Wichita got a great, well-timed boost with today’s news that McConnell Air Force Base will be the main active-duty operating base for the KC-46A tankers, emerging the winner in the 54-base field. McConnell also was in the running to become a formal training base for the new tankers, a job won by Altus, Okla. But McConnell got what it wanted most with the Air Force’s decision, meaning it can expect to receive 36 new tankers in 2016 and the jobs and economic benefits of hosting them. That’s the perfect role for McConnell, which is currently the world’s largest tanker base, with 62 KC-135s, and the home of the Air Force’s 22nd Air Refueling Wing and the Air Force Reserves’ 931st Air Refueling Group. So even though Boeing Wichita won’t help build the tankers after all, due to Boeing’s decision to leave town by the end of this year, many of those planes will end up calling Wichita home. As Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, said in a statement: “We’re thrilled that McConnell AFB has been recognized as an indispensable part of America’s defenses and excited about the opportunities this creates for the rest of Kansas.” Congratulations and thanks to all who fought for and won this exciting new role for McConnell and Wichita.
Good for Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., for helping break the long political stalemate over the four vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by announcing his support Wednesday for President Obama’s nomination of Sri Srinivasan (in photo), who grew up in Lawrence and currently is principal deputy solicitor general. “I have found Sri to be a highly qualified candidate with a distinguished career in the private sector and in the Departments of Justice of the Bush and Obama administrations,” Moran said in a statement. “Srinivasan is one of Kansas’ most accomplished legal minds and among the nation’s leading appellate lawyers.” Srinivasan won unanimous approval Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee; his nomination now goes to the full Senate.
Good for Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, for trying to lower costs and increase innovation in the general aviation industry. Pompeo and four other lawmakers have introduced the Light Aircraft Revitalization Act, which would implement regulatory changes recommended by a Federal Aviation Administration committee of aviation authorities and industry representatives. Congress needs to review these recommendations to make sure they wouldn’t compromise safety. But Pompeo contends that the slow and burdensome certification process keeps products out of the market that could actually improve safety.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was one of only 27 senators to vote Monday against the Internet sales tax bill. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan, missed the vote because of speaking commitment but supports the measure. As Moran noted earlier, the bill is about leveling the playing field between online retailers and brick-and-mortar vendors. States also lost $23 billion in sales tax collections last year on out-of-state Internet, catalog and mail order sales, according to a study by the National Conference of State Legislatures. The bill faces tougher odds in the House, where many lawmakers are afraid to vote for anything that might be considered a tax increase. But as Moran has said, “The legislation will not impose a new tax on the Internet or anyone. It will, however, protect small businesses and empower states with the ability to control fiscal policy as they see fit.” The Kansas House delegation should back
Bryan Robert Whitney is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2014 District 1 congressional race against Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, the Hutchinson News reported. In addition to Huelskamp’s campaign war chest of more than $500,000 and the large GOP advantage in voter registrations, Whitney faces another challenge: He lives in Wichita, which is in District 4. The U.S. Constitution allows Whitney to run for any Congressional seat in the state, as long as he lives in the state. He grew up in District 1, graduating from Syracuse High School, and plans to move back to the district in 2015 after his wife graduates from the University of Kansas Medical School in Wichita. But Whitney acknowledged that not living in the district during the campaign “will be difficult.”
Good for Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., for leading an effort to provide more oversight of pharmacy compounding, which now is mostly unregulated. Roberts has been working for more than 10 years to strengthen regulations regarding the mixing of medications, but the issue received more urgency after dozens of people died last year from an outbreak of spinal meningitis linked to contaminated steroid injections prepared by a compounding company in Massachusetts. “It really is unfortunate that 53 people have to die and 700 get sick before we have the will to do this,” Roberts said. Though Roberts is normally leery of more regulations, he recognizes that this is needed for public safety. “We just have to get it done,” he said. He’s right.
