Voice For Liberty

Category: Kansas state government

  • Kansas Office of the Repealer now open

    Shortly after taking office, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback announced the “Office of the Repealer” which would look for unnecessary laws and regulations that should be repealed. Now the office has a website and is ready for business.

    In the press release announcing the availability of the website that citizens can use to make suggestions, Brownback said: “The top priorities of my administration are to grow the state’s economy and get the more than 110,000 unemployed Kansans back to work. With the help of Kansans, the Office of the Repealer is working to identify laws and regulations that are out of date, unreasonable, and burdensome. State laws and regulations shouldn’t hinder opportunities for Kansans and Kansas businesses.”

    Kansas Department of Administration Secretary Dennis Taylor is the Repealer. He said “My staff and I will run a cost-benefit analysis on each law or regulation that is submitted for review. The focus of the review will be on consumer protection. Laws picked for repeal will be sent to the originating body.”

    It is promised that Taylor and his staff will send a status update within 30 days of receiving a recommendation.

    The website for making suggestions is at Office of the Repealer. I’ve already made a suggestion, based on my article Kansas auto dealers have anti-competitive law on their side.

  • Kansas migration trends

    The rate that Kansans leave for other states is slowing down, but the trend for Kansas income is not. These figures are based on statistics that the Internal Revenue Service collects collects, based on address changes noticed when people file tax returns. The IRS collects three statistics. The number of returns filed is an approximation of the number of households that changed addresses, while the number of exemptions approximates the number of people. The adjusted gross income measures the earnings that changed addresses.

    The Tax Foundation collects these statistics from the IRS and makes them available on a page called State to State Migration Data.

    For Kansas, the statistics for returns filed (approximating households) tell us that each year many households leave the state. The trend, however, is in a better direction as can be seen in the accompanying chart. Still, for the years 2007 to 2008, 37,842 households moved to Kansas from other states, while 39,415 households moved from Kansas to other states. The net out-migration was 1,573 households. (The trend in exemptions, representing people, is very similar.)

    While the trend is that each year fewer households are leaving Kansas, the chart tells us that many have left, year after year. For the period from 2000 to 2008, a net of 34,259 returns (households) representing 55,370 exemptions (people) left Kansas. That’s like the entire city of Manhattan packing up and leaving Kansas — in less than a decade.

    The trend in AGI (adjusted gross income), however, is not moving in a good direction. For the past several years the trend of income leaving Kansas has been on a downward trajectory, meaning that while each year there is an out-migration of income from Kansas, the pace of income leaving is increasing. This is at the same time the trend of people leaving Kansas is moving in a better direction. While it’s difficult to draw a conclusion from this data, a possibility is that Kansas is becoming poorer, relative to other states.

    Kansas migration trendsKansas migration trends. Out-migration of households is slowing, while out-migration of income is not.

  • Kansas Arts Commission survives

    Yesterday the Kansas Senate voted to overturn an order by Governor Sam Brownback to eliminate the Kansas Arts Commission.

    The governor had issued an Executive Reorganization Order to implement his goal. Either chamber of the legislature may then vote on a resolution objecting to the ERO. If such a resolution passes either chamber, the ERO is canceled, and that’s what happened. No action by the House of Representatives is needed.

    The vote in the Senate was 24 to 13, with three not voting. Wichita-area legislators voting to override the governor and save the KAC include Carolyn McGinn and Jean Schodorf. Voting against the KAC were Steve Abrams, Dick Kelsey, Ty Masterson, and Susan Wagle. Les Donovan did not vote.

    Going forward, the KAC has to be funded through appropriations each year just like any other agency or program. While it appears the Senate would be able to pass an appropriations bill with funding for the KAC — it received about $800,000 this year — the House is less likely to pass such an appropriation. In either case, the governor in Kansas has a line-item veto, which he could use on KAC funding.

