Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's austerity regime will come to fruition (or in this case, rot) in 2018 and voters here seem wholly uninterested in stopping him.  First, he finally dropped the other shoe on killing Medicaid expansion yesterday, taunting health advocacy groups who have promised to take him to court. Bevin says without blinking that he will take health care away from ten percent of the state if the courts dare find his new Medicaid work rules unconstitutional.

Gov. Matt Bevin has issued an executive order that would strip Medicaid coverage from nearly half a million Kentuckians should his proposed overhaul of the federal-state health plan be struck down in court. 

No one has filed a legal challenge to Bevin's changes to Kentucky's Medicaid program that federal authorities approved Friday. 

But several advocacy groups have said some of the changes — such as requiring some "able-bodied" adults to work or volunteer at least 20 hours a week — likely will be challenged in court because they violate federal law that establishes Medicaid purely as a health program and does not authorize work requirements. 

Advocates who criticized Bevin's overhaul of Kentucky's Medicaid program were also critical of the executive order he issued Friday, the same day the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved his plan to reshape Medicaid in Kentucky.

"Is the Governor of Kentucky saying that if he is caught doing something illegal, he will take health care away from hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who have done nothing wrong?" asked Leonardo Cuello, director of health policy for the National Health Law Program. 

Cuello's Washington-based health advocacy group is considering a legal challenge to Bevin's plan.

Ahh, but if you think Bevin is bluffing, you should see his 2018 austerity budget proposal that cuts billions from education, infrastructure, and eliminates 70 social programs in the state over the next two years.

Gov. Matt Bevin on Tuesday night proposed a budget that he said would eliminate 70 state programs and cut spending at most agencies by 6.25 percent while fully funding state pension plans.

And the governor gave a high priority in the lean spending plan to the main public school funding program known as SEEK (Support Education Excellence in Kentucky), saying its funding will not be cut.

"The real budget focus this year is getting our financial house in order," Bevin told a joint meeting of the Kentucky House and Senate in an hourlong State of the Commonwealth and budget address.

The key step in doing that, he said, is by fully funding the hundreds of millions of dollars more that he said are needed by state retirement systems, which are $43 billion in debt.

Bevin's budget does not anticipate tax reform, but the governor said that issue remains a priority. He said if tax reform cannot pass in the current regular session, he will push that a special session later in the year.

In his speech, Bevin did not identify any of the 70 programs to be eliminated. He said they were "scattered throughout state government." A briefing released by his administration during the speech said the budget closes the state's film incentive program to new applicants.

He said the eliminations result in massive savings that minimized cuts to other parts of state government, where cuts much deeper than 6.25 percent were feared.

Some areas of the budget would get an increase, like social worker, adoption programs and opioid abuse prevention, but dozens of higher education, arts, teacher recruiting, agriculture, job training, scholarships, environmental, library aid, rural hospital and women's programs would be eliminated entirely, and of course the billions in cuts across the board for just about everything left.

And of course "tax reform" means Bevin wants to go the full Brownback and eliminate the state's income tax on businesses and put the tax burden squarely on workers with new sales and vice taxes.  It's Kansas all over again, only with a massive state pension problem hanging over everyone to boot. Not even Brownback wanted complete austerity, he just tried to wreck roads and schools.
 
If you're wondering what the post-Obama GOP austerity agenda looks like without Trump's ego mucking things up, Kentucky in 2018 is the place where you want to look.

Coming soon to a state near you if the GOP has its way.

And Moran, Moran So Far Away

Kansas GOP Sen. Jerry Moran thought he could have his July 4th recess Trumpcare town hall meeting cake and eat it too as he held it in the remote western part of the state.  The event in tiny Palco, Kansas, population 277, in Rooks County, population 5,200, a county that Trump won by 70 points in November.

Only one small problem, and that is Kansans, even in Rooks County, have had about enough of the GOP.

But about 150 people tried to squeeze into a community center room set up to hold less than half that many people, many of them from outside the area. While the audience applauded Moran for opposing a health care bill written by Senate GOP leaders, the applause was louder for speakers who advocated a universal government-run health care program such as Medicare for the elderly or Medicaid for the poor.

Moran announced last week that he would oppose the Senate Republican bill after a budget analysis suggested 22 million more people would be uninsured under the proposal by 2026. Moran said the legislation needs to protect coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and not hurt rural hospitals. 

“I will choose country over party,” Moran said. “I will choose Kansans over party.” 

Like many other Republican lawmakers, Moran has been a persistent critic of the 2010 Affordable Care Act championed by former President Barack Obama and filed legislation during the Democrat’s administration to repeal it. 

The general push still has the support of many Republican voters in the area, including Ashley Kuhn, the 32-year-old director of a day care center down Main Street from the community center where Moran had his town hall. She said she’s seen her family’s health insurance co-payments double and deductibles rise, and she blames it on Obama’s signature health care law. 

“Health care needs to be changed,” she said. 

But Moran’s town hall drew supporters of Planned Parenthood and members of health care advocacy groups from as far away as the Kansas City area. They were there to press Moran to pursue a bipartisan solution that built on the existing health care law and moved the nation toward broader government coverage. 

“Who doesn’t want health care?” Jeff Zamrzla, a retired and disabled Marine and 59-year-old Democratic activist from Salina, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the east of Palco, said after the forum. “Who doesn’t want to be able to live a life that’s worth living?”

The real albatross around Moran's neck is Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback.  Kansans found out the hard way that Republican economic projections aren't worth a fart in a plains tornado, so you'll excuse them if they don't actually believe Republicans like Moran anymore.

