The election—the important one, for Republican candidates for the Kansas House and Senate in August 2016—is just starting to heat up.

No, not many candidate filings yet, no radio and Internet commercials or those little brochures stuck in the screen door—but that election is starting right now.

Reason? It’s that of the 97 Republicans in the Kansas House and the 32 Republicans in the Senate, the governor-approved tax package this session just passed by one vote in each chamber. That means 34 of those current House Republicans didn’t vote for the governor’s tax plan; 11 Senate Republicans didn’t, either. (No Democrats voted for the package.)

Hmmm…

That can’t be good for a governor who is just one year into his second and final term in office. It means, of course, that the Republican Party of Kansas can brag about its overwhelming majorities, but the titular leader of that party, Gov. Sam Brownback, doesn’t have the solid, stable legislature that he wants to enact…well, whatever he has left on his gubernatorial bucket list.

Lawmakers are, for Brownback’s purposes, sorta like a dog that won’t heel when you tell it to.

So, while there is still a legislative session left before August 2016, plans are probably starting now to prune out those legislators who campaigned under the Republican party label, but didn’t line up to vote for the governor’s tax package. They become the problem, and for Brownback’s purposes, might just as well have been Democrats, or children or illegal aliens or something else.

Practically, in most House and Senate districts in Kansas, because a majority of Kansans are registered as Republican voters, once you get the GOP nomination for the general election ballot, chances are good that you will get to spend winters in Topeka. That’s just the numbers.

So, for the governor, it is time to sort out the Republicans in the Legislature, and the governor is good at it. Look at the Kansas Senate in 2012, when Brownback and political and financial backers pruned the State Senate of most moderate Republicans and boosted the GOP majority to a near-record 32 members.

But the conservative shift in that election didn’t give the governor the certainty of passage of everything he could think up, and while he was involved in the House elections last August and November on behalf of Republicans, he was…how do you say it…distracted by his own reelection campaign.

For 2016, the governor has little to do except to dabble in the House and Senate primary elections and the general election.

So, that sorting has started: Which legislators are keepers and which need to be thrown back into the stream of the general public?

For moderate Republicans, this year’s tax votes show that they are close—with the help of Democrats, of course—to the majorities needed to repeal some of the conservative/Brownback inspired legislation passed this year and last.

But, that comes down to those pesky voters, the ones who, having gone out to lunch or were on vacation during the primary, just look for the letter behind a candidate’s name in November.

While Brownback and crew are pruning, voters might want to read those brochures, those e-mails and such, and identify that there are conservative and moderate Republicans, and maybe figure out where they personally stand. There’s R, of course, and then there’s R-squared.

And Democrats? They’ll benefit from Republican angst, when voters can’t decide whether the GOP candidate is too liberal, too conservative, or just about right. Ever think Republican-dominated Kansas would come to the time when voters might have to consider a Democrat vote the “safe” vote in determining where the government goes? It might get there next election cycle…

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.

On June 20, 1872, the Great Seal of the United States was adopted, sporting the bald eagle at its center, and for the past 232 years the bald eagle has served as the living symbol of freedom, courage, strength, spirit, independence and excellence, all the things America stands for.

Last Saturday, June 20, was proclaimed nationwide as American Eagle Day as a way to celebrate the bald eagle, Americas living symbol of freedom and to bring attention to its dramatic recovery from the brink of extinction. In honor of that, here are some bald eagle facts and trivia.

In the early 1960s, the bald eagle population in the lower 48 states had dropped to less than 500 nesting pairs; today, thanks to conservation efforts there are nearly 15,000 bald eagle pairs in those same 48 states.

I found estimates putting the number of active bald eagle nests in Kansas alone at anywhere from 55 to 90, and more than 3,000 bald eagles spend time in Kansas each winter. The best time to view bald eagles here in Kansas is from November through February, and the best viewing is near any of our large lakes and reservoirs and anywhere along the rivers.

Bald eagles often build nests 50 feet or more off the ground. Nests are not particularly pretty, resembling a haphazard pile of sticks. The same pair uses the same nest year after year, making them larger each time, and after several years a bald eagle nest can easily be the size of a small room. The largest eagle nest ever recorded was in Florida and measured 9 ½ feet across, was 20 feet high from top-to-bottom and weighed an estimated 4500 pounds.

A female bald eagle lays from 1 to 3 pure white eggs once per year in the spring. When I still lived in Ohio there were numerous active eagle nests along Lake Erie, and a game warden friend of mine was in charge of overseeing those nests. He had hours of amazing video of them checking the nests and the chicks in them each spring. They did it by helicopter using 3 people; the pilot, a second person who was lowered from the helicopter down into each nest and a third person as a lookout, constantly watching the sky for the adult eagles to prevent them from flying into the helicopter blades, killing the eagle and crashing the helicopter in the process.

The majority of the bald eagles diet is fish and waterfowl, so when things freeze solid in the winter up north, the eagles migrate south to find open water where they can still fish. Even when our Kansas reservoirs freeze over, the rivers feeding each reservoir still offer open water.

I know ice fishermen often leave a few carp or other rough fish on the ice for the eagles. The huge influx of waterfowl through Kansas each winter is also a big draw to eagles. From their vantage point 1,000 or more feet above the ground an eagle’s miraculous eyes can spot prey over a 3 square mile area.

I just happened upon this proclamation of American Eagle Day as I surfed through the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism website. I’m very disappointed it was not publicized far and wide prior to last Saturday.