    Politically, the passage of this resolution against the wishes of the governor is a reminder that there was an election in Kansas last year, but not for senators. (There are a handful of new senators due to resignations, but the new members seem largely aligned with the views of the senators they replaced, so the character of the body has not changed in a significant way.) It is commonly thought that voters sent a message last November that they want less government spending, not more. To that end, voters elected a governor that ran on a platform of fiscal conservatism, and many conservative members were elected to the House.

    The defeat of the governor’s plan is also a lesson in how entrenched special interest groups can become. Even in this case, where the amount of money is relatively small — some $800,000 from the state that generated another $1,200,000 from other sources — an intense lobbying effort was undertaken to save the KAC. This effort included the use of taxpayer-funded or state-owned resources such as the KAC website and KAC staff time to lobby the legislature for money.

  • Judges are lawmakers

    Kansas University Law Professor Stephen J. Ware is the foremost authority on the method of judicial selection in Kansas and the need for reform. His paper on this topic is Selection to the Kansas Supreme Court, which is published by the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. Further reporting by me is at Kansas judicial selection needs reform, says law professor.

    The Kansas House of Representatives has passed a bill that would reform the way judges are appointed to the Court of Appeals. Now one person, Tim Owens, an attorney and Republican from Overland Park, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is blocking progress on this bill.

    The following article by Ware explains why reform of the method of judicial selection in Kansas is so important.

    In a democracy like ours, should lawmakers be selected democratically?

    Not according to Judge Richard Greene.

    In the judge’s Feb. 2 guest column in The Capital-Journal, he supported a process in which some of our state’s most important lawmakers are selected in a deeply undemocratic process that makes the votes of some citizens count far more than the votes of others.

    The lawmakers in question are our state’s appellate court judges.

    Judges are lawmakers? Yes.

    Judges have routinely made law throughout our country’s history and even earlier, going back to England. This judge-made law, called the “common law,” has generally worked well and continues today to govern thousands of cases including those involving contracts, property rights and bodily injuries.

    Common law rules differ from state to state. States with more liberal judges tend to have more liberal common law, while states with more conservative judges tend to have more conservative common law. The political leanings of appellate judges, rather than trial judges, are especially important because appellate judges have much more power over the direction of the law.

    In short, the appellate judges of Kansas, like those of other states, are tremendously important lawmakers.

    What is unusual about the lawmaking judges of Kansas is how they are selected. None of the other 49 states uses the system Kansas uses to pick its two appellate courts — and for good reason, because the Kansas system is a shockingly undemocratic way to select lawmakers.

    At the center of the Kansas system is the Supreme Court Nominating Commission. Most of the members of this commission are picked in elections open to only 9,000 people — the members of the state bar. The remaining 2.8 million people in Kansas have no vote in these elections.

    This plainly violates basic equality among citizens, the principle of one-person, one-vote. The current system elevates one small group into a powerful elite and treats everyone else like a second-class citizen.

    Kansas lawyers tend to be fine people, but they’re not superheroes. They don’t deserve more power than lawyers have in any of the other 49 states.

    In a democracy, a lawyer’s vote should not be worth more than any other citizen’s vote. As Washburn law professor Jeffrey Jackson writes, democratic legitimacy “would appear to favor a reduction in the influence of the state bar and its members over the nominating commission because they do not fit within the democratic process.”

    Kansas should break the grip its bar holds on the selection of our state’s lawmaking judges. Fortunately, the Kansas House of Representatives has passed a bill that would do just that.

    Will this responsible, moderate reform be enacted by the Kansas Senate?

    Or will our state senators defend the deeply undemocratic view that a lawyer’s vote should count far more than another Kansas citizen’s vote?

  • Arts supporters make case in Kansas Senate committee

    Last week the Kansas Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs heard testimony from opponents and proponents of Governor Sam Brownback’s Executive Reorganization Order that would eliminate the Kansas Arts Commission and create the Kansas Arts Foundation to take its place. The plan would also eliminate state funding for the arts after a transition year.

