazenly racist 1973 novel called “The Camp of the Saints,” by a French author, Jean Raspail, depicting “the end of the white world” after a fleet of savage refugees, led by an Indian called “the turd eater,” overwhelm Europe. Tanton republished the book in English, and it attracted some influential American readers, including Steve Bannon, who has cited the book frequently.

Tanton argued that white people needed to take action against the country’s demographic changes. Tanton outlined his concerns in a 1986 memo, now available from The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labeled FAIR a “hate group.” “Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?” he asked in the memo addressed to colleagues at a retreat of anti-immigration activists in 1986. “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” The Los Angeles Times studied FAIR’s tax returns and found that it had received at least $600,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit foundation that subsidizes research that claims to prove blacks and other minorities are genetically inferior to whites.

Kobach’s connection to Tanton — in addition to representing FAIR in court, he received contributions totaling $10,000 from a political-action committee run by Tanton’s wife — became an issue in his congressional run. “People and groups tied to white supremacists gave Kobach thousands,” said a TV ad run by Moore. “One even hired Kobach.” But Kobach refused to return the donations or disavow Tanton or FAIR. Instead, he made opposition to undocumented immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, criticizing Moore for supporting what Kobach described as “amnesty” and calling for the National Guard to patrol the Mexican border.

Kobach lost the race by 11 points but earned national headlines for his outspoken nativism. “I want to just applaud you for your courage,” Bill O’Reilly told him that year, during Kobach’s first of many appearances on O’Reilly’s show. “You’re the first former administration official to come up and really tell the folks what’s going on.” Kobach became counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, and began drafting a series of ordinances for cities around the country, preventing landlords from knowingly renting to undocumented immigrants or employers from hiring them. Most of the laws were defeated in court because the federal government had the exclusive power to enforce immigration laws. But Kobach’s co-counsel, Michael Hethmon, recognized their real purpose. He told the filmmakers of the 2009 documentary “9500 Liberty,” that the effort to institute one of Kobach’s model ordinances in Prince William County, Virginia, might best be understood as “a field study.”

In 2006, Kobach received a call from the Maricopa County Attorney’s office in Phoenix. Andrew Thomas, the county attorney, wanted Kobach to defend his interpretation of the state’s “coyote law,” which in his view should allow undocumented immigrants to be charged as co-conspirators when they were caught illegally crossing the border. Kobach agreed.

Even as he remained active in his own state’s politics, serving as chairman of the Kansas Republican Party from 2007 to 2009, Kobach began spending more time in Arizona. He struck up a friendship with Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff, who dubbed himself “America’s toughest sheriff.” Arpaio, one of the first local sheriffs who took it upon himself to enforce federal immigration law, was also a flamboyantly authoritarian figure who drew national attention for requiring his inmates to wear pink underwear, work on chain gangs and live outdoors in tents where temperatures reached 130 degrees. At the Justice Department, Kobach had promoted an effort to deputize local police departments with immigration-enforcement authority from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2007, Arpaio received such a deputization, and his office within two years had arrested 33,000 undocumented immigrants, many of them in highly publicized “crime suppression” sweeps.

In 2009, after Barack Obama took office, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement powers. That same year, the Justice Department began an investigation into Arpaio’s “discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures.” Not long after that, Arpaio hired Kobach to train all of his deputies on how to comply with federal immigration law. “I really want to applaud what Maricopa County is doing,” Kobach said in a video for the trainings, calling the county a model for the nation. Despite the federal government’s jurisdiction over immigration, Kobach told Arpaio’s deputies they had “inherent authority” to enforce immigration laws, based on a 2002 memo Kobach had requested from the Justice Department. He listed several of the dozens of federal crimes undocumented immigrants could be arrested for, including “failure to carry an alien registration card” and “failure to notify the federal government of a change of address.”

Kobach also helped State Senator Russell Pearce, the foremost opponent of undocumented immigration in the State Legislature, draft SB 1070, a 2010 bill that required the Arizona police to ask for citizenship papers from anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” of being in the state illegally.

Kobach counseled Pearce on how to make the bill even more sweeping. In an email to Pearce before the law’s final passage, Kobach said that a person’s violation of “any county or municipal ordinance” could lead to an immigration query: “This will allow police to use violations of property codes (i.e., cars on blocks in the yard) or rental codes (too many occupants of a rental accommodation) to initiate queries as well.” After filing a lawsuit against SB 1070, the A.C.L.U. referred to it on its website as the Show Me Your Papers law.

Arizona became the first state to act on another of Kobach’s theories: attrition through enforcement. Make life miserable enough for immigrants, and they will leave of their own volition. As Pearce told The Arizona Republic newspaper, “Disneyland taught us that if you shut down the rides, people leave the amusement park.” Mitt Romney was widely mocked when he used the word “self-deportation” during the 2012 election, but that was exactly what Kobach was trying to achieve in Arizona.

The Arizona experiment didn’t end well for the state or its principal actors. The interpretation of the “coyote law” that Kobach came to Arizona to defend was blocked in 2013. The Supreme Court struck down three of four sections of SB 1070 and narrowed enforcement of the “show me your papers” provision. The Justice Department sued Arpaio in 2012, and the following year a federal court ruled that his immigration stops violated federal law, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for discriminating against Latinos. Arpaio was ultimately charged with criminal contempt of court; he failed to be re-elected in November 2016. Andrew Thomas, the county attorney, was disbarred by the Arizona Supreme Court in 2012 for what it called an “unholy collaboration” with Arpaio. Russell Pearce was recalled from the Senate in 2011 and then resigned as vice chairman from the Arizona Republican Party after saying on his radio show that Medicaid recipients should be sterilized, which led to a public outcry.

But Kobach continued to thrive. In 2010, the same year SB 1070 passed in Arizona, he ran for secretary of state in Kansas. “My hope is that Kansas will be to stopping election fraud what Arizona is to stopping illegal immigration,” he told The Kansas City Star. The position of secretary of state was not an especially glamorous one, but it offered an enormous amount of power by virtue of its authority to enforce state voting laws, particularly as American elections were being decided by increasingly narrow margins. During the 2000 election in Florida and the 2004 election in Ohio, Republican secretaries of state were at the center of hotly disputed elections.

