By Morgan Chilson, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Two Kansas medical professionals sat for an hour at an early morning committee hearing in mid-March, waiting their turn to speak out against a bill. One drove two hours to attend.
Neither got a chance to talk.
Instead, the committee only heard from proponents. Committee chairwoman Sen. Beverly Gossage, R-Eudora, said retired nurse Kelly Sommers and her colleague weren’t on the list to testify, even though Sommers has emails notifying the committee she would be there to speak in person.
“It was horrible. How do the same people, telling the same old stories, get all of the attention and nobody is talking about the opposition and why there is opposition,” said Sommers, former executive director of the Kansas State Nurses Association. “This is the first time that has ever happened to me.”
Republican leaders in the Legislature this year repeatedly ignored traditional legislative practices designed to solicit public input, taking away Kansans’ opportunities to be heard. The results, according to frustrated Democrats and advocates, are disenfranchised constituents and poorly written bills.
Announcing last-minute bill hearings. Taking action on bills that were not on the agenda. Using “gut-and-go” strategies to drop divisive legislation — such as the anti-trans “bathroom bill” — into a separate bill to avoid public hearings.
There is a reason the process of government is slow, said Rep. Alexis Simmons, a Topeka Democrat. Taking time allows legislators to read and study the bills, to talk to experts and to look at other examples of legislation nationally to consider unintended consequences.
The point of public input and debate is to find the holes in the legislation and fix them, Simmons said.
Protesting the “brazen offenses” of process isn’t a partisan issue, she said.
“I would argue they are literally democratic challenges. It’s bad for the state,” she said.
Public input isn’t required by legislative rules, said Rep. Susan Humphries, a Wichita Republican. She dismissed concerns Democrats raised on the floor about the bathroom bill.
“All the rules and procedures were followed. They might be distasteful to some, but they were followed,” she said.
Brittany Jones, president of the conservative Kansas Family Voice, said what happened this session wasn’t out of the ordinary, and like Gossage, she understands this is a legitimate part of the democratic process.
“There have been times where the process has been used against me and I didn’t like it, but I did recognize that that was a valid process,” she said. “And just because there’s a Republican supermajority doesn’t mean they are the supermajority that agrees with me.”
In talking with colleagues nationwide, Jones said, in some places only a handful of people are allowed to speak on bills. The Kansas Legislature generally does a good job at soliciting public input, she said.
“We have split the difference to some extent, where we do our best to accommodate as many as possible, but we’re also not going to let things get bogged down by hours and hours of people talking,” Jones said.
The Legislature doesn’t have rules against gut-and-go procedures — although Missouri and other states do — or specify that committee hearings must happen before a bill passes.
But when hearings don’t occur, it is difficult for advocates and dissenters to get organized and share input about the legislation’s effects, Kansas advocates said.
Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said steps to avoid public input aren’t unprecedented but “definitely” occurred more this session.
“I think the difference this year is that they’re using it more frequently and on higher-profile things than they used to,” he said. “It’s all just moving very, very quickly.”
Eliminating discussions between those with opposing viewpoints means legislators don’t hear from all sides and learn new perspectives before making up their minds, Kubic said.
“When you just short-circuit all of that, I do think it impoverishes the debate and it impoverishes our democracy, regardless of which side of the divide you may be on,” he said.
Rep. Dan Osman, D-Overland Park, called the bathroom bill “the worst bill” he’s ever seen in the Kansas Legislature, specifically pointing to the process Republicans used to pass it.
“It was done with one purpose and one purpose only — to ensure that the absolute least number of people were available as opponents to this bill and that they were unaware that there would even be a hearing,” Osman said.
Bills put on agendas at the last minute, or not at all, are especially difficult for the public, Kubic said.
“It gives you less time to prepare testimony that is accurate and compelling,” he said. “It gives you less time to interact with elected officials, to expose them to your perspective.”
Rabbi Moti Rieber, an activist and leader of Kansas Interfaith Action, complained on his personal Facebook page about lawmakers’ “chicanery” when they announced a last-minute hearing on a Thursday through the Senate calendar for House Bill 2468, a bill about tax credits for private schools, the next Tuesday.
