Kansas Sen. Cindy Holscher, a progressive Democrat from Overland Park, sponsors a lot of bills and resolutions that don’t stand a chance of passing our conservative and veto-proof Republican state Legislature.
This year, she’s signed on to measures to abolish the death penalty, raise the minimum wage, allow voters to register on election day and demanding accountability for the illegal police raid on journalists at the Marion County Record.
In my view, those are all causes worth discussing, but that’s not what this column’s about. What has Republicans who dominate the Statehouse hot and bothered today is Holscher’s unvarnished support for the storybook romance of Travis Kelce, the superstar tight end of the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs, and Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop music megastar.
On Tuesday, the only official action on the Senate floor was an emergency vote “commending the National Conference of State Legislatures on its 50th anniversary in 2025.”
And then Holscher stood up during “announcements” and announced that she had two resolutions:
“The first resolution is support for statehood for Washington D.C., the second resolution is welcoming Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to Johnson County,” Holscher said. “He recently bought a house in Johnson County and this resolution is to welcome Travis and his girlfriend Taylor Swift to our great state and recognize the huge economic impact they have in the K.C. metro area and the positive light they shed on Kansas.”
Holscher said she heard audible gasps from the Republican side of the chamber.
And they weren’t over D.C. statehood.
Rage from the right
Swift, the winner of the Grammy for Album of the Year and Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year,” has become a lightning rod for the far right.
Her cardinal sins, in the eyes of MAGA World, are that she urges young people to register to vote and has, in the past, criticized Donald Trump. The first one is basic civics and the second is common sense, but there you go.
Kelce, meanwhile, has not escaped MAGA’s ire, because he’s currently starring in a funny Pfizer commercial urging people to get a COVID vaccine and a flu shot at the same doctor visit — “two things at once!”
That’s got him sideways with the large and noisy anti-science faction of the GOP.
The situation has gone so far that Fox News and other right-wing media have floated the bizarre conspiracy theory that the Kelce-Swift romance is a sham, maybe even a Pentagon psychological operation to boost President Joe Biden’s odds of beating Trump again in their upcoming November rematch.
The Washington Post made a hilarious video showing Fox host after Fox host throwing shade on the happy couple and urging Swift to stay out of politics for her own good.
