And remember that it came down essentially to one decision for Kansas voters: very conservative Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach or Democrat Sen. Laura Kelly?
Well, Kelly won, of course, by more than 50,000 votes, or 48% to 43% over Kobach.
The race essentially came down to Kobach, or the best-known candidate who wasn’t Kobach. Not being Kobach was a campaign asset — he was a lightning rod for folks who didn’t care for his voter rights/immigration policies and for those who feared he would reignite the Gov. Sam Brownback fiscal era.
But just being “not Kobach” didn’t really tell us anything about whether the “not Kobach” would be a competent and persuasive governor.
With the first adjournment of the Legislature last Friday, it looks like Kelly has been persuasive. She got the GOP-pushed tax-cut bill knocked down; her veto won’t be overridden. That’s victory No. 1.
And she got her school finance plan, worth about $90 million more a year for schools for the next four years, passed. That might, just might, be enough to convince the Kansas Supreme Court that the state is “adequately” funding public schools for our kids and grandkids. Not sure, depending on the court, but it could well be victory No. 2.
Victory No. 3? That would be expansion of Medicaid health care to more than 100,000 generally poor Kansans, their children, the disabled and others who can’t afford health care. No. 3 will be the target of the governor’s intense lobbying of legislators and their constituents during the next three weeks. Kelly and Lt. Gov. Lynn Rogers will be crisscrossing the state during the Legislature’s spring break, with public events where they can try to get Kansans to tell their senators that they want Medicaid to be expanded.
The Senate has so far refused to hear the bill in committee, to consider voting it to the floor of the Senate where there are probably enough votes to pass it. It’s a different deal than two years ago. When the Legislature strongly passed Medicaid expansion, Gov. Brownback vetoed it, and either because of allegiance to the outgoing governor or maybe just because most Republicans were still referring to it as “Obamacare,” legislators couldn’t or didn’t override the veto.
That puts this year’s House-passed Medicaid bill, which the Senate’s anti-expansion leadership has specifically opposed, the target of Kelly and the health-care industry and Kansans without health coverage and lots of others in the next three weeks.
It’s the biggest test of the political power and the political strategy of the “not-Kobach” governor who got elected last November.
If successful, the effort by Kelly and others to get Medicaid expanded could reshape the Republican Party in Kansas.
It could mean that the hard-right conservativism, which got Kobach through the GOP primary election by about 400 votes over slightly more moderate then-Gov. Jeff Colyer, has seen its day. Could mean that the leaders of the Kansas House and Senate, who essentially set the rules for lawmakers and have their thumbs on the scale on nearly every vote taken, are losing horsepower.
Debate over important issues such as taxes, school finance and Medicaid expansion is a good thing. That’s how you find the upside and the downsides of major issues.
The outcome could tell us just how persuasive the new governor is…and might mean Republicans have to figure out how to deal with her…
Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com