The professionals at the Kansas State Department of Education have invested significant time and money in helping develop the Common Core standards, a multistate effort to align standards and progress measures on English and math. And it looks like the standards may escape a legislative attempt to scrap them in Kansas. But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was among nine GOP senators who signed a letter last week asking for language in an appropriations bill that would bar the use of funds to develop, implement or evaluate state-level education standards. Also last week, Kansas Reps. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, Kevin Yoder, R-Overland Park, and Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, and 31 other House members sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan complaining that the “burdensome and misguided” Common Core standards “fail to address the specific needs of our states,” and raised concerns about how the federal government collects and distributes student data. The Common Core standards have been adopted by 45 states, including Kansas, and the District of Columbia, and officials have said it would cost Kansas $30 million to develop other standards and tests at this point.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., is tired of the protracted battle over the planned memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower (in photo) in Washington, D.C. Congress authorized the construction of the memorial in 1999, and its design was approved in 2010. But some Eisenhower family members oppose the design, as do some other critics who want a more classical memorial. Roberts, who is a member of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s executive board, approves of the design and wants to start construction, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. “It’s a highly deserved memorial,” Roberts said. “It fits Eisenhower’s life and what he would have wanted.” Carl Reddel, executive director of the memorial commission, was in Wichita last week trying to generate support for the project, noting how the design highlights Ike’s Kansas roots. Roberts said that it is time to move on the project, “or else we’ll see another decade go by without an Eisenhower memorial.”
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., issued no formal statement about his April 17 vote against bipartisan legislation meant to strengthen background checks for gun buyers. But he told the Baldwin City Rotary Club this week that he didn’t think the measure would have prevented criminals from getting guns and he feared it would have burdened law-abiding citizens. “I have no problem with anyone who is in the business of selling firearms having to do a background check on whomever they sell to. The question is, how do you get to the dad handing the gun off to the son, which is not what we’re after,” said Moran, as quoted by the Baldwin City Signal. (The proposed legislation would not have affected a gun transfer from father to son.) Moran also spoke of the need for more emphasis on mental health at the state and federal levels, calling community-based programs “woefully underfunded.”
According to a Huffington Post article about the 61 of 82 vacant federal judge slots in the U.S. that don’t even have nominees, President Obama “put forward fewer nominees at the end of his first term than his two predecessors. But a closer look at data on judicial nominees, and conversations with people involved in the nomination process, reveals the bigger problem is Republican senators quietly refusing to recommend potential judges in the first place.” Two of those mentioned GOP senators are Kansas’ Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts, “neither of whom has put forward nominees for a district court slot there that has been vacant for 1,246 days.” When Huffington Post asked the GOP senators mentioned in the article why they hadn’t submitted names for long-vacant seats, only one responded, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
The proof of Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran’s effectiveness as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee won’t be known until the midterm elections in November 2014. But it doesn’t reflect well on Moran that the NRSC raised $6.9 million in the first three months of the year, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $13.7 million. According to the Hill newspaper, the NRSC was slow to hire fundraising staff after Moran took over in November. “We’re confident we’ll have the resources needed to win in 2014,” NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen told the Hill.
Praise is due Sens. Pat Roberts (left) and Jerry Moran (right), R-Kan., for trying again to do something about the 11 natural-gas storage fields in the state that have gone without government inspection since a 2009 court ruling. Like their similar 2011 bill, the latest legislation should be a no-brainer – “allowing states to step in when the federal government fails to monitor natural-gas storage sites,” as Moran said in a statement. Anyone wondering why this matters should check with residents in Hutchinson, the site of a 2001 tragedy in which migrating gas underground caused explosions that killed one couple and destroyed a block of downtown businesses. The longer Congress waits to respond to the federal government’s inaction and to restore the state’s authority to regulate interstate gas storage, the greater the risk of more explosions.
At least Congress proved last week that it still has the ability to pass legislation when a crisis arises, in this case the sequestration cuts that prompted furloughs of air traffic controllers and many flight delays. Both chambers quickly passed a bill giving the Obama administration flexibility to move money among Transportation Department accounts. As Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., a dogged critic of the Federal Aviation Administration’s sequestration decisions, said Thursday night: “This bipartisan solution is a victory for air travelers and communities nationwide.” Still, it was hard to disagree with comments along the lines of this tweet: “Sequester Head Start classrooms, deny cancer patients, reduce Meals on Wheels, but don’t delay a senator’s flight!”