Moran's seat is pretty safe, frankly, but not even he's stupid enough to vote for Trumpcare as it is. That may change, he's still a Republican after all.  But for now, Trumpcare is dead as long as Moran won't vote for it.

The Kansas Tornado Finally Ends

The ridiculous austerity experiment by Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback has finally crashed the state's financial and political outlook to the point where even Kansas Republicans are done with him. After five years, Brownback's obscene tax cut scheme has been trashed by an angry state legislature that overrode his veto late Tuesday.

After years of budgetary ruin, Kansas’ experiment in trickle-down economics is finally coming to a close. Late Tuesday night, the state legislature voted overwhelmingly to override a veto from Gov. Sam Brownback and increase a slew of taxes in the state. 

Shortly after he became governor in 2011, Brownback dove into an ambitious effort to reshape the state with massive cuts to taxes and social spending. Brownback sold his plan as a conservative economic overhaul, implementing ideas that Republicans had long clamored for. He paid for Reaganomics guru Art Laffer to help craft the plan and convince wary state lawmakers. 

The centerpiece of his plan was a huge reduction in the state’s income tax. Brownback erased the top income tax bracket and lowered rates across the board, with the most benefits handed to the wealthy. And he zeroed out taxes on “pass-through” income, allowing owners of LLCs and other businesses to evade taxes. Analysts warned that such a big reduction in tax revenue would leave a crater in the state’s budget, but Brownback waved away such concerns, promising that the cuts would more than pay for themselves by juicing the economy and creating jobs. When moderate Republicans in the legislature didn’t fully agree with their governor, he teamed up with the Koch brothers’ advocacy organization to back primary campaigns against them and replace them with true believers. 

But Brownback’s promised economic miracle never came to pass. Tax revenue has consistently come in below expectations. 

A wave of moderate Republicans and Democrats swept into office after last year’s election, campaigning on ending Brownback’s experiment. But it’s still a heavily Republican legislature that voted Tuesday to rebuke trickle-down economics, with bipartisan supermajorities in both chambers backing the override of Brownback’s veto. The legislature’s plan would bring in an additional $1.2 billion over two years by bumping up income taxes across the board and ending Brownback’s exception for business owners.

I've talked about Brownback's disaster of an austerity plan for more than five years now and warned that the results would be exactly what panned out: a huge shortfall in the state budget that would have to be made up through brutal austerity cuts to education and public services.  That's precisely what happened, resulting in the state's Supreme Court ruling in 2016 that Brownback wasn't providing adequately funded public education.

And the jobs that the tax cuts were supposed to create never appeared either.  In fact corporations moved out of Kansas because  the schools and roads were an underfunded mess.

Brownback has been an utter failure as a governor and may go down along with Chris Christie and Rick Scott as one of the all-time worst.  I'm glad Kansas has come to its senses, but it will take decades to fix the damage Brownback did.

Kansas could speed the process up by getting rid of Republicans who backed him.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Kansas Republicans in the Gov. Sam Brownback austerity era are so unpopular even the congressional GOP is losing.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) is projected to lose his GOP primary, making him the fourth House incumbent this cycle to be defeated in a primary.

Huelskamp, a House Freedom Caucus member who helped push out former Speaker John Boehner, was defeated by physician Roger Marshall in a primary for a safe Republican seat.

He now joins Reps. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Randy Forbes (R-Va.), who all lost primaries this year. 

The race was close after polls closed, and Huelskamp's campaign asked the media to leave its watch party in Hutchinson, Kan., as it waited for results, according to The Associated Press. The AP called the race close to 11:30 p.m. Eastern.

Conservative groups that are typically allies found themselves on opposite sides of the Kansas primary fight. 

The Kansas Farm Bureau and Ending Spending Action Fund opposed Huelskamp for his vote against the farm bill. He was kicked off of the Agriculture and Budget committees in recent years for frequently bucking Boehner and establishment Republicans.

And Kansas voters finally got tired of his Tea Party stupidity and replaced him with Roger Marshall, a standard boilerplate corporate Republican instead, as voting against federal farm subsidies in a state like Kansas is too much for even the people who re-elected Brownback to take, apparently.

But the primary bloodbath wasn't limited to Hueslkamp's head being put on a pike.

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators have lost their seats as moderate Republicans made GOP primary races a referendum on education funding and the state's persistent budget woes. 

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce was among the lawmakers ousted amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies. 

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state's fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Kansas has struggled to balance its budget since the GOP-dominated Legislature slashed personal income taxes in 2012 and 2013 at Brownback's urging to stimulate the economy. That's created concerns among educators about future spending on schools, even as many Republicans see the $4 billion-plus a year the state now spends as generous.

Bruce, from Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. 

Bruce was a particular target because of his visibility as the Senate's No. 2 leader. He also had disagreements with the Senate's top leader, President Susan Wagle, of Wichita. Bruce is closer to Brownback than Wagle is. 

"He seemed to care more about what the Brownback administration wanted rather than what the people he represented wanted," said Mary Dondlinger, an 80-year-old retired Hutchinson teacher and Republican who voted for Berger. 

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state's most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

Brownback is to Kansas what Trump is to national Republicans: an absolute disaster for the party.  Now the voters are speaking out, and hopefully starting the process of cleaning out the state's legislative pool filter.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't.

