How A Failure To Override One Of The Governor's Vetoes Was Actually A Victory For Kansas Republicans

By C.J. Janovy, Kansas Reflector

May 5, 2021

Kansans, you got played.

Supporters of human decency celebrated on Monday when the Republican-led Senate failed to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of the craven legislation that came, over the last few ugly months, to be known as the transgender sports ban. This failure to override was unquestionably a good thing: 13 senators of conscience (and one named David Haley) recognized that this mean effort wasn’t about saving women’s sports but was instead part of a well-coordinated national effort to rally the Republican base with a scary social issue.

More Kansans are beginning to understand that transgender people are absolutely no threat to anyone. But there are still enough people who don’t know anyone who is trans (or believe Caitlyn Jenner speaks for the LGBTQ community) and are exploitable by far-right organizations looking to get conservatives elected.

When efforts to scare voters about trans people in bathrooms failed over the last several years, these organizations changed tactics. Frank Cannon, president of the conservative American Principles Project, told the New York Times that polling revealed that targeting trans kids as a threat to women’s sports rallied social conservatives around “the idea that you are taking something away from people. And that’s where they don’t like it.”

That almost worked in Kansas on Monday. Stopping it might have come at a high political cost for Democrats and moderate Republicans, though.

The Republicans pushing the anti-trans legislation are playing a long game, and even though they lost this issue this time, they got what they really wanted.

On the same day Republicans lost on the anti-trans bill, they won nearly everything else.

They overrode Kelly’s veto of tax cuts that favored multi-national corporations as much as regular Kansans, at an estimated three-year cost of $300 million to the state’s budget — the budget that pays for services benefiting all Kansans.

They imposed new restrictions on how Kansas conducts its elections — restrictions that the Republican Secretary of State didn’t ask for, without input from actual election administrators, based on zero evidence of unchecked election fraud in a state whose last election could serve as a model of efficiency and fairness.

They lowered the age at which Kansans could carry a concealed weapon from 21 to 18. (Sen. Cindy Holscher, a Democrat from Overland Park, noted that firearms are the second leading cause of death for children and teens in Kansas.)

They approved new license plate designs that include the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag proudly carried by traitors during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

When it came to actual issues that really mattered, Kelly got clobbered. Meanwhile the anti-trans legislation had taken hours of the Legislature’s time and a springtime’s worth of fresh air. It was a massive distraction, one that rightly required all of the attention it took to stop, given that it was built on the lives of five kids on teams somewhere in the state.

It’s as if Sen. Renee Erickson, the Republican from Wichita who carried the anti-trans bill with the venom of a true believer, had actually been assigned to hit a sacrifice fly so the rest of the Republican priorities could advance.

Now, there’s the political risk that hundreds of thousands of Kansans who don’t pay close attention to the Machiavellian machinations of the state Legislature might conclude, incorrectly, that the only thing Kelly can lead on is protecting LGBTQ people.

What might have mattered most — Medicaid expansion — barely earned a blip. This despite the governor’s idea to fund it by passing medical marijuana, a ploy that looked politically smart early in the session. But by March, Medicaid expansion was so dead that earning it a headline required a Democratic stunt. On Tuesday, Kansas City Star reporter Katie Bernard reported that Senate President Ty Masterson said his chamber would not consider medical marijuana this year. By doing so, he punishes even Republicans who support medical marijuana to deny the governor a win.

In the Senate, one of Kelly’s overriders was the former majority leader currently facing a felony for fleeing a police officer and misdemeanors for driving under the influence, among other infractions.

In the House, some overrides passed with the minimum 84 votes, requiring ayes from the possibly mentally impaired Rep. Mark Samsel, currently facing misdemeanor battery charges after apparently punching a Wellsville student in the groin.

There’s a lesson from the defeat of the anti-trans sports bill that came at the expense of so many other things that matter: Kansas Democrats, moderate Republicans and overall supporters of human decency desperately need an offense.

This story was originally published by Kansas Reflector. For more stories from the Kansas Reflector visit Kansas Reflector.