Kansas has scored another top ranking. Its congressional delegation has been declared the most conservative of them all.
The National Journal did the ranking. Using a 100-point scale, it gave the four Kansas members of the House and its two senators a score of 85.3. The next nearest state was Wyoming, where its single representative racked up a score of 73.5. Points were given for votes on various issues, such as increasing the national debt limit so the nation’s checks wouldn’t bounce.
The results were announced in a front page story in Sunday’s Kansas City Star, in which the reporters quoted unnamed conservative leaders as explaining that “the delegation’s voting records are the result of a 20-year effort to elect more representatives who mirror the state’s conservative constituents.”
A 20-year effort? Let’s see, that takes Kansas back to 1992. Democrat Joan Finney was governor. She revolutionized the way Kansas funded its public schools by shifting the burden from local districts to the state. She was followed by moderate Republican Bill Graves, who gave way to Democrat Kathleen Sebelius, who, in her second term, was followed by her lieutenant governor, Mark Parkinson, when she went to Washington to join the Cabinet.
It wasn’t until 2010, with the election of Sam Brownback, that the people of Kansas voted hard right. And the same year saw the Kansas Congressional delegation become virulently conservative.
No, it was not a 20-year, step-by-step march to the very right edge of the political spectrum. It happened all at once; it was a falling-off-the-cliff political event.
Before Brownback, Kansas saw a string of moderate Democrats and Republicans sitting in the governor’s chair and representing the state in Washington. Our U.S. senators, Bob Dole, Nancy Kassebaum and James B. Pearson, became national leaders.
Dole — who is now labeled moderate, but was Mr. Conservative while he was president of the U.S. Senate and then tried for the presidency — ran the Senate when Ronald Reagan was president and the two of them got the credit for saving Social Security and stabilizing the federal budget with biggest-ever tax increases.
Sen. Kassebaum was the first woman to win a senate seat on her own. She won important reforms in health care and was known for her ability to work with Democrats as well as Republicans. No one, before or after, won succeeding terms by such enormous margins.
Sen. Pearson was a leader on foreign policy and shied away from political ideologies.
For almost all of those past 20 years — and much longer into the past — Kansas sent at least one Democrat to Congress. All of them over the past 40 years were moderates, not ideologues.
The point in reviewing this history is that all of those moderate Republicans and Democrats were elected by the people of Kansas — some within the past few years. It is therefore reasonable to believe — and fervently to hope — the current crop of far right ideologues is an aberration.
An alternative explanation is that Kansans didn’t know what they were doing for all of those years when they kept sending Bob Dole, Nancy Kassebaum and Jim Pearson to Washington and electing the likes of the Dockings and Kathleen Sebelius to the governor’s chair.
Or maybe Kansans fell into a Tea Party trance in 2010 and will wake up only if this administration, or the next, determined to govern, grabs the Kansas delegation’s attention by yanking funding for the billion dollar animal and crop science center at Manhattan or helps balance its budget by killing farm subsidies and ending the subsidy for ethanol — as openers.
In the meantime, focus on this sobering fact: whatever happens, Kansans did it to themselves.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
