By Dr. Mark Peterson

In the broad traditions of this holiday season there are lots of stories of redemption and rediscovery. They often derive from personal moments of crisis – Ebenezer Scrooge is an example. Moral clarity is a personal event. This week’s column addresses political clarity for Kansans as 2015 closes – a moment of collective rediscovery, perhaps.

For example, Kansas’s privatized and malfunctioning intervention and protection system for foster and other at-risk children has been determined to be a near-criminal mess. A long-serving Republican member of the state legislature, Mike Kiegerl (R-Olathe), who has made the activities of the Department of Children and Families, particularly foster care, a personal focus, says that privatization has failed. The December report that he co-authored and submitted to the Legislative Special Committee on Foster Care Adequacy concluded that privatized services were too expensive for the poor results they’ve produced.
Two members of the legislature have helped to make their own seasons merry and bright. Representative Travis Couture-Lovelady (R-Palco), at the end of November, and Representative Steve Brunk (R-Wichita), just last week, decided that life is good without electoral campaigning and with a substantial steady paycheck. Furthermore, they appear to have learned the lesson former House Speaker Mike O’Neal did a few years ago, if you are good to your ‘friends,’ your friends will be good to you. Former Speaker O’Neal traded in his legislative gavel and consistent record supporting the anti-tax, anti-regulation, laissez-faire elements of the Kansas business community for a job as president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce. Former Representative Couture-Lovelady took his expansive view on firearm possession and use in public places, like state funded colleges and universities, and parlayed it into a position as a multi-state lobbyist for the NRA. Representative Brunk is leaving the chairmanship of the Kansas House’s Federal and State Affairs Committee to become executive director of the pro-life Kansas Family Policy Council. The revolving door continues to spin.
After Thanksgiving, House Speaker Ray Merrick reduced his residual headaches from the last legislative session. To eliminate further foolishness from the House Committee on Health and Human Services about expanding Medicaid, Speaker Merrick removed three Republican moderate members who advocated getting additional Medicaid dollars for Kansas to keep medical services functioning in some fragile rural and inner-city locales. Doing so may reduce Speaker Merrick’s Tylenol consumption, and it may well eliminate House policy debate over Medicaid expansion in 2016.

Finally, last week Senate President Susan Wagle presented her hopes and ambitions for the coming legislative session to the Wichita Pachyderm Club. There will be no discussion about taxation this year, if she has any say about it, and as president of the Kansas Senate, of course she does. The senator was also concerned that further borrowing from KDOT, after $400 million in new bonds were issued in December with little legislative or public awareness should not be repeated. She didn’t acknowledge a connection between KDOT’s borrowing and the transfers the governor has made from that agency’s bank account to cover the general fund’s revenue shortage, but she didn’t have to. She also declared that, barring “judicial activism” on school finance, a seventy-five day legislative session is likely for 2016.

As 2015 closes and we retire to our holiday snuggeries, wishing joy and goodwill to family and friends, perhaps we can also think of the foster kids, the unwell, the unemployed, and others on hard-times and reflect on the merry band of self-interested officeholders, practitioners of false economies, defenders of the status-quo, and producers of blue smoke and fun-house images of reality that we’ve sent to represent us in Topeka. We’ll have eleven months for clear reflection and action. Perhaps next December we might optimistically wish each other a happier New Year in 2017.

 

Dr. Mark Peterson teaches political science at the college level in Topeka.