Kansas legislative session marked by conflict with governor, courts, each other

The 2016 legislative session has seen a bill that would make it easier to impeach Supreme Court justices, an attempt to override Gov. Sam Brownback’s vetoes and the ouster of committee chairs after they bucked legislative leaders.

Every legislative session has a fair amount of conflict, but this one has seen an unusual amount of intraparty wrangling, with growing tension between Brownback, in his sixth year as governor, and the Republican-dominated Legislature, said Bob Beatty, a political scientist at Washburn University.

“The emotions are palpable,” Beatty said.

A main reason is because Kansas faces a budget shortfall for the second year in a row. Many analysts blame Brownback’s plan to cut income taxes.

“It’s not going well. This is not how it was supposed to be. Year six was supposed to be the sixth year of the ‘sun is shining,’ ” Beatty said, referring to Brownback’s re-election slogan. “The frustration is probably one of the most salient things of year six, and a major reason for that is everything’s not working like it’s supposed to. … Out of that frustration, what’s emerged is the Legislature asserting itself.”

Conflict with governor

Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, said financial stress is causing more conflict with the governor’s office than in previous sessions.

“This is not personal. This is just a family feud about how to spend money and where to cut the budget to make it balance. That’s all it is. It’s just a family feud,” she said.

Brownback disputes that the income tax cuts he ushered into law have caused the state’s fiscal problems.

Wagle, who supported the cuts in 2012, said the state hasn’t “experienced the growth that’s necessary” to sustain its budget. Last year, she recommended a 2 percent across-the-board budget cut to right the state’s finances, a suggestion the governor did not heed.

“This year we’ve come into a budget where he’s swept a lot of fee funds, and he’s borrowed money, and he’s taken money from KDOT. And we’re just seriously structurally imbalanced, so I asked him again early this year if he would be willing to cut across the board,” she said. “He’s been very unwilling to do that.”

Frustration over money has prompted the Legislature to seek stricter oversight of the state’s finances.

The House passed SB 249, which would prevent state agencies from borrowing without legislative approval, after disagreeing with the Brownback administration over a state construction project in Topeka that has now been terminated.

The Senate voted to override the governor’s veto on legislation meant to keep Brownback from using sales tax revenue bonds to lure the American Royal from Missouri to Wyandotte County, a project lawmakers said would divert money from the state’s general fund.

The veto override failed in the House after Brownback promised to cancel new STAR bonds projects across the state if it succeeded. Legislation to enact stricter oversight of these projects has been introduced in both chambers and passed in the Senate.

Republican infighting

Brownback’s office recently told the Lawrence Journal-World that Wagle was attacking the governor because “she knows the media will reward her with positive coverage for doing so,” a comment Wagle said she was shocked to read.

The governor downplayed any tension between him and the Senate president last week.

“This time in legislative sessions, things get more difficult and the important thing is to try and keep people communicating, talking back and forth,” Brownback said. “There’s lots of things that are said quickly and maybe one looks at them afterwards and says, ‘well, maybe we shouldn’t have said it quite that way.’ ”

Brownback said it’s not unusual for leaders to have disagreements. “That happens. And it happens publicly. I always think it’s better if it’s not as much out in the public,” he said.

The governor’s office also criticized Wagle for stripping fellow conservative Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, R-Shawnee, of her chairmanship of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee after a rules dispute, asserting it showed Wagle supported the federal Affordable Care Act.

The decision to remove Pilcher-Cook as health chairwoman was controversial, and 17 of the Senate’s 32 Republicans signed a letter asking for her reinstatement.

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, the longest-serving member of the Legislature, called this one of the most contentious sessions he could remember.

“I thought the 2012 session was almost as nasty as it could get, because you had this war in the Republican Party between the moderates and the conservatives. But now there’s a war – at least in the Senate – between the conservatives and the conservatives,” Hensley said.

House Speaker Ray Merrick, R-Stilwell, similarly decided strip Rep. John Rubin, R-Shawnee, of his chairmanship of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee after he tried to force a vote on a gaming bill that Merrick said could have potentially cost the state $100 million.