The ultimate insult to the injury of the Sam Brownback Austerity Regime is that, like most GOP-controlled governments, what sacrifices that are demanded of the little people are never enforced upon those who make the laws. After all, Kansas has got to cut salaries for state employees like teachers, but not so much for lawmakers.

The one-of-a-kind Kansas pension plan lets representatives and senators sign up for full-time pension benefits while working their part-time elected positions.

“Legislators,” notes an employee benefit sheet explaining the pension plan to new lawmakers, “have a special deal here.”

They get a modest salary for the roughly four months they spend each year in Topeka, but their pensions grow as if the state paid them for a year-round gig.

All told, a salary shy of $15,000 makes a lawmaker eligible for a pension that any teacher, road worker, prison employee or Kansas bureaucrat could qualify for only if their actual pay ran north of $90,000.

“It’s not fair or appropriate,” said Rebecca Proctor, the executive director of the Kansas Organization of State Employees, a union representing 8,000 workers.

She was a member of a Kansas Public Employees Retirement System study commission that in 2011 suggested changing the system for legislators. The Legislature never acted on that recommendation.

Instead, she said, lawmakers have attempted to shore up KPERS by increasing contributions required of regular state employees. In addition, some legislators have floated proposals limiting whether those workers could count unused vacation and sick time toward their pension benefits.

“It’s hypocritical,” Proctor said.

To be sure, members of the House and Senate must pay into the kitty, 6 percent of the supposed salary on which their pensions are calculated. But it’s such a good deal that few pass it up.

Taxpayers typically pay about twice an employee’s contribution toward the pension. So the more legislators sign up for, the more the state also must chip in.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article80590492.html#storylink=cpy

And of course this awesome pension deal isn't new, Kansas lawmakers have been enjoying this since 1982 and no other state employee gets that kind of deal.  But the state lawmaker pension plan wasn't touched when Gov. Brownback installed his austerity regime, while other state employees received massive pension cuts, especially teachers.

Did you think austerity in Kansas actually counted for the "servants of the people"?

Suckers.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Over in Brownbackistan, Kansas Republicans are facing a wipeout in November at the state level unless they find a way to plug the state's $290 million hole.  Things are so bad for Republicans across the country right now that state lawmakers are considering the unthinkable: eliminating GOP Gov. Sam Brownback's business tax exemptions.

Kansas lawmakers are moving forward with a bill to roll back the state’s income tax exemption for business owners, Gov. Sam Brownback’s signature policy.

The bill would repeal the exemption, which allows the owners of limited liability companies and other pass-through businesses to avoid paying any state income tax, on Jan. 1, 2017.

Rep. Mark Hutton, R-Wichita, said the bill is estimated to bring in about $220 million annually into state coffers.

“It’s a structural change we believe puts us on a stronger path,” Hutton said.

The state wouldn’t begin collecting the tax revenue until the 2018 fiscal year, which will start in July 2017, because of the delayed implementation. That means the bill won’t help the state out of its current $290 million budget hole.

“There’s a lot of people who want that vote,” Hutton said. “They believe it’s at least time to have the conversation.”

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article74661562.html#storylink=cpy

Kansas business groups and the Governor are predicting that anyone who votes for the rollback will face obliteration by voters.

“The Governor does not believe taxing our small business job creators is the way to grow the Kansas economy. An important component in attracting and retaining businesses is a stable regulatory and tax policy environment,” Eileen Hawley, Brownback’s spokeswoman, said Friday.

Hutton’s proposal drew strong opposition from business groups upon its unveiling.

“The business community is not the reason we’re in the current situation that we’re in. They only represented 29 percent of the tax relief in 2012 and yet they’re the ones that are being singled out,” said Mike O’Neal, president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and a former speaker of the Kansas House, who oversaw the 2012 tax reforms.

O’Neal said that 20 percent of respondents to a recent poll of business owners conducted by the chamber said that the tax changes helped them stay in business. “So a vote in favor of this is basically a vote to shut down 20 percent of those people, who but for the tax reforms in ’12 would have gone out of business,” he said.

Once again, Brownback has already been re-elected and doesn't have to face voters anymore.  Kansas state lawmakers however do.

Will they go down with Brownback, the most unpopular governor in the country?

We'll find out.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article74661562.html#storylink=cpy

Last Call For Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Things are so bad now with the Great Brownbackian Austerity Experiment in Kansas that the state's Republican lawmakers are no longer willing to sacrifice their careers on the Laffer curve hill along with the Governor. 

Brownback took office on a pledge to make Kansas friendlier to business and successfully sought to cut the top personal income tax rate by 29 percent and exempt more than 330,000 farmers and business owners from income taxes. The moves were popular in a Legislature where the GOP holds three-quarters of the seats. 

The governor argued that Kansas had to attract more businesses after a "lost decade" in the early 2000s, when private sector employment declined more than 4 percent. 

The predicted job growth from business expansions hasn't happened, leaving the state persistently short of money. Since November, tax collections have fallen about $81 million, or 1.9 percent below the current forecast's predictions. 

"We're growing weary," said Senate President Susan Wagle, a conservative Republican from Wichita. While GOP legislators still support low income taxes, "we'd prefer to see some real solutions coming from the governor's office," she said. 

Last month, Brownback ordered $17 million in immediate reductions to universities and earlier this month delayed $93 million in contributions to pensions for school teachers and community college employees. The state has also siphoned off more than $750 million from highway projects to other parts of the budget over the past two years. 

Lawmakers are worried about approving any further reductions in an election year. All 40 Senate seats and 125 House seats are on the ballot in November.

