Rep. Mark Hutton: Fear of postcards undermined budget solution

To fully understand the challenges lawmakers faced this legislative session, you must also understand how we arrived at the stalemate we experienced.

Had the Democrats and moderate Republicans elected to enter budget negotiations, the outcome could have been much different. This was not the case, and the reason was one word: postcards.

The postcard mailers that we all receive from candidates running for office are the staple of every campaign. It is the single most effective way for candidates to convey their beliefs and positions to voters. Unfortunately, it is also a way for other interest groups to influence political races.

These groups use snippets of truth and distortions of facts with little accountability. This practice has been pointed to as the primary reason that the Republican Party gained conservative-leaning seats in both legislative chambers in recent elections.

Relegated to a minimal voice in the legislative process and facing the continual threat of postcards in the next election, Democrats and moderate Republicans pulled away from the negotiating table this session – and it’s no wonder.

But had they chosen to participate in this process in the House, we could have had a plan that asked small businesses to once again contribute a minimal amount toward our revenue hole.

This plan would have lowered the sales tax on food, frozen future income tax rate decreases, and cut $30 million from the budget with targeted cuts instead of the $50 million we ended up with, to be determined by the governor.

In the final hours of the session, House leadership was ready to offer this plan for a vote, but it was derailed when the moderate Republicans withdrew their support, fearing the plan would not pass the Senate but leave them on record as supporting a tax increase that failed.

In the end, we had a governor, held hostage by East Coast ideologues, who would not consider a correction to his tax policy; House moderates paralyzed by fear of being “postcarded”; conservatives in both chambers who would have been fine with cutting $400 million from our state budget; and the Democrats in both chambers who were more interested in political gains in the 2016 elections than being part of the solution in 2015.

A far superior, fiscally responsible bipartisan solution was lost, and it was lost because of the postcard.

So last Friday at 4 a.m., faced with time running out and the reality of our state careening toward financial ruin, 63 Republican representatives voted for a plan that failed to correct an unfair taxation policy, remained loaded with some of the same type of tax-cut time bombs that caused this problem in the first place, and failed to yield a suitable ending balance for fiscal year 2016.

For the 63 who voted for the plan, it was one of the bitterest times of our lives. Whether it was for breaking a pledge not to raise taxes or failing to gain parity in our tax system, it was a hard vote.

For the 20 Democrats and some 20 moderate Republicans who chose to vote “no,” I suspect it was a bittersweet moment. They won a political victory, but they now likely wonder what could have been.

Meanwhile, outside in the hallway, the president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and godfather of the 2012 tax cuts exchanged a celebratory fist bump with the governor’s consigliere.

Chalk up another victory for the postcard.

This story was originally published June 17, 2015 at 7:05 PM with the headline "Rep. Mark Hutton: Fear of postcards undermined budget solution."