Kobach had not been a particularly popular figure in Kansas. When he was chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, he introduced what he described as a “loyalty rule” to expel moderate Republican party leaders, an episode The Kansas City Star likened to the “Kansas G.O.P.’s version of Stalin’s purges.” But Kobach also had a growing constituency. “He should be running for president,” Arpaio said when he came to Kansas to campaign for Kobach, “but we’ll take secretary of state.”

Just a few days before Election Day in 2010, Kobach held a news conference and announced that nearly 2,000 dead voters in the state were still registered to vote. “Every one of those 1,966 identities is an opportunity for voter fraud waiting to happen,” he said. Kobach singled out one name, Alfred K. Brewer, who was born in 1900 and died in 1996, but was in fact listed as having voted just that year. “An Alfred K. Brewer voted in the 2010 primary election,” Kobach said. “Is it the same one? We are still trying to achieve confirmation of this, but it certainly seems like a very real possibility.”

A reporter from The Wichita Eagle found Alfred K. Brewer very much alive; he was in his front yard doing chores. “I don’t think this is heaven, not when I’m raking leaves,” Brewer said. He was 78 and had been listed as being born in 1900 because Kansas didn’t record birth dates on voter registration forms back when he first registered. The date of death was his father’s, who had the same name but was born in 1904. Kobach could have avoided the embarrassing mix-up if he had called Brewer before singling him out.

But Kansas voters, in the age of Obama, demonstrated an appetite for Kobach’s nativist brew of anti-immigration sentiment and voting restrictions. He won handily and quickly set about turning a once-sleepy office into a kind of laboratory for limiting access to the ballot.

In 2005, Kansas joined with three other Midwestern states in a regional compact called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. The program compared state records to find people registered to vote in more than one place. On taking office, Kobach, recognizing the program’s potential, championed it to election officials around the country, rapidly expanding its reach. The program now includes more than 30 states.

Crosscheck appeared to offer an appealing scientific certainty to the hunt for fraud. But it could also be used to suppress the vote. The program searches for double registrations using only voters’ first and last names and date of birth, and it generates thousands of false matches — John Smith in Kansas can easily be confused with John Smith in Iowa. These false matches have in several instances led to people being wrongly removed from voter rolls. In 2013, after Virginia joined Crosscheck, and in the midst of a hotly contested governor’s race, the state board of elections sent counties a list of more than 57,000 voters to purge because they were supposedly registered in other states. The data was littered with errors: Lawrence Haake, then the registrar in Chesterfield County, told The Richmond Times-Dispatch, “We do need an interstate checking mechanism, but I’m not real impressed with this one.”

Crosscheck has led to outrageous headlines that make double voting seem far more common than it is. In 2014, after North Carolina joined Crosscheck, the head of the state board of elections reported that in the 2012 general election, there were 35,750 voters in the state whose first and last names and dates of birth matched those of individuals who voted in the same election in a different state. Republican leaders of the North Carolina Legislature called it “alarming evidence of voter fraud,” and the conservative political strategist Dick Morris told Sean Hannity on Fox News, “It’s the most important data I’ve read in a year,” adding that it was “the first concrete evidence we’ve ever had of massive voter fraud.” But when North Carolina investigated the numbers using additional data like the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, eight cases of potential double voting were referred to prosecutors and two people were convicted.

Some states, including Florida and Oregon, have withdrawn from Crosscheck over concerns about its accuracy. In a 2016 paper, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the lists of potential duplicate voter registrations that Crosscheck sent to the state of Iowa before the 2012 and 2014 elections and found that “200 legitimate voters may be impeded from voting for every double vote stopped.”

Kobach’s other major project was making the SAFE Act into a sustainable model of election legislation, one that would stand up to scrutiny in the courts. When it was made into law in April 2011, Kobach compared it to the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. But the A.C.L.U. immediately began to file legal challenges claiming that rather than expand access to the ballot, the law was making it harder to vote.

One of the most significant challenges to the SAFE Act came from a lawsuit in a different state. In June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona could not require proof of citizenship for those who registered to vote using a federal registration form, which had the effect of nullifying part of the SAFE Act. Justice Antonin Scalia, however, in writing the majority opinion, noted that states like Arizona and Kansas that wanted to implement proof-of-citizenship laws could petition the Election Assistance Commission, which is a little-known federal agency created after the 2000 presidential-election recount. Its approval, he said, would be sufficient to make the laws constitutional. Kobach, who filed just such a petition in 2012, promptly sent another request two months later, but the acting executive director of the E.A.C. denied it.

A finalist for the permanent position of executive director at the E.A.C. happened to be one of Kobach’s own election commissioners in Kansas, Brian Newby of Johnson County. Kobach was informed in April 2015 by staff at the Johnson County Election Office that Newby was being audited for misusing county funds, but instead of admonishing Newby, Kobach recommended him for a top federal job. The E.A.C., which was made up of three commissioners, two of whom were Republicans, took Kobach’s advice, and Newby got the job in November 2015. Three months after Newby took office, he unexpectedly changed the E.A.C.’s rules in Kobach’s favor.

The League of Women Voters sued the E.A.C. two weeks later. “If the Newby decision stands, then every state in the nation will be able to require documentary proof of citizenship,” the group’s advocacy director, Lloyd Leonard, told The New York Times. “Citizenship documents,” like birth certificates and passports, are not things most Americans carry around with them. That makes it impossible for groups like the League of Women Voters to register voters at farmers markets or public marches and demonstrations. When the SAFE Act went into effect, eight of nine chapters of the Kansas League of Women Voters suspended voter-registration activities; the Wichita chapter went from registering 4,000 voters in 2012 to just 465 in 2014.

The Obama Justice Department took the extraordinary step of refusing to defend Newby’s directive in federal court, so Kobach defended it himself. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him, finding that Newby, as executive director, did not have the authority to make the decision without the consent of his commissioners.