Brownback isn't on the ballot.  All state legislators are.  They're the ones who are going to take the fall for the austerity choking Kansas's economy and they know it.  The plan is to leave Brownback holding the bag.

Democrats have long described Brownback's tax cuts as reckless. Republican critics want to repeal the personal income tax break for farmers and business owners to raise an additional $200 million to $250 million a year. 

Debate over the next budget will intensify after lawmakers return from a recess later this month. They could follow through on their threat by adjourning without making specific reductions and leaving the governor with the authority to do so. He faces fewer repercussions because he will not appear on the ballot again before leaving office in January 2019. 

But with so many Republicans in office in Kansas, Democrats can afford to say "I told you so."

Meanwhile, Kansas reported gaining only 800 private-sector jobs between March 2015 and March 2016, a mere 0.1 percent increase.

800 jobs for the entire state in a year, because tax cuts going to "the job creators" don't create jobs when people can't afford to buy goods and services in order to create the demand for growth.  That's basic macroeconomics folks, and Kansas and Sam Brownback have utterly failed.

You elected Republicans, Kansas.  Time to vote them out.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Time to check in with Kansas again and GOP Gov. Sam Brownback, currently still involved with attempting to fully convert the state into a Laboratory of Democracy(tm) complete with actual lab accidents.  We've previously noted that the one thing keeping the state from completely collapsing has been the Kansas Supreme Court, ruling that the state's draconian austerity measures violate parts of the state's constitution when it comes to providing for the state's common good, crazy socialist things like "schools" and "roads" and whatnot.

You'd think Kansas Republicans would at least be willing to play along.

You'd be wrong.

Republican lawmakers in Kansas, weary of conflicts with a judiciary that has been pushing for more school spending, are beginning to act on a measure to expand the legal grounds for impeaching judges. 

The move is part of an intensified effort in red states to reshape courts still dominated by moderate judges from earlier administrations. 

A committee in the GOP-controlled Senate plans to vote Tuesday on a bill that would make "attempting to usurp the power" of the Legislature or the executive branch grounds for impeachment.

Impeachment has "been a little-used tool" to challenge judges who strike down new legislation, said Republican Sen. Dennis Pyle, a sponsor of the measure. "Maybe it needs to be oiled up a little bit or sharpened a little bit." 

The proposal has considerable support in a Legislature in which Republicans outnumber Democrats more than 3 to 1. Nearly half the Senate's members have signed on as sponsors. It's unclear whether its novelty could complicate passage. 

The serious consideration of the measure, though, signals the exceedingly bitter political climate in the state.

You don't say.  Here's the real issue:

Four of Kansas' seven Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who served from 2003 to 2009, and two by her predecessor, Bill Graves, a moderate Republican. Only one was appointed by Brownback. 

Replacing the justices through elections is difficult in Kansas because they don't run in contested races. Instead, they face a "retention election" every six years, remaining in office unless more than 50 percent of voters vote against them. No justice has ever been voted out. 

Conservative groups are expected to mount a major effort to vote out four of the Supreme Court justices on the ballot this fall. But critical lawmakers also hope to make impeachment a tool. 

Currently, the state constitution allows impeachment only for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. No public official has been impeached since 1934.

Time to eliminate the state's Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court, and Democrats in the state, period.  They have to go, one way or another, in order to pave the way for the single-party Republican utopia that awaits America.

Won't that be fun?

Last Call For Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

What better way for the worst senator in the GOP to show he's all for deep austerity cuts than with the endorsement of the most despised governor in America?

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has become the first sitting governor to endorse Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for president. 

The Rubio campaign announced the endorsement Monday. “Just like Governor Brownback, Marco has consistently defended life, small government and free enterprise throughout his career in public service,” Rubio midwest spokesman Jeremy Adler said in a statement. 

Kansas Republicans will caucus Mar. 5. 

Brownback, a Republican who once ran for president, endorsed then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2011. Perry was a candidate for the 2016 GOP nomination but withdrew. 

“Marco Rubio has a proven track record of protecting life, defending religious liberty, and undoing Obamacare,” Brownback’s statement said. “He will be a wonderful president, and I am proud to offer him my full support.” 

Brownback’s decision is a mild surprise. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is a favorite of many religious conservatives like Brownback. Jeff Roe is the campaign manager for Cruz, and he has had some influence in Kansas. Kansas is a caucus state, like Iowa, where Cruz prevailed. 

He might have also endorsed fellow Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, or former Gov. Jeb Bush. Bush has appeared in Kansas with Brownback. 

It’s possible Brownback may consider Rubio the most electable Republican in the GOP field. Brownback will be looking for work after the 2018 election, and may have an interest in a position with the federal government. A Republican in the White House would be a prerequisite for a federal job.

Quite the job resume there, especially the part where Brownback drove Kansas into a hole. And Marco Rubio thinks that's going to help him in Kansas next month?

Sure thing, Marco.  Keep telling yourself that.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article60470866.html#storylink=cpy

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

The Great Brownback Austerity Regime rolls on in Kansas, crushing everyone in its path, and state Republicans are starting to get nervous about all the cuts.  After all, they'll still have to face voters in 2016, unlike Brownback.

A Republican state senator in Kansas has blasted a memo from a spokeswoman for Gov. Sam Brownback that claimed expanding Medicaid in the state would be “morally reprehensible.” 

The newsletter, from GOP state Sen. Jeff King, provides further evidence that at least some Kansas Republicans are stepping away from the governor’s office, on issues from tax reform to Medicaid expansion. 