Conflict with courts, school districts

Concern about the state’s budget is at the root of the conflict lawmakers have with the judicial branch of government. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in February that lawmakers must fix inequities in school funding before July or risk closure of the state’s schools.

Sen. Ty Masterson, R-Andover, the Senate’s budget committee chairman, has described the court as pointing a gun at the state’s schoolchildren.

HB 2655, which passed on Thursday, included a preamble that noted the court ruling and stated that the Legislature “is committed to avoiding any disruption to public education.”

The bill reallocates money for public schools and changes the way the state calculates equalization aid for property-poor districts. Most districts, including Wichita, wind up with the same amount of money they were already set to receive. Only 23 school districts will see an increase in funding under the bill.

Earlier bills would have given more money for Wichita and other districts but also would have led to cuts in some parts of the state.

“We accomplished the desires of the courts without picking winners and losers,” said Rep. Ron Ryckman, R-Olathe, the House budget committee chairman.

John Robb, an attorney for the Wichita school district, disagrees.

“This isn’t even in the ballpark with a fix,” Robb said. “When you take last year’s money, which was held unconstitutionally distributed, and you give everybody the exact same money next year, it can’t have fixed anything.”

The Senate passed a bill to make it easier to impeach Supreme Court justices the day before it passed the school finance bill.

SB 439, which also would apply to the governor and other constitutional officers, would allow for impeachment of a justice for “attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of government.”

Hensley said there was no question “that the Legislature’s trying to bully the court. And I don’t believe that this court is easily intimidated.”

Wagle said impeachment is a legitimate constitutional process and lawmakers wanted to clarify the infractions that could warrant it.

Budget uncertainty

Kansas’ budget woes have become a punch line on late night television – NBC’s Seth Meyers was the latest to skewer the state this past week – but not everyone is laughing.

“When we knock on doors right now, when we’re at social events, all of my elected senators are being confronted by angry constituents – mostly about budget issues,” Wagle said.

Lawmakers began a monthlong break on Friday and won’t return to Topeka until the end of April, shortly after the state revises its revenue projections.

The state faces a projected $30 million shortfall for the current year, and legislative leaders are worried that a grim budget outlook could grow grimmer.

They plan to enact efficiencies recommended by a private consulting firm to help shore up the state’s finances in the long term. But other steps may be needed in the short term.

Lawmakers have introduced legislation to roll back the business tax exemption.

“We must close the LLC loophole,” Sen. Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, said in an e-mail earlier this month. “It grows bigger every year, costing Kansas at least $250 million annually. It continues to make the budget unstable.”

Brownback has said he’ll oppose any bill that rolls back the exemption, and many lawmakers want to avoid a tax debate in a year when all legislative seats are up for re-election.

Other options that have been floated include reducing payments to the state’s pension fund or selling the state’s proceeds from a tobacco settlement – money now used to fund children’s programs – as a securities bond.

Both of these ideas have sparked backlash from advocacy groups.

Brownback cut spending for higher education by 3 percent this month after the state missed February revenue estimates by more than $50 million. He called the underperformance a cause for concern but said Kansas was not unique in its budget situation.

“The other thing I hope you guys would look at, too, and see is Oklahoma’s got a $1.3 billion budget hole. Nebraska’s got a budget hole. … You’ve got a region that’s having some difficulty,” Brownback said, blaming the phenomenon on declining oil and agriculture prices.

Brownback said he would watch the situation as it develops and that he was in communication with lawmakers. He would not say whether he planned to take action or leave it to the Legislature to make cuts.

Some lawmakers want the governor to take a more active role in the process.

“We’re a citizen Legislature,” Wagle said. “We don’t have full-time staff. Most of us go home to our other walks of life and other jobs and family concerns. We really need the governor to lead on the financial concerns that we have.”

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 5:59 PM with the headline "Kansas legislative session marked by conflict with governor, courts, each other."