In 2015, Kobach persuaded the Kansas Legislature to make him the only secretary of state in the country with the power to independently prosecute voter-fraud cases. He told The Kansas City Star that this was “the final piece in the puzzle in terms of preventing voter fraud.” Betty and Steven Gaedtke were two of the first people Kobach charged. After retiring, the Gaedtkes left Olathe, Kan., to build their dream house in the woods of the Arkansas Ozarks. Betty is a member of the Quapaw Tribe of Oklahoma, which was based in Arkansas before being forcefully relocated to Oklahoma in the 1800s, and she felt as if she were returning home. She was elected to the tribal council and became an advocate against sexual assault. “She’s very, very civic-minded,” her lawyer, Trey Pettlon, said.

Betty became an Arkansas resident and voted there in 2010. Her husband moved down after her and, before he left, filled out absentee ballots for each of them in Kansas. Then he settled in Arkansas before the 2010 election and voted there too, believing he had lawfully established residency. County attorneys in Kansas declined to prosecute the Gaedtkes, seeing the double voting as an honest mistake. But in October 2015, a month before the five-year statute of limitations expired, Kobach charged them each with three misdemeanor counts of “voting without being qualified.” The evidence was “very strong that the individuals in question intentionally voted multiple times in the same election,” he said.

“If I was convicted of that, I would’ve had to step down from my tribe,” Betty recalls. “The whole experience was such a nightmare.” Five days before the trial was set to begin, Kobach’s office dropped the charges against Betty. Steven pleaded guilty to one of the misdemeanors and received a $500 fine. “I didn’t even get to tell him: ‘This is what I look like. I’m a good person,’ ” Betty says of Kobach. “I feel like I was just a pawn for him.”

Though Kobach received the authority to prosecute fraud cases after warning that voting by “aliens” was rampant, the nine convictions he has won since 2015 have primarily been citizens 60 and over who own property in two states and were confused about voting requirements. Only one noncitizen has been convicted. A state representative, John Carmichael, a Democrat from Wichita, told me these cases were “show trials to try and justify his prosecutorial authority,” and he has introduced a bill to repeal Kobach’s prosecutorial power.

While Kobach searched for fraud cases, his SAFE Act had blocked the registrations of 35,000 Kansans by September 2015. Then Kobach started removing anyone from the rolls who didn’t provide citizenship documents within 90 days. “It’s no big deal,” he told Fox News. “Nobody’s being disenfranchised.” In February 2016, the A.C.L.U. sued Kobach on behalf of more than 18,000 Kansas voters who had unsuccessfully tried to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles. A federal court found that the SAFE Act violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which allowed voters to register at many government agencies. In response, Kobach had an administrative rule passed which said that any Kansan who registered at the D.M.V. but didn’t show proof of citizenship could vote in federal but not state elections. In July 2016, while Kobach was at the Republican National Convention helping to draft the G.O.P. platform, the A.C.L.U. sued him again. “It seemed bonkers that someone would be able to vote for president but not school board or City Council or secretary of state,” said Dale Ho, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project.

Marvin Brown, a 91-year-old World War II veteran, became the lead plaintiff. Brown was the first person Kobach ever met who had paid a poll tax. He paid $2 to register on his 21st birthday in Arkansas in 1946, after returning from flying bomber planes over Germany during World War II. “I learned in civics it was your reasonable and honorable duty to vote,” he told me. He added that Sevier County was deciding whether to allow alcohol sales and “the main reason I registered was cause they were voting for the sale of beer.”

Brown moved to Kansas in 1948 and worked as an electrician, ran a marina in Arkansas and then moved back to the Kansas City suburbs to be closer to his family. In 2015, he went down to the county government building with his wife to register to vote in Kansas. “We did everything we did before,” he said. “Then we got this precious letter that said you have to prove your citizenship. I got a little upset.” Brown’s ancestors had fought for the Union in the Civil War and settled in Kansas afterward. He flew so many bombing missions in World War II that the Air Force lost count. “I grew up in this country,” he said. “I’m 91 years old, and this son of a buck is telling me I might not be a citizen. I told Kobach, ‘That hurts me inside real deep.’ ”

In court, Kobach questioned Brown’s citizenship and said he didn’t have standing to sue. “At this point, we don’t even know that these individuals are citizens,” he said. “We know that they are asserting that Mr. Brown fought in the war and, of course, even that doesn’t prove your citizenship.” A state court struck down the two-tiered election system 10 days after the case was filed. “The number of noncitizen registrations are minuscule,” the judge wrote, “compared to the number of voters that potentially will be unable to vote.”

“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Donald Trump tweeted on Nov. 27. When asked in an ABC interview where Trump got that information, the president-elect’s adviser Kellyanne Conway named Kobach as a source of the claim. Three days later, after Kobach certified the results of the 2016 election in Kansas at the Capitol in Topeka, he told reporters, “I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular-vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton.”

As evidence, Kobach pointed to a 2014 study whose lead author was an Old Dominion University political scientist, Jesse Richman. It estimated that “6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008.” That finding was quickly picked up by Breitbart (“Study: Voting by Non-Citizens Tips Balance for Democrats”) and National Review (“Jaw-Dropping Study Claims Large Numbers of Non-Citizens Vote in U.S.”) and was also cited directly by Trump on the campaign trail.

Yet Richman’s study was soon contested by other political scientists. Richman had found 489 noncitizens in a much larger 2010 Harvard survey of 55,400 American adults called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. In 2012, three political scientists who coordinated the original C.C.E.S. study went back and re-interviewed 19,000 of the respondents. They found only 85 who said they were noncitizens in the survey — and none of them could be matched to a valid voting record. “Thus the best estimate of the percentage of noncitizens who vote is zero,” they wrote.

In January 2017, nearly 200 leading political scientists signed an open letter criticizing Richman’s study. Kobach nevertheless recently retained Richman as an expert witness in his ongoing battle with the A.C.L.U., and Richman produced another eye-popping claim: 18,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Kansas. To reach that number, Richman identified 37 noncitizens on a list of temporary driver’s licenses in Kansas and found six who, he wrote in an expert report that Kobach filed in court, “had either registered to vote or attempted to register to vote.” He then divided those six people, representing 16 percent of a total of 37 people, by Kansas’s estimated noncitizen population of 114,000 and concluded that “a very substantial number and portion of noncitizens in Kansas have registered to vote or attempted to register to vote — more than 18,000.”

Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who helped conduct the original C.C.E.S. study, said that going from six people who may have registered to 18,000 noncitizens actually registering or trying to register was a huge leap. “We don’t know that any of them actually registered,” Schaffner told me. “None of them are matched to a valid vote record.” When Kobach told the Kansas Legislature in February that “18,000 aliens may be on the Kansas voting rolls,” the gallery erupted in laughter. Kobach threw up his hands, looked back directly at the chamber and said, “You can perhaps do your own statistical analysis and submit it to the court.”

Kobach’s chilling narrative of deceitful foreigners subverting democracy has served him well. Making people believe that voter fraud is rampant builds public support for policies that restrict access to the ballot. And claims of illegal voting by noncitizens help justify Kobach’s hard-line anti-immigration agenda. This has given Kobach a powerful political constituency, not least of which is the president himself. The story Kobach tells about voter fraud is what persuaded Trump to create a presidential commission on “election integrity” and name Kobach its vice chairman. “He’s stated his own view publicly, which is consistent with what he’s told me privately,” Kobach says of Trump’s views on voter fraud. “He believes that it’s a significant problem.”

The Trump commission marks a major step forward in Kobach’s efforts to nationalize his restrictions on voting. He’ll have a presidential bully pulpit and access to government resources that weren’t previously available, such as a nationwide database that includes noncitizens that could be run against state voter rolls to generate new allegations. But that Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database does not automatically reveal the status of immigrants who become U.S. citizens, which means thousands of noncitizens who are subsequently naturalized could mistakenly be tagged as illegal voters. The commission will also make policy recommendations at the federal and state level, which could include support for suppressive policies like strict voter-ID laws and voter-rolls purges.

Kobach says the National Voter Registration Act and the Voting Rights Act, the country’s cornerstone voting-rights laws, are being misinterpreted. “The N.V.R.A. has been abused by organizations like the A.C.L.U.,” Kobach told me. “They’ve twisted the words to try and say it prevents proof-of-citizenship laws.” The Voting Rights Act is also “being abused by the A.C.L.U.,” he says. “Now they’re trying to attack photo-ID laws using the Voting Rights Act by claiming, using very flimsy evidence, that photo-ID laws disproportionately affect minority populations more than others.” Kobach wants proof-of-citizenship laws to be adopted in every state.

In 2006, when he was still a law professor, Kobach spoke at a candlelight gathering to oppose federal immigration reform, billed as a Vigil to Save the American Worker, in Kansas City. The event was sparsely attended, but Kobach spoke pessimistically to those who had come with passion. He cited a line often attributed to Winston Churchill. “He said that his definition of a fanatic is ‘someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject,’ ” Kobach said, standing in the candlelight. “And friends, if that’s what a fanatic is, then I guess I’m a fanatic. Because, when it comes to restoring the rule of law, I can’t change my mind and I won’t change the subject.”

I nominate Kobach to be in charge of elections on the uncharted desert isle where we want to exile so many of the Repugs.

June 13, 2017

Kobach sounds like a nut job. He's put a lot of his life into "investigating" voter fraud, only to be exposed time and again as being completely wrong. Remember when Trump was first elected, Stephen "Dead Eyes" Miller said that evidence of massive voter fraud in New Hampshire would be presented. We're still waiting...

June 14, 2017

Guys, Virginia had their governer race primaries today. I'm really happy with the result because my candidate, Ralph Northam, won the nomination by a landslide, AND Dems beat GOP voter turnout by over 100,000.

I think Northam has a good chance in November, but let's hope the Democrats repeat the performance in November.

June 14, 2017

9 hours ago, ShepherdontheRock said:

Guys, Virginia had their governer race primaries today. I'm really happy with the result because my candidate, Ralph Northam, won the nomination by a landslide, AND Dems beat GOP voter turnout by over 100,000.

I think Northam has a good chance in November, but let's hope the Democrats repeat the performance in November.

I agree with you. We can't lose focus and have to push for heavy Democratic turnout in November. I preferred Northam, but would have supported Perriello, if he was the nominee.

Corey Stewart is being a sore loser on the Repug side. Of course, that's no big surprise. He was quoted as saying he doesn't concede and won't support the Repug nominee, Ed Gillespie. I hope that divides the Repug electorate and Northam wins in a landslide in November.

June 14, 2017

Jennifer Rubin wrote a good analysis of the Virginia gubernatorial primary: "If Virginia is a preview, the GOP’s in big trouble in the GA-6 and 2018 races"

Spoiler

The Virginia gubernatorial primary on Tuesday delivered good news for Democrats and an ominous warning for the Trump-ized GOP. Democratic turnout was through the roof with more than 543,000 votes. GOP turnout was about 366,000. The more establishment Democrat, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, won by a much bigger margin (56 percent to 44 percent) than expected. Republican Ed Gillespie, who had led by double digits in polling, won by slightly more than 1 percent. (A margin of less than one percent would have triggered an automatic recount.) Gillespie’s opponent Corey Stewart, a demagogue on immigration who made an issue over taking down Confederate monuments, vastly over-performed in his primary, just as President Trump did in the 2016 campaign season. Gillespie, who vastly outspent his opponents, wound up with about 160,000 votes, almost 80,000 votes fewer than the loser in the Democratic primary.

It may be that in the age of Trump, the Republican Party risks shriveling or splintering outside deep-red strongholds. Moderate Republicans in Tuesday’s primary might well have crossed over (allowed in a state with no registration by party) to vote in the Democratic primary for Northam, thereby boosting his margin and gravely damaging Gillespie. If this becomes a pattern outside Virginia, the GOP will be in deep trouble in 2018 and beyond.

