Anne Welsbacher: Kansas can lead in better direction

Anybody questioning the old platitude that “all politics is local” need look no further than this state. Kansas is the canary in the nation’s coal mine when it comes to experimenting with bad policies. A trifecta of Topeka policy changes now thriving in Washington, D.C., serves as a stark illustration.

Voter suppression: The 2011 so-called SAFE Act, masterminded by Secretary Kris Kobach and initiated in 2013, required that Kansans provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. A series of court rulings struck down parts of the act, but Kobach continued to enforce it.

In 2012, the Republican party added voter ID legislation to its party platform, and in 2017, President Trump appointed Kobach chair of an election integrity commission. By mid-year, Kobach had put into place a nationwide request for data on all U.S. registered voters, including final digits of social security numbers, party affiliations, felony records, voting histories, and more.

Tax cuts: Following decades of mostly balanced expense-revenue books, Kansas revenue dropped sharply in 2013, when Gov. Sam Brownback introduced his infamous “experiment,” cutting income and business taxes to create job growth. Instead, job growth declined and became negative; middle-class gains in income tax savings were lost to increased sales taxes.

We have taken funds from the once fully funded Kansas Public Employees Retirement System pension fund, the highway fund, and other programs and in 2018 will empty the state’s investment fund.

The U.S. Senate’s 2017 tax bill mirrors the principles of the Kansas experiment in content and in the manner in which it was created: it was put together in secrecy.

Secrecy: A Kansas City Star series investigated what it said may be “the most secretive state in the country” in articles about behind-closed-doors policies that cost human lives in highway repair, privatized health care, and shootings by police. Of the 104 bills that became law last year, 98 had no identified sponsors.

Nationally, secrecy is now the norm. Along with his public bill signings, the president has quietly signed dozens on the environment, women’s health, education and more; government websites have been censored, edited or removed entirely; hearings on Russian interference with U.S. elections are held in private; and two recent actions that will profoundly affect every American — the FCC’s vote to rescind net neutrality and the Senate’s tax bill — were made with no public hearings and within an extremely short timeline.

But despite these dispiriting trends, there is good news — and an easy way we all can help.

In November 2016, Kansas voters routed radicals and replaced them with moderates more reflective of our state’s traditional values. In January 2017, more than 500 Kansans met in Topeka as the Kansas People’s Agenda — a group that reclaims “morality” from politicians enacting legislation that is anything but moral — to demand decency in Kansas leadership.

With a palpably strong message from the people supporting them, our legislators were able to generate a budget ending most of Brownback’s experiment, which overrode the governor’s veto.

Kansas, once again a harbinger of things to come, recently has taken progressive steps forward in a country that had otherwise boomeranged back to 19th Century policies.

The Kansas People’s Agenda meets again on Jan. 10. Join us at “Kansas People’s Agenda 2018 Rally” on Facebook or at KansasPeoplesAgenda.org.

This story was originally published January 4, 2018 at 3:59 AM with the headline "Anne Welsbacher: Kansas can lead in better direction."