The best thing that can be said of the 2023 session of the Kansas Legislature is that it is over. The second-best? It wasn’t quite as bad as it could’ve been.
But it came close.
During the just-completed session, Republicans who control the House and Senate focused their energies on culture war battles that benefit almost nobody. They passed legislation that would undermine public education, public health and the state’s finances. And, too often, they did so with techniques that make a mockery of democratic transparency.
The damage would have been worse, except that Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, wielded her veto pen an astonishing 29 times this year.
But is Kansas better off than when the session began in January? We don’t think so. There were a few particularly egregious lowlights:
∙ The session will be remembered mostly for Republican assaults on the rights and dignity of transgender Kansans. Legislators overcame Kelly’s veto to pass a new law keeping transgender kids out of school sports, and a “Women’s Bill of Rights” that will prevent transgender women from accessing some domestic violence and rape services. Lawmakers fell just short of the votes needed for a bill that would have revoked the licenses of doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender kids.
These measures were presented as a defense of women, and of the idea that gender is binary, more broadly. In reality, they amounted to little more than the needless bullying of a small and embattled minority. Indeed, that very much seemed to be the point.
∙ Republicans mostly fell short of their efforts to undermine the state’s public schools, thankfully ditching a bill that would have created vouchers to pay for private schools and unregulated home schools. Instead, they passed legislation that fully funds public education. That’s the good news.
The bad news? The education bill also includes a massive expansion of the state’s so-called “scholarship” tax credit program, another measure designed to send students — and money — to private schools. Kelly may yet veto that effort. And legislators whiffed on Kelly’s request to fully fund special education, despite an outcry from educators across the state.
∙ There was a real opportunity for bipartisan cooperation on some sort of tax cut for Kansans. The state started the year with a $2 billion budget surplus, after all. And Kelly was clearly amenable, offering a plan to eliminate grocery taxes, cut taxes for Social Security recipients and create an annual sales tax holiday for school supplies. We didn’t get that.
We didn’t get anything. Why? Because Republicans chose instead to shoot for the moon — channeling their efforts into a Sam Brownback-esque flat-tax bill that would have delivered most of its benefits to wealthy Kansans while taking a drastic toll on the state’s revenues. Kelly wisely vetoed that bill.
∙ And just for good measure, legislators decided to play games with public health, passing legislation banning COVID-19 vaccine requirements to attend school or day care and neutering the ability of state and local public officials to order quarantines and other measures to contain infectious diseases. Luckily, Republicans fell short of veto-proof majorities on those issues.
Kansas Republicans didn’t just give us bad legislation. They also used bad processes.
That education bill? The Kansas House ignored its own rules to include a late provision that allows the state to buy closed school buildings. (Democrats speculated the new measure might be used to turn those facilities over to private schools.) And legislative leaders once again made use of the “gut and go” technique to strip bills of their original content to replace them with provisions more to their liking — depriving the public its opportunity to examine and comment on the replacement measures.
What a disaster.