Rick Wilson, a GOP operative and high-profile #NeverTrumper, noted that Gillespie made a hard-right turn on immigration and even on Confederate monuments at the end. “Ed chased Trumpism, and Stewart was the real deal to Trumpers,” Wilson explained. “By doing that, even if Ed survives the vote (and possible recount) he’s going to have trouble winning in Northern Virginia now.” The latter has become the barrier to the GOP in Virginia statewide races. If it cannot make inroads into populous suburban counties with more moderates and college-educated voters, statewide races become unwinnable for Republicans. Wilson wisecracked that “‘the precious Confederacy!’ isn’t a winning message.”

Gillespie barely scraped by, but in sprinting to his right to beat Stewart, he risks doing much worse in Northern Virginia counties than he did in his surprisingly strong 2014 Senate race against Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). The loss of a chunk of voters in bigger population centers likely won’t be made up by downstate voters who picked Stewart in the primary, not believing that Gillespie was Trumpian enough.

Virginia may be an outlier — at least, that is what Republicans hope. If not, a significant party realignment may take shape in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District special election next week and in the 2018 House and Senate races. Moderates, women, college-educated voters and suburbanites could decide to exit the Trump GOP in droves. If the party is now the party of Confederate monuments and anti-immigrant hysteria, then it will become untenable for such former Republicans, an anathema to their sense of fairness, tolerance and rationality. They then may head for the Democratic Party. If they do, the GOP will be at risk in the sort of seats in which Trump vastly under-performed in comparison with Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008.

Democrats will need to avoid going far left in order to benefit from GOP defections. They will also need a positive message that offers traditional Democrats and newly alienated Republicans an alternative to Trump-Stewart Republicans. They have time — and with a possible win next week in Georgia and in Virginia in November, they may get a shot in the arm from donors and newly recruited candidates anxious to compete against flagging Republicans. In short, Trump may do for Democrats what President Barack Obama did for Republicans — give them a new lease on life.

She is correct, by moving further right, Gillespie risks alienating voters in Northern Virginia, which is the largest population center in Virginia. He can't afford to love NoVa in November. Of course, I hope he does, and we end up with Northam!

June 14, 2017

More questions/questioning of Greitens donors etc. here in Missouri.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article155983134.html

Quote

Questions mount on list of charity donors at center of Greitens ethics fine

BY JASON HANCOCK

jhancock@kcstar.com

Gov. Eric Greitens describes his recent run-in with the Missouri Ethics Commission as a minor campaign finance matter.

Greitens, a first-term Republican, agreed to pay a $1,000 fine in late April for failing to disclose that his campaign had obtained a list of donors to The Mission Continues, a charity he founded in 2007.

But experts in laws governing tax-exempt organizations like The Mission Continues say the legal issues surrounding the donor list may not be so minor. In interviews with The Star, they said they see two possibilities:

▪ The Mission Continues gave its donor list to the governor’s campaign, violating a federal prohibition on charities engaging in political activity.

▪ Or the charity may have been the victim of a crime.

“If the charity gave the list to the campaign, then that’s a violation of their tax-exempt status,” said Lloyd Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame Law School. “If it was taken from the charity without its permission, then it was stolen. That could be a criminal offense.”

Laura L’Esperance, spokeswoman for The Mission Continues, told The Star previously that her organization did not provide the donor list to anyone in the Greitens campaign.

“It is our policy to not share, sell or rent our donor list to any external parties — including campaigns,” L’Esperance said, adding: “The Mission Continues did not supply the list to the Greitens campaign. I can’t speculate how the campaign obtained or developed the list.”

Michael Adams, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney representing Greitens’ campaign, said in an email to The Star that both the campaign and the ethics commission “thoroughly investigated facts relevant to this matter.”

After the fine was levied by the ethics commission, the governor’s campaign amended its 2015 campaign financial disclosure forms to include the charity’s donor list as a $600 in-kind contribution from Danny Laub, who was listed as Greitens’ campaign manager at the time.

But Adams did not respond to The Star’s questions about how the campaign’s manager obtained the list in the first place.

Now the matter has drawn the attention of Greitens’ critics in the Missouri General Assembly.

On Monday, Sen. Jason Holsman, a Kansas City Democrat, filed a resolution calling for the Senate to set up a special investigatory committee to look into how the campaign acquired the donor list, among other issues.

The resolution was co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Scott Sifton of St. Louis County and Republican Sens. Ryan Silvey of Kansas City, Bob Dixon of Springfield, Rob Schaaf of St. Joseph and Doug Libla of Poplar Bluff.

The controversy began last fall when The Associated Press obtained an Excel spreadsheet labeled “All donors $1K total and up — as of 5-7-14.” It showed the names, email addresses and phone numbers of people who gave at least $1,000 to The Mission Continues.

The spreadsheet’s properties showed it was created by an employee of The Mission Continues on May 6, 2014, shortly before Greitens stepped down as CEO. It was last saved 10 months later, on March 24, 2015, by a member of Greitens’ gubernatorial exploratory committee.

Greitens denied using the charity’s donor database for his campaign at the time, although an Associated Press analysis found he received nearly $2 million from donors who previously had given significant amounts to The Mission Continues.

If The Mission Continues gave the list to the campaign, “the (Internal Revenue Service) would be within its right to revoke the charity’s tax exemption,” said John Colombo, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Philip Hackney, a law professor at Louisiana State University who previously worked for the IRS focusing on tax-exempt organizations, said it’s unlikely the IRS would revoke a charity’s tax status if it’s a first-time violation. But there could still be other penalties, such as being forced to pay taxes on the value of the list.

With The Mission Continues insisting it did not and would not provide its donors to any outside entity, the other potential explanation would be that it was given to the campaign without permission, said Bruce Hopkins, a Kansas City-based attorney who practices nonprofit law and is a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law.

“That would be a theft of property and could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the value,” he said.

Stealing is a misdemeanor in Missouri if the value of the property is less than $750.

The $600 estimate of the donor list’s fair market value was made with the assistance of an independent professional list broker, Adams said, “whose opinion was satisfactory to the (Missouri Ethics) Commission.”

Greitens’ senior adviser said after the fine was levied that the donor list wouldn’t be as valuable in the hands of anyone besides Greitens because he had built a relationship with the donors over the years.

