Recent Kansas editorials

The Kansas City Star, Sept. 12

Kansans who listened to any part of Friday’s meeting of the State Finance Council first would be amazed, then embarrassed, and finally outraged about the way their government is run.

The council convened by telephone to discuss Gov. Laura Kelly’s request to extend the state’s declaration of a COVID-19 emergency beyond Sept. 15. Kelly said she needed the extension to qualify for federal pandemic assistance and to protect the operation of the state’s courts.

That seems simple enough. Everyone on the council, Republicans and Democrats, agreed the declaration needed to be extended, and the finance council needed to do it.

But Republican leadership insisted on explicit language in the resolution prohibiting Kelly from closing Kansas businesses in the coming weeks. Kelly said she had no intention of shutting anyone’s doors, but they wanted it in writing.

Chaos. Members accused one another of bad faith, playing politics, shutting off debate. Motions were made, and votes were cast. Lawyers offered language, which was rejected. Republicans wanted Kelly to surrender the power their own bill had given her, and she wasn’t interested.

“There’s absolutely no need to do it,” Kelly said, later adding, “Unless some mushroom cloud of coronavirus should spread all across the state of Kansas, I would have absolutely no intention of putting in a statewide stay-home order.”

Republicans were unsatisfied. “It’s time for the gamesmanship to end, governor,” state Rep. Dan Hawkins said, without a hint of irony, or self-awareness.

“Everyone wants to stop this virus,” state Sen. Susan Wagle said, which may be true but misses the point. Wagle and her GOP colleagues were far more interested in stopping Laura Kelly than in stopping COVID-19.

Finally, in the afternoon, reason prevailed. Kelly agreed to formally say she did not intend to use her authority to close any businesses, and everyone climbed on board.

Kansans will be better protected by the extended declaration. But there will be no more important task for the newly-elected Legislature in 2021 than to rewrite the laws addressing the governor’s powers and responsibilities when dealing with emergencies like COVID-19.

It’s now clear that the laws written this June addressing those powers were slapdash efforts. Any governor - in fact, all governors - must have broad powers to address dangers such as a global epidemic. Kansas law is confusing and restrictive, which in turn pushes the state to the edge of crisis about every 30 days. That has to be fixed.

Legislative oversight is important, of course. And exercising that oversight when the full Legislature is out of session is difficult. That’s why the finance council is involved.

But the structure assumes, wrongly, that members of the council will operate in good faith to review the governor’s decisions. They have not.

Why have we not seen such brinkmanship in Missouri, where Gov. Mike Parson has exercised similar executive powers? That’s easy: The same party controls the legislature and the governor’s mansion. When different parties control different branches, you get the mess we now see in Kansas.

Kansas lawmakers must revisit the state’s emergency response structure. It should extend the time a governor can issue emergency orders and require the full Legislature to convene for debate over those orders if necessary.

If that seems clunky, so be it. The people’s business should not be held hostage to one or two legislative leaders who have political reasons for obstructionism. The health of Kansans and their government is at stake.

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The Topeka Capital-Journal, Sept. 8

The United States has a strong and reliable voting system. Administered by the states, elections throughout our country have traditionally been quick and reliable.

These are important points to state outright, and loudly. We do not - and have not - faced widespread voter fraud. It does not occur during in-person voting, and it does not occur in states that have adopted universal mail-in balloting, either.

So ignore our president’s claims of rigging or dishonest elections. He’s lying, effortlessly and with no concerns for the potential damage to democracy.

What’s more, ignore his calls to vote twice.

For some reason, President Trump has decided to tell his supporters to vote by mail and then, on Election Day, head to their polling places. If their mail-in ballots aren’t recorded, he said, they should vote again.

There’s only one problem with that: Double voting is a crime. States have different rules on when mail-in votes might be counted, so depending on the state the president might inspire an untold number of people to actively break election law.

As we’ve said before, and we’ll no doubt say again: This is unacceptable.

