What do you even write when the most powerful lobbying force in your state not only loses a pivotal election, but gets their heads handed to them?
The immediate reaction is shock.
The secondary reaction is that something may be changing; that we could be seeing a generational shift where the pressure politics of the past don’t work anymore.
In January, when more than two-thirds of our state representatives and senators put the Value Them Both Amendment on the ballot, it looked like the proposition that couldn’t possibly lose.
Conventional wisdom — that Kansas is an anti-abortion state — was on their side. And the anti-abortion Republicans who dominate the Legislature stacked the deck as much as they could.
They deliberately put it on a primary ballot because historically, August primaries have been sleepy affairs where Republicans vote and not much of anybody else does. And the people who wrote the initiative got to write not just the amendment, but the ballot statements for and against it.
Most of all, they had the backing of a seemingly invincible lobby. For the two decades-plus that I’ve covered Kansas politics, Kansans for Life has called the tune at the Statehouse and the Legislature has lined up to dance to it.
KFL has been a kingmaker in the Statehouse and they were key players in purging just about every pro-choice moderate GOP legislator from the Capitol.
And if there are any pro-choice Republican lawmakers left in Topeka, the mere threat of being primaried by KFL and the anti-abortion right was enough to cow them into submission and vote to put the amendment on a primary ballot.
But it all came crashing down Tuesday when the voters got to weigh in.
As of this writing, with 97% of the votes counted, the score was “No” 59%, “Yes” 41%.
The primary architect of the defeat of the Value Them Both Amendment is the United States Supreme Court.
Over the years, pro-choice Kansas has been complacent — letting the Legislature pass more or less whatever it wanted on abortion, secure in the knowledge that the fundamental right to choose was protected at the federal level.
In June, when the High Court overturned Roe v. Wade and threw abortion to the states, pro-choice Kansans — who according to polls were always the majority — finally woke up.
All of a sudden, the only thing standing in the way of a total abortion ban was a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that the Kansas Constitution contained a right for women to control their bodies and their pregnancies.