    One of the cases that arts supporters make is that with the Kansas Arts Commission being a state agency receiving government funds, the commission receives addition funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid-America Arts Alliance. If the KAC is ended and replaced by a non-profit organization (the), arts supporters say Kansas arts organizations could no longer receive these funds.

    Kansas Legislative Research Department made inquiries to the Arts Alliance and the NEA. The answers from both agencies indicate that it is unclear as to whether the new Kansas Arts Foundation would be eligible to receive grants. In particular, the NEA answered, according to Legislative Research, “the potential exists for Kansas to forfeit its ability to receive National Endowment for the Arts funding depending on how the new entity in structured …”

    Senator Roger Reitz, a member of the Senate committee, offered testimony that emphasized the economic development and jobs aspect of arts in Kansas, citing the study produced by Americans for the Arts. This study, which claims huge economic benefit from arts spending, is flawed in the same way of most similar reports.

    Representatives of several arts organizations appeared before the committee to offer testimony on the importance of KAC funding. But as we’ve seen in the case of the Spencer Museum of Art, the case these supporters make is often weak.

    Symphony in the Flint Hills

    An example of the weak case for the necessity of government funding comes from a representative of Symphony in the Flint Hills, Inc., who testified on the importance of KAC funding to that organization, which produces an annual concert. For this year, the tickets to this event cost $72 (plus $3 handling). This year the event sold out — 5,000 tickets — in 30 minutes, according to news reports. That’s $375,000 in revenue, and that’s not all the organization collects as it has many sponsors who make donations.

    Last year the KAC awarded $12,786 to Symphony in the Flint Hills. That’s just 3.4 percent of its revenue from tickets sales, which again are not its only source of revenue. According to the firm’s IRS filings for 2008, its total revenue for that year was $822,864. The KAC funding represents just 1.5 percent of this figure (these figures are not for the same year, but are undoubtedly comparable).

    In fact, Symphony in the Flint Hills, although organized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is quite profitable. For 2008, its “profit” (the IRS form calls it “excess”) was $109,891. That was added to its starting net assets value of $252,401 to give it a balance of $362,292 going forward.

    Testimony provided by Symphony in the Flint Hills indicated that KAC has provided almost $30,000 in funding over six years. With the success of this organization, and with the cash it has on hand, the taxpayers of the State of Kansas would be grateful if it considered repaying these funds — or at least not beg for more. This organization has proven that it can thrive without state funding.

    As a smaller example, the Western Plains Arts Association offered written testimony that indicated without KAC funding, “we will have to eliminate many of our programs.” A look at the numbers indicates that WPAA received $4,035 from the KAC, while its IRS form 990 indicates total revenue of $80,513. While I’m sure WPAA will not appreciate the loss of this five percent of its revenue, it is inconceivable that it can’t adjust and either cut expenses without cutting programs, or seek a small additional amount of revenue from the people it provides services to.

    Taking arts away

    Advocates of government funding for the arts make claims that without such funding, arts will disappear. They even make claims that the government is proposing to take away arts, as in this which appeared in a Newton Kansan op-ed: “Abolishing or limiting access to the arts by reducing funding and support systems is not prudent.”

    These wild claims make the assumption that arts organizations will not attempt to adjust to the loss of government funding. As we’ve seen in several examples, the KAC funding is often a small portion of total funding. The claims of some that loss of KAC funding amounts to “abolishing” arts is not believable. Or, if the only reason an arts program exists is funding by government, I suggest a real-world test of its value is in order.

    The arts are important to our lives, I believe. That’s all the more reason why we need to get government out of art and return supports of the arts to the private sector. The importance of arts is why we need to remove government — which ultimately relies on coercion, a fact seemingly lost on arts supporters — from its funding, control, and management. We’ll have better art as a result.

    The committee passed a resolution opposing Brownback’s ERO. It will now move to the full Senate. If passed there by a simple majority, the ERO is canceled. Either chamber on its own can cancel an ERO, so no action would be required by the House of Representatives if the resolution passes the Senate. If the Senate passes the ERO, the governor can use the line item veto to strike the KAC’s funding, should he desire.

