The nonpartisan FactCheck.org website debunked the Kansas campaign mailers that are claiming incumbent state senators “refused to help stop Obamacare” by not putting the Kansas Health Care Freedom Amendment on the November ballot. The constitutional amendment would have declared “that no law can compel Kansans to buy health insurance or require them to pay a fine for lacking it,” the site said, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality in June. And Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, told FactCheck.org that “short of secession, there is nothing a state can do to stop the application of federal law.”
The May passage of the legislation slashing income taxes gave Gov. Sam Brownback bragging rights to say “I signed the largest tax cut in state history,” as he did in a commentary in the July 29 Eagle. That claim previously belonged to former Gov. Bill Graves, who recently campaigned in Wichita and other cities on behalf of moderate Republican state senators targeted for defeat by Brownback and his allies at the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity. Now, Graves quipped to a Wichita fundraiser crowd, he’s revised his biography to say, “I signed the largest responsible tax cut in the history of Kansas.”
It was good to see the Kansas Court of Appeals second a Sedgwick County District Court judge’s ruling that the Sedgwick County Commission had mishandled its 2010 vote to close part of 71st Street South. In this case, the commission was far too quick to vote to close the unpaved stretch of 71st Street South between 127th and 143rd Streets East at the request of a private airfield. Commissioners did so over the strenuous objections of Derby’s leaders and without fully considering how the closure would affect drivers and emergency response. Elected officials should be as reluctant to turn public land over to private developers as they are to seize private property for government use.
