COMMENTARY | A few weeks after its new Republican governor was caught using taxpayer money to attack a high school student for saying bad things about him on social media sites, Kansas is once again in the news.
According to a Washington Post article, the state’s tea party governor, Sam Brownback, has decided to begin an initiative to use the Sunflower State as the World’s Fair for what a limited government run on the movement’s ideal would look like: a place without art, with an education system likely to favor the wealthy, where Christianity is force-fed to the populace, along with a concerted effort to fight against tolerance of homosexuality.
Not to mention one whose agenda is driven by the whims of billionaires.
According to state and federal election records, Brownback, 55, has received at least $143,000 in support of his senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns from Koch Industries, an oil and energy company based in Wichita and tea party booster via their group, Americans for Prosperity.
Brownback appointed an Americans for Prosperity consultant as his budget director and made the wife of one its leaders his spokeswoman, making one wonder if the governor’s efforts at deregulation are directives of Koch Industries.
Brownback claims job creation as one of his motives, but since he’s taken office his policies have cost 2,050 Kansans their jobs.
Brownback’s tea party revolution has hammered the state’s art, education, and social services budgets, while transforming Kansas into an experiment of limited government that even citizens in one of the more historically Republican states is uneasy about.
Bill Kassebaum, a Republican former state representative voiced support for the revolution while at the same time reminding us that “people don’t realize the role government plays in their lives until it’s gone,” and that “they may not be happy with what’s left.”
Part of the governor’s massive cuts included taking $600,000 from a Head Start program in one of the state’s poorest counties to free up money to hire a Florida pastor to beef up his healthy marriage and fatherhood training initiative-a euphemistic assault of gay rights that would make Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann proud.
Brownback’s administration has also created the “Office of the Repealer” whose purpose is finding where the state’s laws and regulations — like ones that prevent an energy company from wanton pollution perhaps — can be slashed.
Brownback recently attempted to close nine of the state’s social services offices after earlier making Kansas the only state with no public arts budget.
Lynda Tyler, 48, a Wichita stockbroker and active tea party member said that while she hopes the cuts last a long time, she fears Brownback is using Kansas as a laboratory experiment for what could happen should a tea party darling become president.
Americans who recognize the role the federal government has in maintaining a decent quality of life and who’ve seen what happens when limited government policies fail to properly regulate the private sector, hope there’s never a tea party in the Oval Office.
Follow Phillip Warlove on Twitter: @WarloveRevolit