Kansas isn’t Florida. Who’s going to tell hard-right Republicans in Topeka that? | Opinion
One of the biggest problems with all the culture war bills coming out of the Kansas Legislature these days is that they’re so generic — a parade of lawmaking that tests well on Fox News or in national conservative think tanks or maybe in that right-wing utopia known as Florida, but doesn’t have much to do with the wants or needs of most people who actually live here.
Consider what the 2023 legislative session has given us so far.
Attacks on transgender people and their right to exist in public. Legislation that would undermine public education by diverting its funding to home schools and private operations. Never-ending efforts to end abortion in the Sunflower State. (And let’s not forget Attorney General Kris Kobach’s show efforts to warn big retail pharmacies against selling abortion medications here.) A “flat tax” that would give massive tax cuts to the rich while also defunding the state government.
These ideas are popular among conservatives. Were Kansans asking for them? Not really.
The “Value Them Both” amendment vote back in August made clear how voters feel about abortion access. They want to preserve it, overwhelmingly.
Republican Derek Schmidt spent last fall trying to make the Sunflower State gubernatorial campaign all about transgender athletes and drag queens, only occasionally talking about the actual challenges faced by Kansans. The result: Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, won a second term in office.
The last time the state’s public schools were threatened — by then-Gov. Sam Brownback’s disastrous tax-cutting experiment — voters went to the polls and put in legislators who immediately voted to raise taxes and bolster education funding. Brownback ended up fleeing office in order to go work for then-President Donald Trump, and he remains something of a bogeyman in Kansas political discourse.
And as for the flat tax: Where did that come from, exactly? If there was a clamor for it leading up to this legislative session, I certainly missed it. We’re on the cusp of a massive change that Republicans didn’t bother to mention to voters first.
But again: We’ve already seen how Kansans reacted to the GOP’s last big tax-cutting extravaganza. They didn’t like it.
All of this means that the revealed preferences of the state’s voters are at stark odds with the agenda Republicans are pushing in the Kansas Legislature. But that agenda squares up pretty well with what conservatives might be hearing on podcasts hosted by out-of-state rightists such as Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh, or in a generic red state with none of Kansas’ distinctive wants and needs.
A state like, say, Florida.
In retrospect, the high mark of last fall’s gubernatorial campaign for Republicans was not anything Schmidt did, but a September campaign visit by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s “anti-woke” GOP governor who has become a presidential contender on the strength of his pushback against COVID-19 lockdowns, the “Don’t Say Gay” law and his bullying of Disney, one of the Sunshine State’s biggest employers.
The crowd was enthusiastic.
“I want a future for our great state of Kansas that looks a whole lot more like Ron DeSantis has in Florida,” Schmidt said. He lost. Republicans doubled down anyway, with Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson declaring after the election that the Republican voting base “wants bold leadership like we’ve seen out of Florida and in other states.”
Put aside the merits of DeSantis’ conservatism for a minute. Here’s a little secret: Kansas isn’t Florida.
We don’t have that state’s weather or ocean or giant influx of out-of-state retirees who want both. But we do have a drought that is threatening our agricultural economy, and a hundred small towns that are slowly dying — as well as a giant new Panasonic plant and more opportunities on the way.
Our challenges are different. So are our possibilities.
You wouldn’t know that, though, from the one-size-fits-all right-wing legislation coming out of our capital. These days, it’s getting harder and harder to tell Topeka and Tallahassee apart.
This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Kansas isn’t Florida. Who’s going to tell hard-right Republicans in Topeka that? | Opinion."