Kobach vows to sue Biden, while we get gouged on gas for the next 10 years | Opinion
Kris Kobach ran against Joe Biden and won.
And now, we can only hope that as our next attorney general, he takes his responsibilities to Kansans more seriously in office than he did on the campaign trail.
With nearly 100% name recognition from his controversial tenure as our secretary of state, Kobach managed to edge Chris Mann, a Democrat that nobody ever heard of before, by the less-than-overwhelming majority of 51% to 49%.
He achieved that mainly by campaigning against Biden, vowing to create a special unit within the attorney general’s office expressly for the purpose of coming up with new and exciting ways to sue the Biden administration.
“I’ll wake up every morning having my breakfast, thinking about what our next lawsuit against Joe Biden is going to be,” said Kobach the candidate.
Hopefully by lunch, he’ll turn his attention to the issues that really matter to Kansans.
There’s a big piece of unfinished business at the attorney general’s office and it has to do with your utility bills.
We now know approximately how much it’s going to cost us and how long we’ll have to be paying higher natural gas bills for the unmitigated price-gouging that occurred during Winter Storm Uri, the deep and lasting freeze that hit the state in February 2021.
Kansas Gas Service, the state’s dominant gas company, has completed the process of “securitizing” the extra costs. That’s a fancy way of saying that they had to borrow money to cover the cost of overpriced gas during the emergency and now we, the customers, get to pay it back over time.
The cost is $336 million to customers of KGS.
That works out to a little more than $5 extra on your gas bill every month for the next 10 years. It will be recalculated every six months, so it could go slightly higher or lower depending on the breaks.
During the storm emergency, the price of natural gas skyrocketed from about $3 per million British Thermal Units to a previously unimaginable high of $622.
It’s not the gas company’s fault. It had to either pay up or shut off gas to thousands of customers during a life-threatening crisis.
The beneficiaries are various suppliers, middlemen and traders who had us all over a barrel and raked in a fortune from our hardship.
It’s nearly two years later and we don’t have even the slightest clarity into how prices could go so high so fast, without collusion and market manipulation.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, handmaidens of the energy industry that they always are, doesn’t think there’s anything wrong here.
Kris Kobach, if you’re bound and determined to sue some feds, go sue those guys. They actually deserve it.
Our outgoing attorney general, Derek Schmidt, dragged his feet on investigating the situation.
Why he made that choice, we’ll probably never know.
What we do know is he lost the governor’s race by an eyelash to incumbent Gov. Laura Kelly — by about 20,000 votes out of roughly a million cast.
If Schmidt had beaten the gas profiteers, or at least put up a valiant fight on Kansas’ behalf, he’d have been the Hero of the Rebel Alliance.
He’d have had a much stronger message to sell voters than the campaign he ran, mostly that he thinks transgender people are icky — and he’d almost certainly be measuring for new drapes at the governor’s mansion instead of seeking employment elsewhere.
Schmidt let us down and paid the price.
My strong advice to Kobach would be this:
The average Kansan cares a whole lot more about having $5-plus stolen from their wallet once a month for the next 10 years to pay off gas fat cats, than they do how many times you sue the Biden administration over less-consequential things.
If you want to pick a fight, fight for justice for Kansas utility consumers. We’d all be behind you on that one.