“We got rid of the wind production tax credit. I worked really hard on it. We got rid of it for 23 hours. Crowning achievement of my time here in Congress so far. And then in the Senate, they stuck it back in, in the dark of night.” – Rep. Mike Pompeo (in photo), R-Wichita, at a Politico forum on energy and taxes
“There was a bright light in the room.” – Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., sparring with Pompeo
“An alien who has a terrorist background can call himself ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ without having to prove that that is his real name.” – Secretary of State Kris Kobach, arguing against an immigration-reform bill last week in Senate Judiciary Committee testimony
“The testimony had nothing to do with this office.” – Kobach spokeswoman Kay Curtis, after Sunflower Community Action asked in a news release, “Has Anyone Seen Kris Kobach in Kansas?”
“If I do vote for it, it would end my political career. Politics in this state are brutal.” – Rep. Don Hineman, R-Dighton, at a Garden City forum, saying he won’t support the governor’s effort to retain the higher sales-tax rate
No surprise that Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, starred in another clash of the House Republicans – or “Fight Club on the Hill,” as the headline of Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post dubbed it. Huelskamp and others rebelled this week against an effort by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to help people with pre-existing health problems get insurance, which Huelskamp dismissed as “expanding Obamacare.” As part of a “Making Life Work” agenda meant to move the party “beyond the fiscal debate,” Cantor also has sought changes to comp and flex time and worker retraining. But he shelved the insurance bill Wednesday. Huelskamp said: “In August, we’re going to hit the debt ceiling and we can’t avoid that. We’re running out of money, and as Republicans, we have to get ready now and talk about the vision of what we have to do to get our country on a 10-year plan to balance the budget,” adding that theme “is the kind of message that gets lost in little things.” Milbank responded: “So helping workers and the sick are ‘little things’? Cantor can forget warm and fuzzy for now; he has enough trouble just making his colleagues sound humane.”
Despite being publicly rebuffed by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., on a December vote on the United Nations treaty on the rights of the disabled, former Sen. Bob Dole (in photo) endorsed Roberts’ re-election bid next year. “No one fights harder or more effectively for the people of Kansas than Pat Roberts,” Dole said in a statement Wednesday. “He never stops working for our values and our concerns.” Roberts also has been endorsed by the state’s four members of the U.S. House as well as five statewide officeholders.
“We don’t have the money to keep the towers open. We simply don’t,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a House committee last week. But the fight against LaHood’s plan to close 149 air-traffic control towers is strong and bipartisan, spanning the likes of Sen. Jerry Moran (in photo), R-Kan., and actor and pilot Harrison Ford. “General aviation is more than guys in corporate aircraft,” Ford told Bloomberg. “It’s police and fire services. It’s EMS. It’s a guy flying his fish to market. It’s tractor parts getting to a rancher or a farmer. It’s a broad range of businesses that are affected.” On the administration’s plan, Moran told Bloomberg: “There’s a rural aspect to it that certainly catches my attention, but it’s more a belief in government doing its job responsibly as compared to seat of the pants.”
“I think we’re all Bostonians this week.” – Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn (in photo), at last week’s commission meeting
“It just reminds you that with public service comes the real possibility that you could be a target.” – Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., about the letters possibly contaminated with ricin that were sent to President Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.
“Imitation is the finest form of flattery.” – Mike O’Neal, president and CEO of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, on Missouri legislation to slash individual income taxes on business income
Is there a bigger disconnect between Congress and the public than on expanding background checks for gun purchases? National polls show 90 percent or more of the public support expanded checks. Locally, 84 percent support requiring every gun buyer to go through a criminal background check, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for KWCH, Channel 12. Yet a carefully crafted measure failed in the U.S. Senate Wednesday, with Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran among those voting against it.
Is there more Congress can do to respond to the Boston Marathon bombings? “I don’t think so,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday, while noting that law enforcement officials “are going to have all the resources they need.” Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, predicted that cuts to police departments will become a big issue in the months ahead, and suggested the U.S. can better reallocate resources to reflect modern warfare. “Last month, the last M1 tank departed Europe for the first time since D-Day,” Pompeo told Politico. “We probably should’ve done that 10 years ago – we’re slow to change to the evolving threats.”
“Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is on a glide path toward re-election, having won endorsements from each of the state’s four members of Congress as well as five statewide officeholders,” wrote Kansas City Star columnist Steve Kraske. “Oh, did I mention he’s got $1.1 million in the bank, too?” Kraske also credited Gov. Sam Brownback and his political operative, David Kensinger, with “the solidarity the Kansas GOP is maintaining in the wake of its historic clean-sweep election of 2010. The temptation to break rank and run for Senate or governor, and trigger a primary, is extraordinary given the number of down-ballot officeholders with oversized ambitions,” he wrote. “But so far, the dam is holding.” Of course, the newly powerless moderate Republicans are angry and restless, and will see their only statewide officeholder, Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, retire after 2014. The GOP primary for that job will feature at least three conservatives, including repeat candidate David Powell of El Dorado.
“I don’t know what we’ve done to Mother Nature, but she sure hasn’t been very kind to us.” – Sen. Pat Roberts (in photo), R-Kan., in a Senate floor speech about strengthening crop insurance
“What Republicans need to do is get off their rear ends and go out, outside of Washington, and talk about what they’re for.” – Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, in a radio interview in which he also dismissed party outreach to “the so-called Hispanic voter”
“We all find ways to entertain ourselves late at night.” – Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, R-Hutchinson, on the House’s 0-120 vote against the Senate tax plan and its extension of the higher sales-tax rate
“It’s just craziness to think that accounting maneuvers would fool the court and turn an apple into an orange.” – John Robb, an attorney for school districts in their lawsuit against the state, on a House-passed bill that would newly count a portion of local-option budget funding as base state aid
“I would like to see the highest-paid person in every school be a teacher.” – Rep. Ron Highland, R-Wamego, saying districts can use money more wisely
Never mind that Wichita is a long way from an ocean. It was a proud moment to learn last week that a U.S. Navy warship will again bear the city’s name and safeguard the nation’s liberty around the world. Lockheed Martin’s construction of the new USS Wichita should begin in the next couple of years in Wisconsin, according to the office of Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita. The littoral combat ship, a kind of fast and maneuverable craft designed for combat close to shorelines, will be the third Navy ship named after Wichita and the first since 1993. As Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said: “Two great ships have already carried Wichita’s namesake, and its re-selection is a real honor for the city and for Kansas.”
Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts were quick to blast the budget blueprint that President Obama released Wednesday. Though Moran acknowledged that Obama proposed some entitlement reforms (a move that has upset many Democrats), he complained that the blueprint “is far from the serious, reform-oriented budget our country so desperately needs.” And after applauding the proposed funding for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Roberts said he was “very disappointed that the budget once again includes a misguided proposal to increase taxes on the business aviation industry” and that the blueprint “is not the right formula to grow jobs and create stability in the economy.” Roberts’ statement came a few hours before he joined 11 other GOP senators and Obama at the White House for a nearly three-hour dinner of steak, salad, sauteed vegetables and coconut sorbet.
As President Obama steps up his call for an up-or-down vote on gun restrictions in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage, Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts and 11 other Senate Republicans are threatening to filibuster any such vote. The senators, led by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a letter Monday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that they “intend to oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.” But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he didn’t understand the filibuster threat: “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.” McCain asked: “What are we afraid of?”
Wichita got a great, well-timed boost with today’s news that McConnell Air Force Base will be the main active-duty operating base for the KC-46A tankers, emerging the winner in the 54-base field. McConnell also was in the running to become a formal training base for the new tankers, a job won by Altus, Okla. But McConnell got what it wanted most with the Air Force’s decision, meaning it can expect to receive 36 new tankers in 2016 and the jobs and economic benefits of hosting them. That’s the perfect role for McConnell, which is currently the world’s largest tanker base, with 62 KC-135s, and the home of the Air Force’s 22nd Air Refueling Wing and the Air Force Reserves’ 931st Air Refueling Group. So even though Boeing Wichita won’t help build the tankers after all, due to Boeing’s decision to leave town by the end of this year, many of those planes will end up calling Wichita home. As Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, said in a statement: “We’re thrilled that McConnell AFB has been recognized as an indispensable part of America’s defenses and excited about the opportunities this creates for the rest of Kansas.” Congratulations and thanks to all who fought for and won this exciting new role for McConnell and Wichita.
