TOPEKA — The Kansas Legislature completed a 14-hour special session Monday night by sending Gov. Laura Kelly a bill packed with generous medical, religious and philosophical exemptions to federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates and the potential of state unemployment benefits to people fired for refusing to be inoculated.
As legislators were voting on the measure, the Democratic governor issued a brief statement saying she would sign the bill when it reached her desk.
The House and Senate began the day by adopting rival bills in response to President Joe Biden’s nationwide order requiring vaccination of millions of federal employees, contractors, health care workers and people employed at large companies. In an unusually short meeting in the evening, six negotiators representing the House and Senate hammered out a deal that incorporated the House version of exemptions and Senate provisions on jobless benefits.
The Senate affirmed the decision on a vote of 24-11, while the House completed the process on a vote of 77-34.
The final version was watered down by dropping a Senate amendment forbidding Kansas businesses from imposing vaccination requirements on employees and an amendment banning discrimination against workers based on vaccination status. The settlement deleted a 2023 sunset of the law and retained a severability clause to preserve the bill if portions were successfully challenged in court.
In addition, the package would funnel civil fines as high as $50,000 paid by businesses for violation of the law to the state’s unemployment fund rather than the general treasury.
Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, and Rep. John Barker, R-Abilene, lead negotiators for the Senate and House, exchanged a couple of offers on behalf of their bipartisan three-person negotiating teams before landing on middle ground. The four GOP members embraced the compromise, while both Democrats rejected the pact.
“In the greater scheme of things,” Masterson said, “we have to stay focused on the priority, which is protecting those people right now that could be losing their jobs.”
Kelly announced opposition to Biden’s vaccination mandates before scheduling the unprecedented special session, which was the first in state history to be triggered by petitions signed by senators and representatives.
Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, R-Lenexa, said the bill wouldn’t provide the job security sought by people who believe vaccination by government order to be tyranny.
“They think they’re safe, and they don’t have to get a vaccination,” she said. “It’s not going to change anything for them.”
‘It’s bulls***’
Rep. Vic Miller, a Topeka Democrat, said the legislation was structured so that nobody will have to claim unemployment. Workers won’t have a reason to quit, he said, because Republicans who wrote the bill “built a hole so big that you can’t avoid driving through it when you exercise your religious exemption.”
“Frankly, I don’t think anybody is going to ultimately qualify for unemployment,” Miller said. “It’s a pretend thing, to pretend that they care about these people. It’s — it’s bulls***.”
Miller said the governor’s staff encouraged him to agree to the deal negotiated between Senate and House members, but he refused. The legislation is “a scam,” he said, that allows anybody who is “just slightly smart enough to apply for the exemption” to avoid complying with a vaccine mandate.