Trump has no interest in an accurate count, of course. Republican operatives have begun to acknowledge that there’s no way he will actually win the popular vote. After all, in 2016, he lost that tally to Hillary Clinton by some 3 million ballots. No, what the president cares about is sowing chaos in a small number of swing states - to claim to his followers that he was cheated out of a victory that was rightly his.

It’s not difficult to figure out, not if you’ve followed Trump for the past several years. His bottomless need for affirmation outweigh any concern for voters or the republic.

Trump’s spokespeople deny that he has any intent to encourage double voting. He’s merely interested in ensuring an accurate count, they say. But it’s pretty interesting that ensuring an accurate count, to our president, means encouraging people to break the law.

As we’ve seen time and again, our president sees the world entirely through the prism of his own self-interest. It has proved toxic to our nation and our political dialogue. It has proved catastrophic as COVID-19 spread. We can’t allow that naked self-interest to overwhelm our free and fair elections.

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The Lawrence Journal-World, Sept. 9

Cancer is not much good for anything, but it can be useful today in helping understand the stain Donald Trump has left on the presidency.

Unlike COVID-19 - a disease still in its infancy - almost all of us personally know someone who has died from cancer. So, it is easy enough to imagine sitting in an exam room with a cancer doctor. The doctor knows that you have cancer, but he doesn’t want you to panic, so he decides to not tell you that you have cancer. Or, maybe, he does acknowledge that you have cancer, but he decides - again, for your sake - to not tell you the true mortality rate for your particular type of cancer.

Is that any way for a doctor to act? Of course not. It violates an oath, but, more importantly, it violates the standards of human decency.

The president violated those standards as well when earlier this year he repeatedly and intentionally provided the public with such dubious information about the dangers of COVID-19.

He said he did so because he didn’t want to create a panic. That simply is not a credible explanation. If the president can’t figure out how to explain the dangers of a disease that has a U.S. mortality rate of about 3% without creating a national panic, then that should be a prime example of his unfitness for the job.

For heaven’s sake, COVID-19 is not an asteroid hurtling toward earth leaving the human race with no hope for survival. Even an unskilled communicator can figure out how to pass along the basic safety tips and guidance for reducing your chances of contracting the disease, while also providing hope and assurance that the American way of life is durable, adaptable and will return in full force when we certainly defeat this disease. COVID is not the end of America. The country has faced greater challenges before.

It should be worrisome that the president couldn’t figure out how to do that. Even if you are a supporter of the president, that should create worry. It was not that difficult of a task.

What also should worry everyone, including supporters of the president, is that he openly and repeatedly talked about how he was misleading the public about COVID, and he told all of this to a person whose job is to disseminate information to the public. On an audio recording. That is just a major breakdown in logic. If you are trying to not create a panic, why would you tell a reporter that this disease is really a lot more dangerous than you’ve ever told the public? If the chains of logic are working at all, you have to understand that the reporter simply is going to tell the public what you said, thus destroying your reason for hiding the information from the public in the first place.

As late night television host Jimmy Fallon said of Trump: “I’d say at this point, the dude needs to give himself some hush money.”

In all seriousness, though, there is reason to worry that the president’s mental acuity is in decline. Is there any Trump supporter who honestly thinks it was a good idea for the president to reveal this to Bob Woodward?

At this point, we can hope that two things come out of this presidential debacle. One, if there truly were people who were refusing to wear masks and take other simple precautions due to the words of Trump, hopefully they will take his true beliefs about the virus into consideration and change their ways. That’s not likely, but America still will prevail in this fight anyway. We will defeat COVID, but it will take longer and be more deadly than it should have been.

In some ways, the second prospect is more critical. Supporters of the president have a chance to simply say that on this point the president was wrong. That should not be a difficult statement. You don’t have to renounce everything the president has done. You don’t have to apologize for your vote. You don’t have to give up on the idea of “draining the swamp.”

All you have to do is say that people deserve to be treated better than that. All you have to acknowledge is a leader shouldn’t provide information to his followers that he knows puts them at greater risk of contracting a potentially fatal disease.

What the president did was indecent. Do not defend indecency. No act of loyalty should require that.