Hopkins said that value “seems awfully low for a list that throws up millions of dollars a year.”

“I’m not an expert on this,” Hopkins said, “but my gut tells me that’s a really low number and the list would be worth more than that.”

The Mission Continues raised $10.8 million in 2014 and $8.4 million in 2015, according to paperwork filed with the IRS.

Eric Gorovitz, a San Francisco-based attorney who specializes in advising tax-exempt organizations, said The Mission Continues’ directors have an obligation to investigate what happened if it appears that the charity’s resources were used for improper purposes, including partisan political activity.

“If they have reason to believe something went wrong,” he said, “they have a duty to understand what happened and prevent it from happening again.”

The Mission Continues did not respond to a request for comment by The Star on whether the group thinks its donor list was stolen or whether it took any action upon learning the Greitens campaign had the list.

The state attorney general’s office enforces Missouri laws regarding charities. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Josh Hawley declined to comment on the issue.

This isn’t the first time Greitens’ tenure with The Mission Continues has drawn scrutiny.

Greitens’ Democratic opponent last year, Chris Koster, publicly questioned the size of Greitens’ salary while he ran the charity. Greitens was paid a total of $150,000 from mid-2009 through 2010. His salary increased to $175,000 in 2011, where it remained until he stepped down as CEO in 2014.

Koster also criticized $600,000 in payments The Mission Continues made to the St. Louis-based public relations firm FleishmanHillard in 2013 and 2014, arguing the spending was designed to bolster Greitens’ eventual political campaign by raising his profile around the state. Greitens’ spokesman said at the time that the spending was part of a rebranding of The Mission Continues, as well as marketing and outreach efforts.

5

June 15, 2017

Posting here because it's about Brownback's policies: "These are the people who suffered when Kansas’s conservative experiment failed"

Spoiler

IOLA, Kan. — Suzan Emmons has done the most she can for the girls. Her small green house has bunnies in the back yard, class pictures proudly displayed on the living room wall, food in the refrigerator. She has scrimped from her annual salary of $14,000 to pay for one dance class each: tap for Elizabeth, jazz for Jaiden.

But far-off political decisions have made the haven that Emmons built for them more precarious.

Five years ago, she rescued Jaiden, her granddaughter, and Elizabeth, her granddaughter’s half sister, from a dangerous home. Today, she doesn't make enough money to qualify for health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She would qualify for Medicaid under Obamacare’s proposed expansion of the program, but because the Kansas governor turned down federal funds for that expansion, she doesn't qualify there either, leaving her unable to afford insurance coverage.

Meanwhile, dramatic funding cuts at the state levels shuttered the programs that gave the girls a safe place to go when Emmons was at work and that counseled them to overcome their trauma.

The combination of deep tax cuts and austere spending that was supposed to ignite economic growth and reduce dependency have hit hard in the southeastern corner of Kansas, where Emmons lives, a collection of some of the poorest and sickest counties in the state that is sometimes branded the Appalachia of the Midwest.

Emmons is an involuntary participant in a conservative program of tax decreases and spending cuts that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, the policy's main architect, once called a "real-live experiment." The Kansas legislature voted to partially unwind these policies last week, when it raised taxes and spending in a revolt against Brownback.

Brownback had promised that the tax cuts would unleash an economic resurgence strong enough to keep the government funded and lift people out of poverty — a similar narrative to that of Washington Republicans, who are considering a comparable plan that pairs tax reductions with steep cuts to welfare programs. But five years after Brownback's first tax cut, Kansas has become a warning sign about what happens when promised economic growth fails to materialize, leaving families such as Emmons's to deal with the consequences.

“I just hope the country will use Kansas as a case study in what not to do. Because we tried it all. And it failed,” said David Toland, who runs the community organization Thrive. He sat across from Emmons in the attic of a thrift store in downtown Iola, where his organization is housed.

“Kansas is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is on life support,” Toland said.

“Are you sure it’s not dead?” Emmons asked.

What happened in Kansas

Brownback, a former senator and 2008 presidential candidate, came into the Kansas’s governor’s office in 2011 on promises to eliminate the income tax, reduce the number of people on public assistance, and overhaul public schools.

The changes came quickly. The state limited eligibility for welfare and instilled a lifetime ban on welfare recipients who broke certain rules. It dramatically lowered taxes, by reducing the number of income tax brackets in the state from three to two and slashing rates on both. It also exempted small-business income from taxation entirely — creating what analysts described as a pernicious loophole when individuals started representing themselves as small businesses to qualify.

Yet the fast growth that the state's tax cuts were supposed to generate never appeared. In each of the past five years, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has been below that of the country as a whole.

Dan Rickman, an economist at Oklahoma State University who created an index to measure states with similar economies, says that Kansas was performing in step with other similar states before Brownback took office. But after the tax cuts were implemented, it began to lag.

“To be honest, I think it’s their policies,” Rickman said. The economic benefits from tax cuts can take many years to materialize, he said. In the short term, reduced spending hurt the government’s many employees, suppliers and contractors, he said.

The policies also blew a substantial hole in the state’s budget, turning long-standing budget surpluses into yawning shortfalls. To pay its debt, the state government delayed payments to school boards and local agencies, canceled or delayed road maintenance and put off payments to pension funds.

In 2015, Brownback and Republicans in Topeka increased the sales tax to raise more money. Sales taxes are disproportionately paid by the poor, who spend more of their money on everyday goods that are subject to the tax.

Last year, with the reserves all but exhausted, the state drew down $400 million from other sources, the bulk of it from the highway fund, and put off making payments totaling about $200 million.

It wasn't enough. This March, Kansas's Supreme Court ruled that the lack of support for public schools violated the state's constitution, and ordered the government to increase funds.

“That’s essentially lawmakers shaking the couch cushions for change,” said Duane Goossen, the state’s former budget director.

'The experiment has been conducted'

Rural Kansas school systems, which were already burdened with high poverty and mental health issues, saw their budgets fall and class sizes balloon.

In Coffeyville, a small town 70 miles south down a pot-holed two-lane highway from Iola, the superintendent of the school system pointed out that the cuts to the schools were themselves deeply damaging to the local economy.