Our media gives plenty of press to everything wrong in America; why not spend a little press on something like American Eagle Day that might just give us all something good to think about, if even for a day.

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

The Kansas Legislature has adjourned after the longest session in its history. While high fives and fist bumps characterized the final acts among legislators Friday, in truth they went home with tails between their legs.

The 2015 Kansas legislative session was a disaster on par with the movie “San Andreas.” Only Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wasn’t there to save the day.

By now the story is well-known. A massive deficit caused by significant income tax cuts had to be addressed by some kind of revenue increase just to keep schools operating. Cuts, as popular as they are with donor groups and voters, don’t play well in the reality of public policy. To avoid the session plunging beyond disaster into anarchy, new revenue streams had to be developed. The Governor announced he would veto any substantive reduction of his corporate and income tax cuts, so other sources had to be found. Governor Brownback’s own proposal, mostly predicated on alcohol and tobacco taxes, was dead on arrival.

What were the alternatives, though? None. Despite a cadre of new and supposedly creative lawmakers in the chamber, no alternative plans emerged throughout the session. Most legislators seemed to want to wait for the Governor or Speaker Merrick’s office to produce a plan. Eventually they got one – seven days after scheduled adjournment. Once they got it, they didn’t like it, and chaos ensued.

Legislators spent extended final weeks of the session (and a million dollars in overtime pay) scrambling for options, and a half-dozen competing plans emerged from burgeoning factions within the legislature. Some of the plans were so absurd as to raise taxes on Girl Scout cookie sales. In a remarkably ironic plot twist, taxes on all Kansans increased – the exact opposite of Governor Brownback’s initial plan despite his insistence to the contrary.

Democrats, failing to learn lessons from 2014, simply watched the GOP implosion in vain hope their collapse would allow a Democrat to back into Cedar Crest just as they expected Paul Davis to do a year ago. And Republicans have done their best to give the Democrats enough ammo to go to war on their failure alone.

While much blame will go to Governor Brownback, as it should, the real question of leadership and the biggest failure of the year should be directed towards the Speaker’s office. Where has Ray Merrick been, and what has he done, other than transform the legislature from a subject of derision into a subject of mockery? The Speaker apparently never coordinated with the Governor on a revenue plan, nor did he vet initial drafts with influential rank-and-file members or the House Tax Committee.

Keeping legislators in the dark about the most important bill of the session is on par with Nancy Pelosi’s infamous bromide about Obamacare that Congress had to pass it to know what was in it. Pelosi at least had the votes to pass her bill. Kansas legislators didn’t take the bait and pass the first thing presented, but at a cost of their own reputations with constituents and the exposure of competing coalitions within the legislature’s polar alliance Republicans that could be exploited by center-right primary challengers and some Democrats if either group can recruit, fundraise, and organize against them. The legislature, in a complete leadership vacuum, has served up a heaping plate of opposition research to 2016 challengers.

Like “San Andreas” or “The Towering Inferno,” the relief at the end of the 2015 Kansas legislative session is that it is over. The damage has been done, and perhaps minimized. Nonetheless, we have been witnesses to a disaster of historic proportions.

Chapman Rackaway is a Professor of Political Science at Fort Hays State University.

Today it’s nothing but a dilapidated pile of old lumber in the middle of a wheat field; so far off the road in fact that it takes binoculars to even see it there.

We locals don’t even notice it anymore and neither would anyone else were it not for the few trees and old windmill nearby. It was an old shed with a small grainery in one corner; the kind where you would shovel loose grain into the room and keep adding boards in the doorway as the level of the grain rose. There was once a house trailer there too that was the first home of some friends of ours when they first married. But to us the place will always be known as the vulture nursery.

Several years ago I was told that a pair of turkey vultures had nested in the old shed for years. We slipped back there that evening, and sure enough, in the very corner of the little grainery room was a female vulture firmly planted over two eggs. Turkey vultures are most necessary to our environment and are part of God’s dead-animal-cleanup crew. They are the most amazing birds to watch as they soar effortlessly on the rising thermals, and they possess a digestive system so sophisticated and iron-clad that they can eat even diseased carcasses without harm.

Yet, in spite of all their merits, they are contenders for the homeliest creature God ever made.

With an old board we were able to gingerly lift one corner of mom vulture that night to see the two eggs beneath her, and she didn’t seem to mind much. Baby vultures begin life in the most humble surroundings imaginable. The old shed was on its last leg even back then. The only way inside was to squeeze through a small opening in one end, then clamor over and around stacks of old lumber to get to the grainery in the opposite end, all the while listening to the partially-collapsed roof above you creak and groan as you went. The nest was flat on the floor amidst mud and vulture droppings from past years.

We paid regular visits to the old shed that year and watched the process unfold. Soon there were two pure-white balls of fluff that soon grew into two feisty vulture chicks that stood back-to-back and hissed at us each time we were able to view them without mom around. Then one day the nest was empty, but as we searched the sky, suddenly there they were roosting on top of the old windmill outside watching us from their new and better vantage point, while in the sky and always close, soared mom and dad.

No vultures have nested in the old shed now for years; its total collapse left the grainery in the far corner accessible from all sides, exposed to predators and the elements and I don’t think they feel secure there anymore. If only the old shed could talk and tell us about all the grain that was unloaded there, shovel-by-shovel over the years. And about all the kids that played within its walls and climbed in its loft. And yes, even about all the turkey vultures born and raised there.

Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].