Pro-life attack on Commissioner Lacey Cruse was ugly and disingenuous | Commentary
.JPG "This newsletter item got Lacey Cruse in hot water with her pro-life Sedgwick County Commission colleagues and some state legislators.")
Anti-abortion Sedgwick County commissioners and state legislators treated us to a premeditated political attack on pro-choice Commissioner Lacey Cruse this week, that was as ugly and inappropriate as anything that has been done at that bench in years.
In the name of “correcting” Cruse’s position on the Value Them Both Amendment, those legislators and commissioners hypocritically engaged in the same type of speculative and politicized rhetoric they accused Cruse of.
This might have been written off as an example of election-year politicking, but the commission took it a step too far, directing staff to send out a special missive to county voters and the media to correct what they called Cruse’s “misinformation” on the topic.
At issue is a statement in Cruse’s regular monthly newsletter encouraging people to vote in the Aug. 2 election:
The Constitutional Amendment, HCR 5003, if approved by a majority of Kansas voters, would create a new section in the Kansas Bill of Rights concerning the regulation of abortion. This constitutional amendment would eliminate secure and safe abortions in Kansas.
The amendment by itself doesn’t do that, but it certainly clears the way for the Legislature to. And every indication is that the Legislature, dominated by anti-abortion Republicans, will ban abortion the first chance it gets.
Cruse’s problem here isn’t that she’s wrong, but that her opinion conflicts with the rhetoric of the Value Them Both campaign, which disingenuously claims that the amendment seeks only to allow reasonable regulation of abortion.
As I’ve said before in this space, you don’t fight for 30 years to ban something and then pull back to “common sense” regulation when you’ve amended the constitution and you’ve got the votes in the Legislature to do whatever you want.
The county’s action came at the request of two pro-amendment Republican legislators, Patrick Penn and Susan Humphries.
Their presentation was far more hyperbolic and speculative than Cruse’s newsletter.
Penn said failure to pass the amendment would make Kansas a “haven for unlimited abortion” and that “taxpayer funded abortions up to the moment of birth are almost certain without the Value Them Both Amendment.”
Humphries followed that up with “it absolutely does not eliminate any abortions in Kansas except taxpayer-funded abortions.”
For the record, abortions are already strictly regulated in Kansas and taxpayer funding of abortion is already banned by state and federal law, except in medical emergencies.
This was nothing more or less than a political mugging of Cruse, who is up for re-election and facing a competitive race against a conservative Republican challenger.
It was planned in advance and carried out behind the scenes in the county courthouse so they could spring it on her without her having any time to prepare.
County Counselor Mike Pepoon announced during the meeting that he had been in contact with the state Governmental Ethics Commission at the request of two Republican commissioners, later determined to be Jim Howell and David Dennis. Nothing came of those inquiries, but it shows you how serious they were.
Now this might be different if commissioner newsletters were anything other than thinly veiled campaign ads for incumbents.
But to pretend they’re not political vehicles doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Howell’s newsletter last month was headlined “Don’t Trade Representative-Democracy for a Few Bucks” and outlined his case for keeping the offices of county clerk, county treasurer and register of deeds as elective rather than appointive offices. A few months ago, he used his newsletter to promote his church.
And Cruse’s predecessor, Richard Ranzau, had his own “reading list” posted on the county website of various treatises supporting his small-government conservative views.
Commissioner Sarah Lopez made a good suggestion: That the county hold a study session to set guidelines for what should and shouldn’t be in commissioner newsletters.
If anything good comes of this, it will be a crackdown on using county government resources as a political gift to incumbent officeholders.
I can hardly wait.
This story was originally published July 7, 2022 at 4:08 PM.