King — the vice president of the state Senate — represents the district that includes the now-closed hospital in Independence, Kan. His release takes aim at a memo from Melika Willoughby, the governor’s deputy communications director, that sharply criticized the idea of expanding Medicaid in the state. 

Willoughby called that expansion “morally reprehensible.” 

King denounced her claim. “I refuse to make moral judgments based on a person’s view of Medicaid expansion,” he writes in the newsletter. “I wish Ms. Willoughby would have done the same. 

“Maybe if her hospital were closing. Maybe if her parents were wondering where to go for emergency care. Maybe if she faced uncertainty in her health care future, she would view those looking for health care answers in a little less judgmental light. I leave that for her to sleep on at night,” he added.

Don't feel too bad for state Sen. King here, because he doesn't actually want Medicaid expansion either. Rather, his solution of course is to replace Medicaid with a "private insurance" program, where Kansas takes the Feds' money and then does everything but provide health insurance with it.

King says he supports expanding Medicaid, but through a private insurer.

“Our health care system failed Independence and it is failing tens of thousands of hardworking Kansans,” the letter says. “I don’t have all of the answers, but saying no to everything isn’t an option. I look forward to exploring the benefits of a conservative, Kansas-focused Medicaid expansion based on private insurance.

“Maybe, after we weigh our options and the costs of doing nothing, Ms. Willoughby will be less hasty to morally condemn those trying to solve our state’s toughest problems.”

But then again, Brownback is so hated that this fake Medicaid expansion looks great in comparison. That's how the game works, kids.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article41200734.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article41200734.html#storylink=cpy

A Bad Judgment Call In Kansas

I've been talking for months about how Kansas Republicans have effectively decimated the state, cutting taxes to the point where the state can no longer fund itself, under the nightmare tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback.  But now the state is rapidly going from permanent Laffer Curve punchline to third-world banana republic status with blinding speed.

On Wednesday night, a district judge in Kansas struck down a 2014 law that stripped the state Supreme Court of some of its administrative powers. The ruling has set off a bizarre constitutional power struggle between the Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. At stake is whether the Kansas court system will lose its funding and shut down. 

Last year, the Kansas legislature passed a law that took away the top court's authority to appoint chief judges to the state's 31 judicial districts—a policy change Democrats believe was retribution for an ongoing dispute over school funding between the Supreme Court and the legislature. (Mother Jones reported on the standoff this spring.) When the legislature passed a two-year budget for the court system earlier this year, it inserted a clause stipulating that if a court ever struck down the 2014 administrative powers law, funding for the entire court system would be "null and void." Last night, that's what the judge did. 

The Republican legislature has threatened to destroy the state's court system unless the GOP can strip the power the judiciary has to appoint judges and give that power to lawmakers instead.  The judiciary called the legislature's bluff.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt warned that last night's decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch.” That would lead to chaos. As Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for the Kansas judge who brought the legal challenge against the administrative law, put it, “Without funding, our state courts would close, criminal cases would not be prosecuted, civil matters would be put on hold, real estate could not be bought or sold, adoptions could not be completed."  

Both parties in the case have agreed to ask that Wednesday's ruling remain on hold until it can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, so that there is a functioning court to hear the appeal. On Thursday, a judge granted the stay. Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case and advocates for judicial independence are preparing a legal challenge to the clause of the judicial budget that withholds court funding. Sometime in the next few months, the state Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the legislature has the right to strip the Supreme Court of its administrative authority, and whether it can make funding for the courts contingent on the outcome of a court case. 

“We have never seen a law like this before," Randolph Sherman, a lawyer involved in fighting the administrative law, said in a statement, referring to the self-destruct mechanism in the judicial budget. "[I]t is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis.”

So depending on the outcome, Kansas may or may not have courts.  Amazing.

Imagine if a Republican Congress and Republican president passed a law that said the President could no longer appoint federal court or Supreme Court judges, and that instead they would be appointed by the Speaker of the House and approved by the Senate, and that the law also said that if the Supreme Court struck the law down, that Congress would automatically end all funding for the federal court system.

That's the kind of thing you find in a dictatorship, not a representative, Constitutional democracy. But here we are.

The most broken state in the Union continues to stay broken.

He.s The Heavy, He's My Brother

Of all the problems of his own making that plague Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback (like a state economy disintegrating under tax cuts for the rich, vice tax for the poor, and basic government services like public school districts that can't pay their bills to keep the lights on and can't pay teachers enough to keep them working) the most interesting problem may be his asshole brother Jim.

Undulating fields of crops and livestock-dotted pastures are the domain of a trigger-happy bully who brags about a political cloak of invincibility keeping him beyond reach of the law in faithfully conservative Linn County. 

Adversaries say he has woven a liquor-infused tapestry of fear colored by intimidation, abuse and lies. The saga features stalking, death threats, trespassing, drive-by gunfire, massive explosions, cattle theft, loan defaults, hit-and-run driving and marital strife. Linn County Sheriff’s Department files bulge with complaints about him. 

There is trepidation among acquaintances to speak freely, a point accentuated by the number expressing nervousness about reprisal if they were candid. There is genuine fear. 

Descriptions of events offered by those willing to speak out converge to reveal a potentially lethal menace. Neighbors allege some in law enforcement responded to cries for help with degrees of indifference or favoritism. 

Locals aware of the dynamics shake their head in dismay. In a place where people honor the Second Amendment and revere the self-defense castle doctrine, there is astonishment no one has been gunned down. 

