Kansas Chamber hosts candidate forum as general election heats up
BY: TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Second congressional district candidate Derek Schmidt said this could be a moment in American history when Congress could effectively push back against explosive growth in federal regulation.
Schmidt, a former Kansas attorney general who won the Republican nomination for the open seat, said serious people didn’t argue for elimination of federal agencies or for an end to government regulation. However, he said recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions throttling power of the federal bureaucracy presented an opportunity for Congress to take action to contain power of unelected officials in Washington, D.C.
“Here’s the bottom line: There is a moment to deal with this over-regulation problem that I think is enormous. I hear it everywhere I go in the 2nd District. Took us generations to get it. It’s not going to be headline-grabbing. It’s going to be down in the weeds, roll up your sleeves, do the dirty work of oversight,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt took part in a Kansas Chamber candidate forum Wednesday along with five other major party candidates for Congress. All four GOP nominees and two of four Democratic Party nominees participated in the question-and-answer program. U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the 3rd District Democrat, didn’t attend. Nor did the Democrat running against U.S. Rep. Ron Estes of the 4th District in Wichita. Libertarian Party candidates for Congress didn’t take part.
Former U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, who captured the Democratic nomination in the 2nd District of eastern Kansas, spoke before her rival Schmidt closed out the event. But Boyda also argued the nation could no longer let fester a persistent problem — the relentless partisanship and division damaging the nation.
“We have so much broken trust. We are so divided,” said Boyda, who cast herself as a political centrist. “I can get the right and the left to speak to each other. That’s just what I’ve been about for 20 years.”
Boyda told members of the Kansas Chamber in the audience that they wouldn’t be fulfilling their roles if they didn’t put pressure on the Kansas congressional delegation to work in a bipartisan manner on behalf of Kansans. She made her point personal, suggesting U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, a Salina Republican who serves the 1st District, had to find common ground with Democrats in a quest to improve the lives of Kansans.
“Tracey, I expect you to work with me. I expect you to work together, and very visibly. And it will cost you politically and it will cost me,” she said.
Mann frets about hospitals
Mann, who easily won the 1st District’s GOP nomination, said his attention was focused on underhanded acts by China, the $35 trillion U.S. federal debt and the nation’s drift away from fundamental values of “faith, family and hard work, personal responsibility.” He said the federal government had to create a safe national border and place emphasis on “innovation and not regulation.”
“We have a lot of work to do to get this country back on track,” said Mann, who serves a district ranking No. 3 nationally in terms of agriculture commerce. “I’ve been very frustrated, very vocal with this (Biden) administration’s lack of focus on trade. We’ve got to think about who should our trading partners be in 2040 and 2050, and working to build those relationships today to be less beholden to China and other countries that wish us ill.”
Mann said the Big First included 60 of the state’s 105 counties, and there were more hospitals — 58 — in his U.S. House district than any other district in Congress.
“In the western part of the state,” Mann said, “our hospitals are struggling. This is a problem today. It’s about to become a huge problem.”
He didn’t endorse expansion of eligibility for Medicaid in Kansas, which would add more than 100,000 lower-income people to the joint federal-state health care program and unleash hundreds of millions of dollars annually in federal funding for preventive health care that would have an impact on the bottom line of hospitals. The congressman did argue against the federal government imposing staff mandates on rural hospitals.
First District Democratic nominee Paul Buskirk, who worked for decades in academic counseling of students at University of Kansas, said his conversations with registered Republicans, Democrats and independents revealed deep frustration with the inability of Congress to do its fundamental job.
“They’ve lost sight of that call to service,” Buskirk said. “Politicians tell us what we want to hear. Leaders tell us what we need to know.”
Buskirk said the most important business issue of 2024 was the pledge by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to identify, arrest and deport everyone not legally in the United States. He said one estimate put the number of people living without proper documentation in Kansas at 62,000, but he speculated the total could be twice that figure. He said withdrawing thousands of immigrants from the state’s labor force would cause an economic calamity, especially in the southwest Kansas livestock and meatpacking industry.
“The leader of that (GOP) party believes that they can create more unity out of finding an enemy,” he said. “That could not be more ludicrous.”
‘Amnesty is not a solution’
Physician Prasanth Reddy, the Republican nominee in the 3rd District, said his experience immigrating to the United States from India as a child left him “very much pro-immigration.” He’s running against Davids, the incumbent.
“Immigrants are the driving engine of this country, right? We are a melting pot,” he said. “The question is: What’s the right policy? The folks who are doing it the right way (legally) are being punished, and we’re letting people kind of jump in line. We got to do better right now for the needs of this country. Work programs, right? Amnesty is not a solution. Geographic convenience shouldn’t be a moral argument for amnest either.”
Estes, the 4th District incumbent, said he filed to run for another two-year term because he was frustrated with the surging federal debt and excessive annual overspending. He said Congress had to make difficult decisions about expenditures on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.
“At the spending level that we’re at right now, one out of every four dollars that the federal government spends is borrowed. That equates to about $80,000 a second that is being borrowed. We’re borrowing more than the median income of a Kansas household,” he said.