  • Kansas judicial selection should be reformed

    By Karl Peterjohn.

    Removing politics from the Kansas judiciary is about as likely as removing the moo from a cow. In Kansas the there is no transparency and a great deal of discrimination in this back room judicial selection process. Judge Ricard D. Greene’s defense of appellate judge selection (February 24, 2011 Wichita Eagle) in Kansas neglected these odious features in his defense of this terribly flawed system.

    I write this as a second-class Kansan who has been disenfranchised in the process of selecting a majority of this powerful governmental committee that is dominated by the members of the Kansas bar and the group that picks who will become its appellate judges. There is no other government panel in Kansas that empowers one small class of special citizens at the expense of the rest of us. I recently asked the Secretary of State’s office for the election results for selecting this powerful state committee’s lawyer members. I was told that information is not available.

    Five of the nine members of this powerful committee are elected solely by the members of the Kansas bar. The other four are appointed by the governor. While this committee selection process is used in a number of other states, none of them provide for making a majority of its members are lawyers.

    This type of closed door selection process which occurs outside the public’s view is a reason why a few years ago, six of the seven members of the Kansas Supreme Court who had been selected using this process were members of one political party while the seventh who wasn’t, was a friend of the governor (see kansasmeadowlark.com). The latter was judicially reprimanded but that admonishment and the underlying egregious misbehavior that led to this punishment did not keep Lawton Nuss from his current promotion to be the Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.

    Yeah, there aren’t any politics here. Yeah, only the best and the brightest are being added to the court according to Judge Greene. I must note that none of the Eagle’s news coverage of Nuss during his retention election last year mentioned his reprimand or kept the Eagle’s editorial page from endorsing him despite his ex parte abuse with litigants in the Montoy case.

    Judicial selection is important and decisions will impact state policy. Must the state spend $853 million more for K-12 schooling to comply with the KS Constitution? Yes says the unanimous supreme court in overruling its own earlier decision. Are state owned casinos constitutional? Yes again, despite the fact that there never was a statewide vote on legalized casinos. Was the Kansas death penalty constitutional? The Kansas Supreme Court overruled itself from an earlier case and said no, but then Attorney General Kline took this case to the US Supreme Court. Kline won in Washington and that decision was reversed.

    Today, the politics of the Kansas judiciary are now occurring behind the closed door-back rooms of the bar association. Transparency is non existent when the meetings of the government committee occur behind closed doors and without any public records being recorded from these meetings.

    KU law professor Stephen J. Ware has written that this is an inequality that goes against the “one person, one vote” principle of democracies. The power of a vote of a member of the bar is “infinitely more powerful” than the votes of non-lawyers.

    When comparing the method of judicial selection in Kansas to other states, Ware said that “Kansas is the only state that gives its bar the power to select the majority of its supreme court nominating commission.”

    The Kansas House majority supporting HB 2101 should be praised for eliminating this vestige of elite discrimination by one class of specially empowered citizens. The attorneys and their hand picked judges won’t like this bill, but the politics of judicial selection should be out in public where everyone has a say as well as a clear view, instead of hidden in back rooms. I hope that a majority of the Kansas senate as well as Governor Sam Brownback agree and HB 2101 becomes law as a first step in reforming appellate judicial selection in Kansas.

  • Kansas government arts supporters: some numbers

    In the debate over Kansas government funding of the arts and the elimination of the Kansas Arts Commission, a few things stand out.

    First, when government-funded arts supporters say that loss of funding will result in the loss of events or institutions, this assumes that nothing changes. It assumes that arts organizations can’t — or won’t — react in some way to compensate for the loss of funding.

    An example is an editorial in the University Daily Kansan, which is the student newspaper at the University of Kansas. In it, the editorialist writes: “KAC provided the Spencer Art Museum with $21,286 and the Lied Center with $16,286 for the fiscal year of 2011. Without funding from the KAC, the Spencer Art Museum would likely have to make cuts, including one full-time art education position.”