Folks in direct path of this prairie hellion pray for an end to what some coined “neighborhood terrorism.”

So far, their nemesis has found no reason to relent. 

Not when your name is Jim Brownback and you are a brother to Sam, the most powerful politician in Kansas.

I swear, this story reads like a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, or an episode of Longmire. Farm pigs mauled by dogs, a keg of nails scattered on the driveway, drunken shotgun drive-bys, blowing up stuff in the middle of the night to wake the neighbors, cattle unleashed to devour crop fields, frightened insurance adjusters, and good ol' boy shitkicker cops that won't touch the governor's brother.

Jim Brownback is possibly the second biggest asshole in the entire state, next to his brother. It's terrorism by a cartoon bully and nobody can put a leash on this guy.

Least of all the governor of the great state of Kansas. What Jim is doing to his neighbors on the Kansas plains, Sam is doing to the entire state.

Bullies all around, doing what they do best, has always been the way.

Last Call For The Education Of Kansas Voters

The Sam Brownback GOP Disaster in Kansas continues as massive austerity cuts to public schools has now left districts without enough licensed teachers to fill jobs, as experienced teachers are leaving in droves.

While the tax cut experiment didn’t create jobs, it did destroy the Kansas budget, and one major consequence of that has been massive funding cuts for Kansas schools. Several districts ended the school year early for lack of funds. Education funding levels are so low, and unequal across school districts, that judges have ruled them unconstitutional and the case is currently pending at the state Supreme Court. 

Kansas’ teacher pay is among the lowest in the nation. The Kansas legislature has removed teachers’ tenure protections, tried to make it possible to criminally prosecute them for teaching offensive material, and attempted to weaken collective bargaining. Teachers are retiring in fear that the state will soon target their retirement benefits, one superintendent from a nearbyMissouri school district said. 

There are double the normal openings for school staff in Kansas, teachers are quitting and retiring at high rates, and new teachers aren’t looking to start careers in Kansas. The Independence, Missouri School District has billboards to lure teachers from over the border, and they’ve seen an doubling in applicants with Kansas addresses, even as applicants from Iowa and Arkansas have held steady. 

A piece of legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) now allows several Kansas school systems to hire unlicensed teachers to fill the gap.

Republicans got exactly what they've been calling for nationally in Kansas: major teacher pay cuts, retirement benefit cuts, tenure system loss, weakened teachers' unions, all of which were supposed to magically improve the system, get rid of "lazy bad teachers making too much money" and make super smart kids.

Surprise!

Kansas education is a wasteland, teachers are fleeing and giant corporate lobbyist ALEC wants to turn schools into factories churning out ignorant, compliant workers.

All part of the plan.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't.

Kansas Republicans have finally passed their nearly $400 million tax hike on the state's working class to make up for the hundreds of millions in the hole that GOP Gov. Sam Brownback's tax cut for the rich and businesses created, in an effort to avoid even more draconian cuts to schools and universities.

Kansas will avoid massive budget cuts after a tax plan crawled to passage in the Legislature on Friday, but some lawmakers who voted for the plan say the state has failed to right its financial ship. 

Many lawmakers — including ones who supported the bills — accused Gov. Sam Brownback of bullying lawmakers into accepting a flawed plan. 

Republicans, who hold supermajorities in the Kansas House and Senate, found themselves bitterly divided on taxes for weeks in the face of a $400 million budget hole as the legislative session stretched to 113 days, the longest in state history. 

The House scraped together the 63 votes needed for passage at 4 a.m. Friday, passing a plan that raises $384.4 million in tax revenue, after working around the clock since Wednesday night. Several lawmakers who voted for the plan were moved to tears before Rep. Blake Carpenter, a Derby Republican, cast the deciding vote. 

Little more than 12 hours later, the Senate approved the plan with 21 votes, again the bare minimum for passage, after an emotional debate. But even some lawmakers who voted in favor of the plan argued that it failed to address the cause of the state’s financial woes. 

Sen. Jeff Longbine, an Emporia Republican, accused the Brownback administration of perpetrating “political blackmail” in recent weeks by threatening to veto any plan that rolled back an income tax exemption for certain businesses. That exception was passed in 2012 and removed more than 330,000 business owners from income tax rolls. 

“This fix doesn’t fix the problem,” Longbine said. “If you’ve got congestive heart failure, you go to the cardiologist and not the dentist.” 

The 2012 tax bill also eliminated the top tax bracket and cut all income tax rates. Longbine pointed out that it has already cost the state more than $1 billion, but argued that the plan passed by the Legislature through a pair of tax bills Friday failed to address that impact. 

The measures will instead raise the sales tax to 6.5 percent from 6.15 percent in July and hike taxes on cigarettes by 50 cents per pack to help balance the state’s budget. 

Longbine said he wanted to watch the plan burn but voted in favor of it to prevent cuts to the state’s schools, universities and disability services. 

Brownback had warned that if lawmakers did not pass a tax plan before Monday, then he would make massive budget cuts — either issuing a 6.2 percent across-the-board cut costing schools nearly $200 million, or line-item vetoes of budgets for the state’s regents universities.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article23831500.html#storylink=cpy

The Kansas disaster continues, and I'm betting that the hike in sales and vice taxes, a regressive taxation scheme targeting the poor and working class, won't bring in the projected revenue just as the massive tax cuts on the wealthy didn't magically create new revenue either.  Somehow I bet Topeka will be right back in the same hole soon, and when it does, raising taxes on those who can afford it the least won't work.

