Kansas Rebellion: Bipartisan Revolt Against Governor Brownback

By Rod Kackley, PJ Media

03 July 16

eff Blackwood has had enough of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s economic policies that included across-the-board tax cuts.

Blackwood, the founder of the Kansas City healthcare technology firm Pathfinder Health Innovations, announced on the company’s blog June 13 that he’s moving to Missouri.

“I can’t, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they’re simply a tax burden that should be ignored,” Blackwood wrote on his blog.

That’s the kind of statement that has been sending shockwaves through the Kansas political hierarchy, and some of those who ran things for decades in Topeka have also had enough

All four living, former Kansas governors — two Democrats and two Republicans — are among more than a dozen politicians who have launched a bipartisan group, the Save Kansas Coalition, to warn fellow Kansas residents about Gov. Sam Brownback.

Republicans Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, along with Kathleen Sebelius and her fellow Democrat John Carlin, accused Gov. Brownback of pushing Kansas into a financial crisis by pushing the Legislature to cut personal tax rates by 29 percent in 2012 and 2013.

Kansas has struggled to balance its budget ever since, and the state’s credit rating has fallen.

Both Standard & Poor’s Ratings and Moody’s Investor Service downgraded Kansas’ credit rating in August 2014 and warned in April 2016 that further downgrades could be coming.

“Our state of affairs is on a continuous decline,” said Hayden in the Save Kansas Coalition press release.

The latest financial crisis to embroil Topeka was legislation to keep public school classrooms open.

A special session of the Legislature culminated with lawmakers passing the school finance bill June 24, and Gov. Brownback promising to sign it.

The AP reported the bill boosts state aid to poor schools in response to a court mandate and ended a threat that the state's public schools might be forced to close.

“Now we can move forward with the other issues that the state faces,” Brownback said.

Rep. Melissa Rooker (R) told the Kansas City Star the legislation was nothing more than a temporary “safe harbor.”

“This was triage,” Rooker said. “The state has a number of different areas of crisis going on. This was the most immediate.

Democrats and some Republicans have continually blasted Brownback’s idea that cutting taxes would be the key to revitalizing the Kansas economy. They argued that the 2016-2017 budget approved by House and Senate negotiators in February did nothing more than paper over problems for another year.