    Now if the Spencer Museum of Art were to lose this funding, are we to believe that the museum is so feckless that it can’t do something to compensate?

    And what the museum would have to do to compensate might be quite small. I learned that the museum attracts between 120,000 and 140,000 visitors each year. Using the lower figure, if the museum could figure out a way to coax just 18 cents from each visitor, it could make up for the loss of Kansas Arts Commission funding. I might suggest a small admission fee that could be voluntary. Or a tip jar.

    Or consider Music Theater of Wichita. According to its website, it has a budget of over $2 million per year. It received a grant of $7,808 from the Kansas Arts Commission, representing just 0.4 percent of its budget. Are we to believe government-funded arts supporters when they claim that organizations like this will fold if they don’t receive their government funds?

    Even for arts events in small towns, the government funds could easily be made up in many ways. In particular, organizations can start charging admission, or increase it slightly if they already charge admission. In this way the people who benefit from arts pay for the enjoyment, just like we expect people to do with other activities they enjoy. It will also force arts organizations to be more accountable to their customers instead of government bureaucrats. That’s a good thing.

  • Kansas Economic Freedom Index released

    Today marks the release of the first Kansas Economic Freedom Index for the 2011 legislative session. To view the index, click on Kansas Economic Freedom Index.

    Why is economic freedom important? Here’s what Milton Friedman had to say in the opening chapter of his monumental work Capitalism and Freedom:

    The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom

    It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements. The chief contemporary manifestation of this idea is the advocacy of “democratic socialism” by many who condemn out of hand the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by “totalitarian socialism” in Russia, and who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements. The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain arrangements are possible and that, in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.

    Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

    Resources on economic freedom:
    Wikipedia article on economic freedom
    Milton Friedman, the Father of Economic Freedom

  • Unions disrupt Kansas Legislature

    Last week I asked Kansas legislators whether the union-organized protests in Wisconsin could happen in Kansas. Representative Jim Ward said: “I don’t think it would happen in Kansas.” While people in Kansas are passionate, we have a tradition of civility, he added.

    At today’s session of the Kansas House of Representatives, however, we’ve seen that it can happen. There union members were evicted from the House chamber for their noisy and rude protests.

    According to reporting by Martin Hawver: “The Kansas House this morning — for the first time in decades — was interrupted by shouting from the balcony by opponents of the bill that would prohibit employers from providing union political action committee checkoff on paychecks.”

    Hawver also reported that the group made “tasteless remarks about female legislators who supported the bill.”

    The bill in question prohibits automatically deducting donations to unions’ political action committees from workers’ paychecks. Workers may still contribute, but not automatically.

    Video of the demonstration shows the workers to be quite unruly. A union leader said “we will not shut up … we will not keep it down.”

    On Twitter, union supporters and Democrats seemed pleased with the way events unfolded. The Twitter account for kshousedems tweeted: “We are pleased to see so many working men and women in the KS Capitol today, fighting for their rights!” Later the same account called the disruption a manifestation of democracy: “The GOP Speaker’s chief aide says the peaceful assembly of working Kansans in the Capitol is “intimidation.” We call it Democracy.”

    “katethedavis” disputed the account reported by Hawver, saying; “Repubs saying the union folks at the Capitol were sexually derogatory? This 24yo female saw nothing but perfect gentlemen.”

    Chad Manspeaker was proud, tweeting “We are no longer in the gallery. I couldn’t be more proud of my Union family today.”

    This bill does not prohibit unions from accepting contributions for political activity, although it makes it likely that contributions may decline, as union members will have to take active steps to contribute.

    So if the Kansas governor and legislature advanced the same actions that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has proposed, could there be large union demonstrations in Kansas? It seems so. In fact, unions have just announced a “Rally to Save the American Dream” to take place on the steps of the Kansas statehouse this Saturday.