But this is what happens when you give the GOP total control of a state: guaranteed absolute fiscal disaster. The Nation's Kai Wright looks at the people who are suffering in Kansas under the Brownback administration, like RaDonna Kuekelhan and her sister Cathy O'Mara.

The sisters drove 30 miles from Cathy’s house down to the nearest CHC clinic, in Montgomery County’s largest town, Coffeyville. There, they met Julie Griffin, the doctor in charge. Griffin is also an evangelical minister, and as with many of the people I met in socially conservative southeast Kansas, Brownback’s politics force a tension in her core values. She’s resolutely pro-life and supports Brownback for his famously firm stance against abortion. But for her, valuing life means valuing universal access to healthcare, too. And she blames southeast Kansas’ ailing health on a toxic mix of poverty and political neglect. 

“If you can’t find a job, you can’t feed your kids, you don’t feel like there’s any help for your kid in terms of success, that’s going to affect your mental health,” she says in a typically energetic riff about the challenges her patients face. “And if you don’t take care of your mental health, then your diabetes is going to be a thousand times worse.” She says much of her work is a matter of convincing patients to fight for their own lives, despite the dearth of care. She can call the roll of uninsured patients she’s coaxed away from preventable death, only to have them tumble back to grave illness when they grow defeated because she’s run out of subsidized meds or can’t connect them with a free specialist: “People that didn’t want to take care of their diabetes because there’s no hope anyways.” 

Griffin immediately saw this grim potential in RaDonna and began scrambling. She sent the sisters on a 65-mile trek over the border to Joplin, Missouri, where she found specialists at a private hospital who would see RaDonna without insurance. “We went there for a year, back and forth,” RaDonna says. “We went to a throat doctor, went to a lung specialist, a stomach guy,” Cathy chimes in. Finally, they discovered the problem: All that radiation to clear RaDonna’s larynx cancer had destroyed her esophagus. 

“The top of her throat is paralyzed,” Cathy explains. “Everything that she puts into her mouth and swallows, some of it aspirates down into her lungs. They told me that she is ‘terminal’—that was their words to me. ‘Your sister is terminal. We don’t know how long she will live. She will either slowly starve to death or she will aspirate and choke to death.’” 

RaDonna was too young to collect Social Security, and she was trying to survive on a $231-a-month pension from Emerson. Despite her diagnosis and collapsing income, as a single adult she still didn’t qualify for Medicaid. The only way into Kansas’ program was to qualify for disability—and in 2013 the state rejected her application. “They denied it,” says Cathy, still angry. “They said she was not ill enough.”

Kansas is red state America at its finest: rejection of Obamacare grant money, full privatization of the state's Medicare program, massive tax cuts for "job creators" and budget cuts to get rid of "unnecessary spending", with a Republican supermajority in the state legislature and a GOP governor.

The results speak for themselves, don't you think?

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

The reckoning in Kansas continues as the state's massive budget hole is swallowing up everything it can find, including it seems the options of Kansas Republicans in the state legislature.  GOP Gov. Sam Brownback may have survived his re-election battle last year, but it doesn't mean the state's other Republicans are going to sacrifice their careers for his supply-side tax-cutting lunacy. Now the reckoning is coming, and the GOP has to decide if they want to call out Brownback and his tax cuts, or dump the tax burden on middle-class voters.

Just three years ago, many of these lawmakers passed the largest tax cuts in state history, saying they would lead to economic growth. But that growth did not appear, and after repeatedly trimming spending to close shortfalls, legislators again find themselves in a prolonged budget battle with no easy answers, where both houses of the Republican-controlled Legislature are proposing tax increases.

The reason: even anti-tax Republicans are acknowledging that there is not much more to cut without significantly hurting popular programs, including education.

The fault lines now seem to run along the question of which taxes to raise. Some believe that income taxes are off limits and that they should raise sales taxes to shoulder the entire burden. Others advocate a mixed approach and said income taxes should be on the table. Democrats argue that increasing sales taxes would be another blow to low-income Kansans to the benefit of the business class.

And many worry that the only solution will be to repeal the signature piece of the law they passed in 2012: the elimination of taxes on certain types of small businesses.

You reap what you sow, Kansas.  Of all the agriculture states in the Midwest, you should know this.

Since those changes, Gov. Sam Brownback and lawmakers have found themselves repeatedly tinkering with the budget to fill hundreds of millions of dollars in shortfalls. The governor has cut some state agency budgets by 4 percent, reduced contributions to the state pension system and shifted money between state accounts. Lawmakers have rolled back funding for poorer school districts and changed the way they allocate money to schools. They have slowed funding increases for entitlement programs.

Mr. Donovan said the results of the tax law were “never as good as we hoped.”

“We hoped they would just be a magic lantern and everybody would react to it,” he said. “But, eh, it’s hard to get a company to uproot their business when they’re established and move to another place just because of this difference in tax policy.”

Still, supporters of the tax bills are not necessarily willing to concede that the cuts were the reason for the state’s fiscal problems.

Trickle-down voodoo economics can never fail, they can only be failed.  And now it's the poorest Kansans who will pay the price.

The House plan would tax the nonwage income on small businesses at 2.7 percent and increase the sales tax to 6.45 percent, but reduce it to 5.9 percent for food.

Some Republicans are holding the conservative line, saying cuts to bureaucracy could close most, if not all, of the gap.

“There’s definitely waste in the budget,” Senator Dennis Pyle, a Republican, said in an interview. “It’s my goal to not raise taxes. We have to let the private sector breathe and operate as freely as possible because that is the revenue driver.”

