The road to renewal in Kansas runs through a single political party: the Republican one.
While Democrats have a traditionally wide-ranging coalition — all the way from free-market capitalists to democratic socialists and beyond — Republicans have winnowed their ranks to a teensy spectrum of hard right to extreme right.
Think of it this way: The space between Democrats Gov. Laura Kelly and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez contains huge political and practical differences.
While the space between Republicans state Sen. Ty Masterson and likely U.S. House Speaker Steve Scalise could split an atom. They’re two sides of the same extremist coin.
That’s why Kansans First, the educational organization headed by former state Senate President Steve Morris, deserves your attention.
Created with the help of Republicans consultant and strategist Mitch Rucker, the group aims to reanimate the moderate GOP coalition that once wisely guided Kansas politics.
“In the past years, we had a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats that worked together to do good things for the state,” Morris said. “And we were successful in doing that. But I don’t see that bipartisan cooperation happening now.”
Moderate Republicans once guided our nation, working closely with a Democratic-dominated Congress. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush all embodied moderation — to different extents, and in their own distinctive ways. They didn’t just navigate our nation for decades, they helped win the Cold War along the way.
In Kansas, moderate Republicans governors like Bill Graves and Mike Hayden alternated with moderate Democrats like John Carlin and Kathleen Sebelius.
I grew up in that Kansas. I don’t recall many folks complaining about it at the time.
EXTREME partisanship, fueled by religious fundamentalism and national politics, eventually infected the Sunflower State. Gov. Sam Brownback, a diehard ideologue, led a purge of moderate Republicans from the Legislature in 2012. Arguably, the state hasn’t recovered in the 11 years since.
Morris was one of those ousted.
“When I was involved with the Senate, we had majority of the Senate and the House either in the center, center right or center left,” he said. “We didn’t have the extremes of hard left or hard right. And I think the hard right is where we are right now. And I don’t believe that the majority of Kansas are there.”
By any standard, the far right has been a disaster for Kansas. Brownback’s signature tax policy “experiment” exploded into destructive shards, damaging state schools and other services from top to bottom. The party since then has lost two gubernatorial races to a moderate Democrat, saw an anti-abortion constitutional amendment collapse at the polls and spent years slow-rolling food sales tax cuts.
GOP legislators now want to take another whack at demolishing public schools through a convoluted voucher program that amounts to government handouts to wealthy families and religious schools.
