NORLIN: Topeka's dysfunction junction

Submitted by David Norlin
Salina

The Kansas legislature is so busy saving the unborn, it seems unable to save itself.  Or for that matter, us.   

A recent visit and news reports provide a shocking picture of a body supposedly acting for all of the people.   Yet, not.  

The newly-remodeled 325-million-dollar Capitol floats above Topeka’s horizon, a shining beacon, inside and out, an Ark finally floating above Brownback-deficit flood waters.  But without direction -- or if there is one, the wrong one.  High above the Capitol, Ad Astra points his arrow toward the stars—stars evidently lost to navigators inside the ship.

The dysfunctional family at the helm holds its deathgrip on its shuddering rudder, without a glance at compass or navigational system.  Titanic obstacles to good governance are ignored, full fossil-fuel steam ahead, and damn the consequences.  

Not all legislators are part of this dysfunction.  As one of the conscientious ones confided, “I don’t have energy anymore.  This place is brutal, and I’m out of here.”  Many are still game, however, putting forth reasoned, caring letters to their constituents.   They resist Republican committee chairs and House and Senate leadership, who operate essentially unchecked, like Lords over medieval machinery.

But those conscientious souls who focus on legislation other than amending the Constitution, who vote against the dysfunctional rudder-holders, are bullied and threatened with removal from the KS ledge.

These legislators face smug thuggery, face-to-face threats of million-buck budgets to defeat them unless they toe the (party) line. Threats mainly from “Kansans for Life” or the Kansas Chamber of Commerce.  

This is made even worse by religious zealots, most visibly the Catholic hierarchy, who hold a gun to the head of Medicaid expansion—unless their demands for church/state control of  women’s reproductive lives are written into the Constitution.  And we still claim slavery is a thing of the past?

In its most blatant exhibition of hypocrisy, the Bishopric holds forth against “unelected” justices and judges, ignoring the fact that they themselves, in the words of a prominent Catholic friend, are selected by “an unelected procedure from the bowels of an unaccountable institution.”

They, and the rest of the anti-choice Mob, loudly proclaim their desire for the ‘will of the people” to prevail.   What to make, then, of their insistence that the “People’s” vote be held in August’s not-very- august primary, where a dismally low number of people typically vote, many of those likely followers of the Hypocrisy Hierarchy?   

Without Medicaid Expansion, 130,000 Kansans face great difficulty and even death.  That’s bad enough, but with the Hypocrisy Hierarchy holding other progressive legislation hostage, the rest of us (nearly 3 million) suffer, too.  

The pro-pregnancy, anti-choice Mob evidently feel just fine in their 325-million-dollar Ark.  But the rest of us are drowning.  To get their attention, you might be better off returning  to the womb.  

Or, you could just vote them out.