Splintered into conservative and far-right factions, the Kansas majority party is openly at war with itself over an $800 million, two-year budget deficit gnawed open by the tax cuts nobody wants to roll back. If they can't fill the hole by week's end – against long odds – furloughs of government employees will follow.
Then there's the high-stakes showdown between lawmakers and the state Supreme Court over disparate funding between rich and poor school districts, an unfortunate development in the state that prompted the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. The clash of political titans, spurred by power moves and score-settling, could trigger a constitutional crisis, and hinge on whether Republicans can fire the court and pack it with their allies.
Meanwhile, Brownback, who won re-election in a come-from-behind race last year, is an instant lame duck hobbled by job-approval numbers only Richard Nixon would envy. Since his second term swearing in, the governor has enacted a series of what critics call mean-spirited restrictions on welfare recipients, and national Democrats call him the poster boy of the majority party's war on the poor.
Brownback himself famously called Kansas' incoming, one-party rule a real-world experiment in fiscal and social policies. He and his allies wasted no time installing the supply-side economic idea that tax cuts will stimulate economic growth, a sure-fire, fiscally responsible way to grow the economy.
"Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy," Brownback wrote in a Wichita Eagle editorial in July 2012.
What followed, however, was an economic face-plant: growth flatlined, state revenue dried up and the conservative brain trust found itself on the business end of consecutive nine-figure deficits...
Read the entire U.S. News article "The Dysfunction of Oz"
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