One of the town’s biggest employers, the school district has seen its budget fall from roughly $13 million to $11.5 million in the last nine years. “That’s a lot of jobs being lost in the community,” superintendent Craig Correll said.

As Brownback predicted, the lack of funds made communities like Coffeyville and Iola band together and get more creative to support one another. They turned to grants and pooled funds between programs to plug funding gaps, and had charities fill in for government services. But even so, locals say that the system has left many people behind, especially those who are most vulnerable.

In Iola, community workers talk of tragedies that could have easily been prevented.

Holly Jerome, a director at the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center, spoke about a patient who lost a leg to diabetes and a disabled drug addict who couldn't go back to work because his insurance wouldn't cover a nonaddictive pain medication. Angela Henry, project director of the community organization Safe Base, told of a 13-year-old girl who lost part of her jaw when her parents couldn’t pay to finish a dental operation, and the packing pellets a dentist put in her tooth rotted.

“The experiment has been conducted, and I don’t know how anyone who looks at data or who hears the stories that we live every day could say the experiment has been successful,” Toland said.

Some of the people who run the schools and community organizations in these small towns are more hopeful now that the Kansas legislature revolted against Brownback and voted to reverse his tax cuts.

But even after the hike, the rich are still paying less and the poor are paying more, and it will take the state a long time to recover.

“The damage from these tax cuts — the financial damage — has been so great that it may take up to a generation to really repair it,” Goossen said.

Some conservatives say that the state just hasn’t cut spending enough — including Brownback, who was not pleased by the legislature’s vote last week to overcome his veto, reverse his tax cuts and direct more funding to the schools.

“I think it’s wrong for the long-term view of the state of Kansas. I think it’s wrong for growth,” Brownback said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a positive for this state moving down the road.”

In the gap

Standing on the porch of her little house, Emmons described how she came to fall in a limbo-like insurance situation that is known as the Medicaid gap. In March, the governor had decided to veto a plan that would have expanded Medicaid coverage to 150,000 more Kansans — including herself.

“What does veto mean?” Jaiden, her 10-year-old granddaughter asked, as she fidgeted, impatient to head to the nearby pool and practice diving off the diving board.

“It means the governor said no to the plan,” Emmons said.

“He sucks,” Jaiden said.

Emmons earns about $14,000 a year from cleaning houses 40 hours a week — too much to qualify for Kansas’ Medicaid program. If she was living by herself, she would qualify for Obamacare subsidies to make her health insurance more affordable. But because she took in the girls and her household has expanded to three, she also earns too little to qualify for subsidies to buy insurance through the marketplace.

She says she can’t afford insurance premiums outright, which would come to nearly half her earnings. At 57, she is going further into debt and has no hope of retirement.

In February, Emmons traveled to Topeka, where she gave testimony urging lawmakers to expand Medicaid in the state.

Other programs on which the family depends are also being squeezed. A community program that gave her daughters a safe place to go when Emmons is at work has seen funding cuts of 90 percent, and this year it canceled its summer program entirely.

She dreams that her girls might one day go to college — but more realistically, she hopes that they will have a better life than their mother and father. She hasn't heard from them in five years.

“If I had not taken the girls out of their situation, they would have followed in their mothers’ footsteps. You know they would, because that’s all they know,” she said.

“I’ve said all along, I’m not looking for a handout. Nobody should ever get anything for free,” she said. “You should work for what you get. But they make it harder and harder every day.”

It's sickening that the Repugs want to do this on a national scale.

June 15, 2017

27 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Posting here because it's about Brownback's policies: "These are the people who suffered when Kansas’s conservative experiment failed"

Hide contents

IOLA, Kan. — Suzan Emmons has done the most she can for the girls. Her small green house has bunnies in the back yard, class pictures proudly displayed on the living room wall, food in the refrigerator. She has scrimped from her annual salary of $14,000 to pay for one dance class each: tap for Elizabeth, jazz for Jaiden.

But far-off political decisions have made the haven that Emmons built for them more precarious.

Five years ago, she rescued Jaiden, her granddaughter, and Elizabeth, her granddaughter’s half sister, from a dangerous home. Today, she doesn't make enough money to qualify for health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She would qualify for Medicaid under Obamacare’s proposed expansion of the program, but because the Kansas governor turned down federal funds for that expansion, she doesn't qualify there either, leaving her unable to afford insurance coverage.

Meanwhile, dramatic funding cuts at the state levels shuttered the programs that gave the girls a safe place to go when Emmons was at work and that counseled them to overcome their trauma.

The combination of deep tax cuts and austere spending that was supposed to ignite economic growth and reduce dependency have hit hard in the southeastern corner of Kansas, where Emmons lives, a collection of some of the poorest and sickest counties in the state that is sometimes branded the Appalachia of the Midwest.

Emmons is an involuntary participant in a conservative program of tax decreases and spending cuts that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, the policy's main architect, once called a "real-live experiment." The Kansas legislature voted to partially unwind these policies last week, when it raised taxes and spending in a revolt against Brownback.

Brownback had promised that the tax cuts would unleash an economic resurgence strong enough to keep the government funded and lift people out of poverty — a similar narrative to that of Washington Republicans, who are considering a comparable plan that pairs tax reductions with steep cuts to welfare programs. But five years after Brownback's first tax cut, Kansas has become a warning sign about what happens when promised economic growth fails to materialize, leaving families such as Emmons's to deal with the consequences.

“I just hope the country will use Kansas as a case study in what not to do. Because we tried it all. And it failed,” said David Toland, who runs the community organization Thrive. He sat across from Emmons in the attic of a thrift store in downtown Iola, where his organization is housed.

“Kansas is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is on life support,” Toland said.

“Are you sure it’s not dead?” Emmons asked.

What happened in Kansas

Brownback, a former senator and 2008 presidential candidate, came into the Kansas’s governor’s office in 2011 on promises to eliminate the income tax, reduce the number of people on public assistance, and overhaul public schools.

