This is why we can't have nice things...

An examination of politics-as-usual creating more problems than it solves

There’s polling out there that has told the ruling party in Kansas what issues are most likely to scare voters to their side - border security and the modern-day Red Scare, China.

Both are legitimate concerns that warrant thoughtful discussion and a meaningful response. But that’s not what voters got last session from the Kansas Legislature. We got political pandering based far more on winning elections than on doing anything even remotely substantive towards solving a problem. Especially when you consider that these aren’t issues relevant at all to the Kansas Legislature.

I’ve joked that if the membership of the Kansas Legislature is truly the last line of defense between American Democracy and Chinese Communism, we are all in more trouble than I thought.

On the border, we put $15 million of your taxpayer money to deploy our Kansas National Guard forces to Texas, which is a dubious use of Kansas resources in a year when we were told we couldn’t afford to expand Medicaid or provide disabled Veterans with more property tax relief. Moreover, the legislature did this knowing Gov. Kelly is the only one who can deploy our National Guard, and she’d already declared she would do no such thing.

On China, we got a very flawed bill that went through several changes. Each adjustment attempting to solve one problem created a bigger and potentially worse problem. On its face, it violated the Kansas and U.S. Constitutions, and attempts to remedy that issue resulted in a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars.

First we were just going to take land away from people if they didn’t give it up on their own within a prescribed timeline. Set aside whatever legitimate concerns you may have about international espionage and geo-political subterfuge, and consider that the proposed legislation would simply take land away from people and companies. That seems to strike at the very heart of our Constitution, and the concept of personal property rights - which is perhaps why these bills met resistance from nearly every agriculture group in Kansas.

Then, when the Senate realized that might be an issue, our solution was to use Kansas taxpayer money to compensate Chinese political and military operatives for the seizing of their land. That might have solved the Constitutional question, but it created another problem: We would be paying people we believe mean us harm... With your money.

Want to take a guess how much Kansas land is owned by “the Chinese?”

It’s one acre. And from what we gathered during hearings, it’s someone’s wife in Russell County. In fact, you can see for yourself all the foreign land holdings in Kansas, thanks to the help of K-State. Below is an excerpt from an Associated Press story on the legislation.

A Kansas State University report last fall said Chinese ownership accounted for a single acre of privately owned Kansas agricultural land and all foreign individuals and companies owned 2.4% of the state’s 49 million acres of private agricultural land. The bill would have required the university to compile annual reports on all foreign real estate ownership, including non-agricultural business property.

Oh, here’s another fun twist - that provision to require K-State to do a more thorough annual report? The university didn’t have the staff or the budget to execute. So that created another big and expensive problem.

What’s more, there is already a federal resource that addresses companies wanting to purchase land in the United States. I didn’t know how this process worked, and I doubt many in the legislature did before this bill came up.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has done this work since 1950. The committee includes the Department of Homeland Security, Defense, State, Commerce, Justice, Energy, and a handful more - all profoundly more qualified to make such judgements than anyone in the Kansas legislature.

I am on the committee that heard the aforementioned land ownership bill, and in our conference committee there was an open conversation about how the state of Kansas absolutely, without question, would be sued because of the legislation. To me, that’s not the best way to go about protecting our state.

Yet, the campaign material you’ll see this year won’t talk about any of that. It won’t provide any details about how these measures are a waste of taxpayer resources, how it violated the Constitution, or how it would get us dragged into court. It also won’t talk about how this isn’t a real state-level problem that we’re not equipped or well financed enough to handle.

Instead, you’ll get junk that looks something like this…

My Wichita-based opponent’s big money friends spent a lot of money talking about these very issues during the primary election. The very center of my opponent’s approach seems to be that he’ll tackle the border and keep us safe from China. But, he won’t, because he can’t. If we really believe it’s a legitimate issue, we must also recognize that it’s much bigger than the Kansas Legislature.

The real issue with all of this, though, is that these tactics and misleading tricks work, and people can and do win elections on them. And that’s why we sometimes struggle in Kansas to make the advances that would keep us in line with neighboring states.

I’m looking at you, Kansas per capita debt, which is way higher than neighboring states…

Kansas’ ruling party has had all the power to fix real problems in Kansas (they’ve had the majority all but three times in Kansas’ entire history) - yet they have used their position working to increase and cement their power through half-truths and suckling on whatever national level scare tactic is on the political menu. All the while, they’ve let real problems fester and grow worse - problems they absolutely could’ve done something about.

You’ll likely see a lot of this across the state and in Hutchinson this election season. It’s another in a long line of insults to the intelligence and diligence of Kansas voters. And it doesn’t solve a single real problem for a single person in Kansas - outside of those hoping to leverage fear into votes in November.