University officials are up in arms about a bill that would effectively force them to allow students and others to carry concealed guns on campuses. The bill by state Rep. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona, would allow the state’s public universities, community colleges and technical schools — as well as other state or municipal facilities, including mental health centers and court buildings — to prohibit conceal-and-carry permit holders from bringing guns on campus only if the schools have metal detectors in their buildings or other costly security measures.
“We are hurtling irreversibly toward a budgetary crack-up that will generate the mother of all crises in global bond and currency markets,” wrote David Stockman, who was a former budget director for President Reagan. Stockman places much of the blame on the supply-side movement that he led under Reagan, which claimed that “deficits disappear on their own if doused with enough economic growth from tax cuts and deregulation.” The consequence of the GOP abandoning its fiscal responsibility, Stockman wrote, was that “the nation’s finances have succumbed to the raw, parochial imperatives of organized lobbies and hometown industry. These primal political forces now heap fiscal largesse on clunker cars, random homebuyers, farm-belt ethanol plants and Wall Street bankers with bipartisan equanimity.”
The Kansas Ethics Commission issued an opinion last month that the retention elections for Kansas Supreme Court justices are not governed by the Kansas Campaign Finance Act, because the Kansas statute defining state offices doesn’t specifically list Kansas Supreme Court justices (though it does list district judges). That means corporations and special interest groups — such as the anti-abortion organization Kansans for Life — can spend whatever amounts of money they want to support or try to oust Kansas justices, and they don’t have to disclose to voters who they are or report where they got their money, as they have to do for other state elections. How is that good for democracy or an independent judiciary?