But Democrats called the Republican proposals inadequate for fixing the budget woes. “There’s a lot of things you could do to show that you are concerned about all Kansans,” said Valdenia Winn, a Democratic representative. “But are they doing it? Nope. So your little piecemeal baby steps don’t impress me one bit. They’re desperate because you still have those Tea Party people who cannot go home and say, ‘I had to vote for tax increases.’ ”

And so it goes.  The only question is how much of the state's tax burden will be transferred from businesses and the rich to the poorest people in the state, which was always what the plan was from the beginning.

Popcorn Populists

Ed Kilgore on Republican fake populism playing a role in the 2014 GOP rampage:

The allusion is to the success of Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and even more strikingly (since reproductive rights were central to the messaging of his Democratic opponent Mark Udall) Cory Gardner of Colorado, who used the Bobby-Jindal-suggested gimmick of supporting OTC contraceptives as an anti-government gesture that also superficially rebutted Democratic claims they wanted to restrict access to contraceptives. It was clever, if not especially deep or credible. But what Edsall is suggesting is that if swing voters want to vote Republican, such gestures on economic issues could be effective even if they are shallow and insincere.

That’s something for progressives to keep in mind before mocking Republican “populism” too much. A little bit can go a long way if that’s the way the wind is blowing.

I'll counter with two words:  Sam Brownback.

The Kansas governor's "populism" has been an absolute austerity disaster so far, and if Democrats are smart, they'll keep Kansas's terrible economy in the news as much as possible.  If there's any Republican who wants to take Brownback's austerity program nationally and put America back into a deep recession, it's "budget guru" John Kasich.

Democrats can easily take this approach apart if they move now to head it off.

But Kilgore is right: unchecked, Republican fake populism is going to help them in places where the Obama recovery hasn't helped the middle class much at all.

To Protect And Sever

Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback continues to be the worst state chief executive in the nation, this week reversing by executive order civil rights protections for LGBTQ Kansans because...well he doesn't really have a good reason, does he?

In a move that shocked progressive advocates in Kansas, the state's Republican governor on Tuesday issued an executive order to remove discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and transgender state employees. 

State employees in Kansas can now legally be fired, harassed or denied a job for being gay or transgender, critics said. 

Gov. Sam Brownback said an 2007 executive order by Kathleen Sebelius, then the state's Democratic governor, went too far by not getting legislative approval to bar job discrimination for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Discrimination for state jobs in Kansas is forbidden for race, color, gender, religion, national origin, ancestry or age. Brownback said any expansion of such laws for LGBT employees should be done by the Legislature "and not through unilateral action." 

"This executive order ensures that state employees enjoy the same civil rights as all Kansans without creating additional ‘protected classes’ as the previous order did," Brownback said in a statement announcing the replacement of Sebelius' executive order with his own.

So no, Republicans are 100% okay with codifying bigotry and discrimination back into law whenever they can.  Speaking of that, why did Brownback not do this on his first day as Kansas governor in 2011?  He waited until his second term in order to reverse Kathleen Sebelius's order.  So for four years, Brownback didn't have a problem with it.

Only now he does.  Only now he feels like Kansas is better served by being able to fire state employees for being gay or trandgender,  Was he just completely unaware of the executive order?  I doubt it.  Sebelius signed the order in 2007, so for 8 years this was fine, including Brownback's entire first term.

Oh wait, maybe Brownback needs a Two-Minute Hate subject in order to distract Kansas Republicans from his incoming new taxes and massive cuts to schools and infrastructure to pay for his continuing scheme to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations.

Funny how that works out, huh.

Like I said, worst governor in the country.

Brownback To The Future

Well, if you thought that Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback was going to change course after driving the state into a $700 million hole from his massive tax cut scheme, well, you'd be completely wrong. Not only is he going to continue cutting taxes and assuming growth will somehow magically appear, he's going to raise regressive taxes on the little people.

Kansas would dramatically raise its tobacco and liquor taxes and slow the implementation of promised income tax cuts to help close a projected deficit under Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget proposals for the next two fiscal years, which were unveiled Friday. 

The state’s cigarette tax would be nearly tripled, from 79 cents to $2.29 a pack, and the tax on packaged alcoholic beverages would go from 8 percent to 12 percent under the Republican governor’s budget plans.

Oh, but that'll only make up about half of the hole.  The rest?  Going after Medicaid, of course.

The governor said he wants to move the state from income taxes to consumption taxes to “reward productivity.”

“Transitioning to consumption taxes allows Kansans more freedom to determine their spending and reinforce the principle that the family budget is more important than the government budget,” he said in a statement. 

Brownback also proposed levying $162 million in fees over two years on the three private health insurance companies managing the state’s Medicaid program since 2013. 

Other measures would further eliminate the shortfalls, including spending cuts and changes to the Medicaid program, which provides health coverage to the poor and disabled.

In Sam Brownback's state, if you're sick or poor, you're not rewarded for your productivity, you're punished for lack of it.

I want to know how many people who happen to be smokers voted for Brownback in November specifically because of his tax cut plan.

And when the tax cuts don't grow revenues, and the budget shortfall gets even worse, I wonder which "consumers" that Gov. Brownback will target next?  My guess is all of them, through a ridiculously high state sales tax.  That's the next step.

Oh?  You didn't vote for tax increases on cigarettes and booze?  Oh, but my dear droogies, you did. You most certainly did.  You elected a Republican.

New tag: Sam Brownback.