The changes came quickly. The state limited eligibility for welfare and instilled a lifetime ban on welfare recipients who broke certain rules. It dramatically lowered taxes, by reducing the number of income tax brackets in the state from three to two and slashing rates on both. It also exempted small-business income from taxation entirely — creating what analysts described as a pernicious loophole when individuals started representing themselves as small businesses to qualify.

Yet the fast growth that the state's tax cuts were supposed to generate never appeared. In each of the past five years, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has been below that of the country as a whole.

Dan Rickman, an economist at Oklahoma State University who created an index to measure states with similar economies, says that Kansas was performing in step with other similar states before Brownback took office. But after the tax cuts were implemented, it began to lag.

“To be honest, I think it’s their policies,” Rickman said. The economic benefits from tax cuts can take many years to materialize, he said. In the short term, reduced spending hurt the government’s many employees, suppliers and contractors, he said.

The policies also blew a substantial hole in the state’s budget, turning long-standing budget surpluses into yawning shortfalls. To pay its debt, the state government delayed payments to school boards and local agencies, canceled or delayed road maintenance and put off payments to pension funds.

In 2015, Brownback and Republicans in Topeka increased the sales tax to raise more money. Sales taxes are disproportionately paid by the poor, who spend more of their money on everyday goods that are subject to the tax.

Last year, with the reserves all but exhausted, the state drew down $400 million from other sources, the bulk of it from the highway fund, and put off making payments totaling about $200 million.

It wasn't enough. This March, Kansas's Supreme Court ruled that the lack of support for public schools violated the state's constitution, and ordered the government to increase funds.

“That’s essentially lawmakers shaking the couch cushions for change,” said Duane Goossen, the state’s former budget director.

'The experiment has been conducted'

Rural Kansas school systems, which were already burdened with high poverty and mental health issues, saw their budgets fall and class sizes balloon.

In Coffeyville, a small town 70 miles south down a pot-holed two-lane highway from Iola, the superintendent of the school system pointed out that the cuts to the schools were themselves deeply damaging to the local economy.

One of the town’s biggest employers, the school district has seen its budget fall from roughly $13 million to $11.5 million in the last nine years. “That’s a lot of jobs being lost in the community,” superintendent Craig Correll said.

As Brownback predicted, the lack of funds made communities like Coffeyville and Iola band together and get more creative to support one another. They turned to grants and pooled funds between programs to plug funding gaps, and had charities fill in for government services. But even so, locals say that the system has left many people behind, especially those who are most vulnerable.

In Iola, community workers talk of tragedies that could have easily been prevented.

Holly Jerome, a director at the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center, spoke about a patient who lost a leg to diabetes and a disabled drug addict who couldn't go back to work because his insurance wouldn't cover a nonaddictive pain medication. Angela Henry, project director of the community organization Safe Base, told of a 13-year-old girl who lost part of her jaw when her parents couldn’t pay to finish a dental operation, and the packing pellets a dentist put in her tooth rotted.

“The experiment has been conducted, and I don’t know how anyone who looks at data or who hears the stories that we live every day could say the experiment has been successful,” Toland said.

Some of the people who run the schools and community organizations in these small towns are more hopeful now that the Kansas legislature revolted against Brownback and voted to reverse his tax cuts.

But even after the hike, the rich are still paying less and the poor are paying more, and it will take the state a long time to recover.

“The damage from these tax cuts — the financial damage — has been so great that it may take up to a generation to really repair it,” Goossen said.

Some conservatives say that the state just hasn’t cut spending enough — including Brownback, who was not pleased by the legislature’s vote last week to overcome his veto, reverse his tax cuts and direct more funding to the schools.

“I think it’s wrong for the long-term view of the state of Kansas. I think it’s wrong for growth,” Brownback said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a positive for this state moving down the road.”

In the gap

Standing on the porch of her little house, Emmons described how she came to fall in a limbo-like insurance situation that is known as the Medicaid gap. In March, the governor had decided to veto a plan that would have expanded Medicaid coverage to 150,000 more Kansans — including herself.

“What does veto mean?” Jaiden, her 10-year-old granddaughter asked, as she fidgeted, impatient to head to the nearby pool and practice diving off the diving board.

“It means the governor said no to the plan,” Emmons said.

“He sucks,” Jaiden said.

Emmons earns about $14,000 a year from cleaning houses 40 hours a week — too much to qualify for Kansas’ Medicaid program. If she was living by herself, she would qualify for Obamacare subsidies to make her health insurance more affordable. But because she took in the girls and her household has expanded to three, she also earns too little to qualify for subsidies to buy insurance through the marketplace.

She says she can’t afford insurance premiums outright, which would come to nearly half her earnings. At 57, she is going further into debt and has no hope of retirement.

In February, Emmons traveled to Topeka, where she gave testimony urging lawmakers to expand Medicaid in the state.

Other programs on which the family depends are also being squeezed. A community program that gave her daughters a safe place to go when Emmons is at work has seen funding cuts of 90 percent, and this year it canceled its summer program entirely.

She dreams that her girls might one day go to college — but more realistically, she hopes that they will have a better life than their mother and father. She hasn't heard from them in five years.

“If I had not taken the girls out of their situation, they would have followed in their mothers’ footsteps. You know they would, because that’s all they know,” she said.

“I’ve said all along, I’m not looking for a handout. Nobody should ever get anything for free,” she said. “You should work for what you get. But they make it harder and harder every day.”

It's sickening that the Repugs want to do this on a national scale.

If this was an experiment in Kansas, the only conclusion can be that the experiment failed miserably. And still, even though it's proven to be a failure, the DOH's want to do this nationally, because...?

It just boggles the mind.

June 15, 2017

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Posting here because it's about Brownback's policies: "These are the people who suffered when Kansas’s conservative experiment failed"

It's sickening that the Repugs want to do this on a national scale.

A cousin of mine taught at a university in Kansas. She moved.

Edited June 15, 2017 by onekidanddone

June 15, 2017

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

If this was an experiment in Kansas, the only conclusion can be that the experiment failed miserably. And still, even though it's proven to be a failure, the DOH's want to do this nationally, because...?

It just boggles the mind.

One word. Greed.

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