Alan Cobb of Americans for Prosperity-Kansas made an excellent point on Thursday’s Opinion pages: that taxpayers deserve to know how much taxpayer-funded cities, counties and school districts pay to directly lobby leaders in Topeka. But it’s pretty rich for Americans for Prosperity to be grandstanding about an issue of openness in government, given its exploitation of weak state laws allowing it to spend lavishly to influence voting, lawmaking and policymaking without any disclosure of its own backers and expenditures. Yes, AFP’s issue is public dollars. But when leaders and citizens are being lobbied by anybody to act a certain way, they need to be able to consider the source. That necessitates fuller disclosure, which Kansans aren’t getting in the case of AFP and other issue-advocacy groups.
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