‘Democracy died here a bit’: Kansas Legislature ends messy session with 24-hour circus
It’s as if a powerful squall line blew through Kansas overnight. By dawn’s early light it was time to assess the damage.
That’s the feeling left by the Kansas Legislature’s wholly unnecessary end-of-session 24-hour marathon, which started Thursday morning and went nonstop through the night until 8 a.m. Friday.
As Kansans woke up perhaps wondering what might have happened to their state overnight, they weren’t much more in the dark than their bleary-eyed elected leaders. How can good legislation, or much of anything that’s good, result from sleep-deprived lawmakers pulling an all-nighter, after an all-dayer, and trying to make law in wee hours that not even above-average college students would be cramming through?
“My head is spinning from exhaustion,” Rep. Jan H. Kessinger, a Republican from Overland Park, said afterward.
“Over the past 23 hours, this Legislature has assaulted many of the basics of good governance and democracy,” Rep. Cindy Holscher, Democrat of Overland Park, says she told her colleagues when it was over. “I think deep down, we all know democracy died here a bit today.”
The poorly conceived, harried session made certain that thoughtful, deliberative decisions couldn’t be made on issues such as badly needed Medicaid expansion; a constitutional amendment to give voters the chance to allow legal restrictions on abortion; and how much pandemic-reponse authority to take away from Gov. Laura Kelly.
Lawmakers raised legitimate questions about the balance of power in times of emergency but allowed no time for serious debate or careful consideration of the details as they rushed to require the governor to seek legislative agreement before closing businesses for more than 15 days and asserted their authority to oversee how the state’s $1.25 billion in federal coronavirus funds are allocated.
Legislators also ordered long-awaited infection control inspections at all long-term care facilities in Kansas, home to some 20,000 residents. Appallingly, only about a third of the nursing homes have been inspected for infection control since the virus shutdown began in March.
COVID-19 didn’t cause this disaster
The Legislature’s failure to pass Medicaid expansion, in the jaws of a pandemic no less, is abject and indefensible. It consigns as many as 130,000 Kansans to another year without access to routine medical care.
Lawmakers also hastily passed delicate provisions shielding health care professionals and business owners from lawsuits resulting from coronavirus — despite the fact that some lawsuits may be warranted.
And it remains to be seen whether lawmakers have overly hamstrung the governor, who needs to be flexible in a roiling pandemic. Kelly would be fully within her rights to veto the slapdash bill, which would unfortunately throw an already unstable legislative and legal environment into further turmoil. A veto would end the current state of emergency on Tuesday, rather than on May 31, and undo everything else in the bill.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Legislature suspended its session March 19 due to the virus, but lawmakers weren’t forced to complete they work in just one day, as they unwisely attempted to do. They could have afforded themselves more time, but did not.
The result of this completely unforced error is a mishmash of lawmaking hash, a manmade disaster to go on top of the natural one.
There are huge concerns with legislation passed in a weary hurry, says Holscher. It’s unlikely legislators actually read the bills they voted on, the emergency powers measure alone being more than 70 pages. Cognitive abilities decline as the night goes on: “I’m guessing a number of people are very foggy in regard to what was passed,” Holscher says. Peer pressure and fatigue can lead lawmakers to cave in to things they normally would not. And last-minute laws are drafted, either by legislators or lobbyists, with no hearing or debate.
Legislature created its own state of emergency
In 45 days of legislative meetings, Kessinger says, “we worked legislation only seven of those days.” The last one is already living in infamy.
Sadly, Patrick R. Miller, associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas, says such indigestible warm-and-eat sausage has become a staple of legislatures across the country and in the nation’s capital.
“What happened in Topeka (Thursday and Friday) will be disappointing for people who still cling to the outdated notion that the legislative process is — or should be — something that is highly deliberative, open, civil, and well thought out,” he says.
Instead, partisan authoritarianism, autocratic leadership and last-second brinkmanship have increasingly replaced deliberation and compromise — and, therefore, replaced good governance.
“Cue, then, the bills that no one reads or reviews before drop-dead deadlines, greater influence for lobbyists — or legislators having to come back and ‘fix’ bills they rushed to pass but had unintended consequences,” Miller lamented.
What a terrible shame. But no surprise, as it all went perfectly to recent form: The Legislature’s failure to work with the governor on what she might support in the emergency powers bill echoes the governor’s lack of communication with legislative leaders on her use of that authority.
Kansas has a proud history of divided government that has worked for the people because its leaders have been able to work with each other. No longer, clearly.
It will take weeks, if not months, to assess the damage from this latest breakdown.