Kansas’ moderate Republicans signal shift in GOP
Politicians joined with Dems to raise taxes, reject conservative governor’s platform of tax cuts
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Kansas was at the heart of the tea-party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results that GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.
Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many die-hard proponents of the tax cut had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.
“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people,” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.
Kansas’ moderate ascendancies may portend problems for Republicans in Washington, where many in the party, including President Donald Trump, are pushing to adopt federal tax policies similar to the ones Brownback has installed in Kansas. But while Brownback had hoped what he called Kansas’ “real-live experiment” in conservative economic policy would become a national model, it has instead become a cautionary example.
Brownback and his promised tax cuts would spur enough economic growth to keep the government well funded, but when that economic boom never materialized, state lawmakers faced perennial deficits and had to implement spending reductions to close the gap. And when they did, some lawmakers found that while promises to cut spending play well in a campaign, actually taking away the public services that spending pays for often proves far more unpopular.
That conclusion will be tested in the upcoming gubernatorial Republican primary, when representatives of the party’s more moderate and more conservative wings will square off to replace Brownback when his term expires.
Kris Kobach, Brownback’s secretary of state, who was once thought likely to join the Trump administration, entered the contest this week and is decrying the new increase. “It is time to drain the swamp in Topeka,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, borrowing a phrase from Trump.
“This state does not need more money, and the people of Kansas do not need to keep feeding the government monster with year after year of increased taxes,” Kobach told supporters in a speech announcing his candidacy. “Kansas does not have a revenue problem. Kansas has a spending problem.”
The state’s deep spending cuts to schools and programs aimed at helping the poor have been especially controversial. Michael Speer, a schools superintendent and business manager in Coffeyville says he previously voted for Brownback, but is now troubled by the changes forced on his profession.
“We’re trying to make all the money stretch as far as it can,” Speer said.
“I can no longer support him,” Speer said of Brownback.
The gubernatorial primary will involve competition for voters like Judith Deely. A registered Republican who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Deely said that she was never very interested in politics until she and parents at their local public school started to notice a shift.
The school increased its class sizes and scaled back gifted education. Teachers, worried about their wages and future, began fleeing the school system in Kansas City, Kan., for jobs across the state line in Missouri. Now she is an avid opponent of Brownback’s tax cuts.
“In 2016, enough people woke up and said ‘We have to fix this. The guys in office are refusing to fix this, and come on, the evidence is plain,’ ” she said. “I really don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, I just want someone reasonable.”
Meanwhile, Brownback’s remaining supporters have been quick to lambaste moderate Kansas Republicans for enacting what they have termed the largest tax increase in state history.
The return to more centrist policies could foreshadow trouble for Trump’s tax plan, which is based on the same concepts that guided Brownback’s overhaul beginning in 2012.
Trump has proposed slashing taxes for small businesses. Brownback exempted small-business income from taxation entirely, opening what analysts described as a loophole in which individuals represented themselves as small businesses to qualify for the tax break.
Trump has not issued a detailed proposal since taking office, but in April the White House released a one-page document on tax policy that reiterated these basic principles.
A plan put forward a year ago by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., contains some similar provisions. The resemblance points to the connections between Brownback and the conservative establishment in Washington. Before becoming a congressman himself, Ryan served on Brownback’s staff when the governor represented Kansas in the Senate.
Trump and Brownback have relied on the same advisers, including the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who famously laid out the principle of supply-side economics on a cocktail napkin. Laffer argued that excessive taxation could slow the economy by discouraging people from working. His signature theory was that the government, by cutting taxes, could encourage people to earn more, thereby maintaining or increasing overall tax revenue. Yet most economists believe that U.S. tax rates are already far too low to benefit from Laffer’s curve.
The tax cuts for the wealthy frequently advocated by Republican politicians are viewed unfavorably by many voters, polls show. The Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group, found that 57 percent of Americans nationally, including more than a third of Republicans, support increasing taxes on those earning at least $250,000 a year. By contrast, Brownback’s policies reduced them drastically.
Yet Dan Cox, the institute’s research director, said that Brownback’s defeat did not augur more victories for Republicans pursuing more moderate economic policies. He said Republican policymakers and their advisers around the country are likely to view the example of Kansas as a failure of implementation, rather than one of principle, and they will argue that Kansas’s experiment would have succeeded had the legislature reduced spending even more.
Moreover, Cox said, the business lobby remains more influential in the party than those who support centrist or populist points of view.
“Trump was supposed to upend that, but it looks like he’s not going to,” Cox said. “Despite the rebuke that conservative economic policy received in the last election, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to see the same thing happen on the national stage.”