Does Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly know ‘what the hell’ the governorship is for?
The most arresting thing about Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s State of the State address was the body language between the Democratic Kelly and the Republican with whom she crafted the compromise that’s supposed to expand Medicaid coverage to 150,000 more Kansans at long last.
As Kelly praised the deal — no surprise there — and smiled in Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning’s direction, he sat expressionless. As others stood to applaud their accomplishment, he didn’t move, didn’t look around, didn’t nod in acknowledgment. And as Kelly joked, again looking at him, that they’d surprised even themselves, coming to an agreement, he did not surrender even a hint of a smile.
Maybe he was there despite severe tooth pain or had just received some terrible personal news. But the state senator from Overland Park, whose constituents favor Medicaid expansion and whose challenger, state Rep. Cindy Holscher, is running on it, looked like a man made miserable by the mention of the “accomplishment” he’s fought against for years.
After Kelly was sworn into office a year ago, we on The Star’s editorial board praised her “delightfully dull” inaugural address. (“It was a calming lavender bath, really, in praise of public service and volunteerism and all we have in common even when we disagree. Even the platitudes, and there were a few, were a relaxing change from the exhausting, nonstop drama in and invective out of Washington” and “eight years of too much excitement in Sam Brownback and Jeff Colyer’s Topeka — Will our poorly funded public schools be closed by the Kansas Supreme Court? Will any safety net survive?”)
Wednesday night’s address may have pushed that delight to its outer limits. (If the highlight wasn’t the shoutout from her cat, what was it? And between the revelations that her husband is getting into composting and that she hopes this decade will be remembered as the “Soaring 20s,” maybe it’s no wonder Sen. Amy Klobuchar had a hard time recalling Kelly’s name at the last Democratic debate.)
Laura Kelly virtually always makes sense, and that never gets old. She’s right that the failure to expand Medicaid is killing Kansans. Or as she put it, “In July, a study of mortality rates in non-expansion states estimated that 288 Kansans have died prematurely every year since 2014 specifically due to our failure to adopt expansion.”
She’s right that the state has to step up for aviation workers laid off because Boeing put safety last. And maybe most of all, she was right when she said, “I will veto any tax bill that comes to my desk that throws our state back into fiscal crisis, or debt, or sends us back to court for underfunding our schools.”
But there was not even a fleeting mention of guns, and no answer to the insane “Anti-Red Flag Act” attempt to make Kansas a place where even those barred from carrying by mental illness could still keep their firearms. There was no mention of the research that has linked red flag laws to a lower suicide rate — though the suicide rate, as Kelly did note, gets more frightening all the time. There was no mention because Kelly has said she won’t push gun control measures this year.
There was no mention of other fights worth having, either, on medical marijuana or over a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion. And she said too little about the need not just for classes and rehab in prisons, but for real criminal justice reform.
All goals can’t be accomplished at once, of course, but Kelly doesn’t seem to appreciate the power of the bully pulpit she so rarely uses that she might not even know how.
Just days into his presidency, after John Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson informed his advisers that he intended to use his first address to Congress to argue for a sweeping civil rights bill that was way ahead of where lawmakers were at that point. Terrible idea, his aides said, to waste energy on a lost cause. “Well, what the hell is the presidency for?” he answered, and said what needed saying anyway.
The real problem with Kelly’s State of the State wasn’t the flat-as-Kansas rhetoric, but that it left me wondering, not for the first time, if she knows what the hell the governorship is for.
This story was originally published January 16, 2020 at 11:46 AM.