The great Kansas experiment continues...

[GMDino]

Had to dredge up this zombie thread due to some new activity:

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/08/03/3804852/kansas-legislature-primary-brownback/

Quote:After giving Gov. Sam Brownback ® a free hand to turn Kansas into a science lab for hard-right policy experiments for more than five disastrous years, voters finally yanked the leash Tuesday night. At least 11 separate conservative members of the legislature lost their primaries to more moderate Republicans in the state, with a number of contests still too close to call with confidence.


While the wave won’t unlock the statehouse doors for Democrats, who are dramatically outnumbered in both House and Senate, the primaries signal that voters share the frustration that some Kansas Republicans have begun to voice with Brownback’s unbreakable commitment to trickle-down economic policies that have left Kansas so insolvent it can’t pay for a basic public education system.

The change will be most sweeping in the 40-seat Senate, where there are currently four Republicans for every Democrat. A full quarter of seats there will be filled with a more moderate butt next year. Conservatives lost 10 out of the 16 state Senate primaries the party ran Tuesday night.



Kansas Uses Sex Toy Auction To Help Close Budget Gap
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Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce headlines the 2017 departures list. Bruce lost to Ed Berger by a roughly 1,500-vote margin -- or 14 percentage points in a small district where many Democrats had re-registered as Republicans to help defeat him.

Berger spent three decades running a local community college before announcing his run in 2015. Bruce, by contrast, has worked in politics for decades and held office himself since 2005.

Brownback lost five other Senate allies in Tuesday’s primaries in addition to his Majority Leader. A special education administrator named Bruce Givens beat Sen. Forrest Givens, “one of the most conservative” people in the legislature.

Kansas conservatives got bloodied despite large cash expenditures from their allies. Brownback himself dropped $100,000 on various races and the state Chamber of Commerce spent another $300,000 to boost many of the men and women who lost Tuesday night.

In the 125-seat House, six out of 97 sitting Republican members lost their primary. Five of those were conservatives in the relatively well-off suburbs of Kansas City “where voters have cherished good public schools for decades,” the Topeka Capital-Journal notes.


Kansas Supreme Court Orders Lawmakers To Fix School Funding That's Biased Against Poor Districts
[url=http://thinkprogress.org/education/2016/02/17/3750219/kansas-supreme-court-school-funding/]
Brownback’s tax policies have ruined Kansas’ finances from root to branch, creating a nearly billion-dollar budget hole across all state services. But his experiment with eliminating all income taxes for anyone who decides to file as a small business hit schools hardest.

The state was already underfunding education before the former U.S. Senator lobbed a grenade into the balance sheet.

After Brownback’s cuts, lawmakers careened from one unconstitutional solution to another while school employees scrambled to keep the lights on. In some districts, school nurses were forced to replace ice packs with frozen sponges because of budget cuts.