Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly knows COVID-19 hasn’t gone away, but she seems to have given up
The short version of what’s happened so far in the Kansas Legislature’s special session that began on Wednesday is that Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican lawmakers have agreed to a deal severely limiting her emergency authority during the coronavirus pandemic.
Unless something unexpected happens, the GOP leaders will have given almost nothing and gotten almost everything.
After the deal was announced, the governor canceled her news conference, and the nursing home industry complained because this legislation will make it merely almost impossible instead of completely impossible for an elderly Kansan to sue a facility over its handling of COVID-19.
Kelly had already agreed to drop her slow and careful, phased-in approach to ending the coronavirus shutdown when she vetoed the Legislature’s first try at making her governor in name only during this pandemic.
Over to you, she said to counties, which mostly responded by discarding all pandemic-related restrictions.
Come back and do better, she said to lawmakers. But if she thought that ceding so much ground before even starting negotiations would make them any more reasonable, well, she should have known better.
They have come back to Topeka, but the bill they’ve agreed on is only a little less bad than the earlier version.
Bad not because it disadvantages Kelly politically but because if this virus does come roaring back, as scientists fully expect, and as the lack of restrictions in counties across the state makes all the more likely, she will be even more unable to respond without permission.
They’ve not yet resolved the issue of whether nursing homes should have immunity from all or merely most coronavirus-related liability; in the current version, facilities can still be sued, with great difficulty.
That too is wrong, given how lightly regulated and inspected these facilities already are. More than half the COVID-19 deaths in Kansas have been in nursing homes, and the ability to sue is the only real protection elderly residents have.
The bill also extends through the end of 2021 what was supposed to be a temporary, emergency dispensation to nursing homes to hire aides with as little as eight hours of training. Half a dozen bills that would have improved conditions in nursing homes, where infection control was spotty long before COVID-19, went nowhere this year.
That the fight now comes down to whether to relieve older people of their last remaining recourse entirely or almost entirely should trouble the consciences of lawmakers, in theory anyway. Do these folks not have parents, or not think they themselves could ever need the protections they’re so eager to please industry lobbyists by stripping away?
Kelly will now be more restricted in her ability to close businesses and schools in response to any COVID-19 resurgence, which will be OK if nothing else goes wrong. Does it seem at all likely to you, based on recent events, that that’s what is going to happen?
The governor, who certainly saved lives by acting quickly to close schools, will now have to get permission from the state board of education to do that.
Instead of having to get an OK from the lawmakers on the Legislative Coordinating Council before spending federal relief aid, she’ll only have to go to the State Finance Council, which she chairs. That’s her big win, apparently. That and she can still call in the National Guard to deploy resources in the pandemic. But in the immortal word of Justice Clarence Thomas, “whoop-dee-damn-do.”
Maybe she had no choice but to trade so much for so little, but Kansans deserve a lot better than this so-called compromise, for which we have other names. The pandemic didn’t end because we have other serious problems, and though Kelly knows that, she seems to have given up.