The committee doesn’t work on Fridays. He submitted testimony at 9 a.m. Monday, knowing the committee required 48 hours notice. He wasn’t allowed to testify because he missed the deadline.
“I call and say, ‘How can it be late if it was only in the journal on Thursday?’ ” Rieber wrote.
Rieber said at one hearing, Attorney General Kris Kobach was allowed to talk in favor of the bill for 20 minutes, and then opponents were given 90 seconds each.
Rep. Kirk Haskins, D-Topeka, said multiple bills placed on committee agendas this session had little to no public notice.
“That kind of maneuver shuts everyday Kansans out of the process and undermines trust in how we do our work,” he said. “When major bills move this fast, without time for legislators or the public to weigh in, that’s not governing — it’s steamrolling.”
House Bill 2452, a proposal to move local elections to even-numbered years, was introduced on Jan. 15, heard on Jan. 20, and passed out of committee on Jan. 22.
“There was no cost estimate, the proponent testimony was thin and the justification for the bill was vague at best,” Haskins said. “That’s not how you build confidence in election policy.”
Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, who has been in the Legislature since 2013, said the most obvious effort this year to stifle public input was the bathroom bill.
About 200 people managed to turn in written testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, even though the bill hearing was announced with 24 hours notice. The bill originally was about stopping people from changing their gender on driver’s licenses and birth certificates.
Legislators rolled the bathroom portion into the bill and it passed out of committee the same day, leaving no time for public input on a bill that already has one lawsuit filed challenging its constitutionality.
Carmichael said people came to his office to complain about the House’s “153-bill marathon” that occurred the week of Feb. 16.
This year the process was “deliberately designed” to avoid citizen input, especially when legislators debate a bill on the floor and then take emergency action to pass the bill the same day, he said.
“That means that our constituents can’t even contact us overnight to tell us we’re making a mistake,” Carmichael said.
An example of that occurred the last day of the regular session, when the Senate Taxation and Assessment Committee made numerous changes to a property tax bill, House Bill 2745. Republicans pushed it through the Senate and sent it straight to the House floor for a vote.
The House had passed the original bill several weeks before. Now, lawmakers debated the revised version with no public input, unlike the first version, which drew more than 50 opponents and five proponents. Of the opponents, many were city and county leaders concerned about implementing the bill.
Michael Poppa, executive director of Mainstream Coalition and mayor of Roeland Park, said reducing public input has serious consequences for the system and affects local governments.
“There are no checks and balances,” he said. “They don’t care about the local units of government that they’re stripping of our home rule or local authority.”
Rieber said the Republicans’ supermajority means they don’t have to listen to Kansans before moving favored bills forward.
“They jigger the process so that they can put their prejudices into law,” he said. “It’s not fair. It’s not meant to be fair. It’s meant to put forward a particular worldview.”
Former Republican Rep. Tom Phillips, of Manhattan, was a mayor and city commissioner before moving to state politics for eight years, leaving the House in 2020. Although not currently tracking legislative processes, he said, he believes strongly in public input and debate. He said he saw restrictive actions five years ago.
“I think committee chairs and leadership need to place a priority on making sure the process is designed to operate to allow public input,” he said.
“Our founding fathers believed in liberal democracy and a representative form of government,” Phillips said. “While officials are elected, they have to be able to allow the public to come forward.”
Bob Beatty, professor and chairman of the political science department at Washburn University, said questions about public input and other procedural issues come down to what kind of democracy Kansans want to have.
“What we’re talking about here is this idea that democracy has been considered the best way to guarantee people’s rights,” he said. “But there’s also an acknowledgement that the way it works may not produce anything.”
Contentious debates, competing interests and other factors may mean that things don’t get done, Beatty said.
“Ideally, if you want to pass a bill in a democracy, it has to go up for public scrutiny,” he said. “The media is going to be interested in it. Usually committees are going to talk about it. People are going to oppose it. Nowadays, there might be commercials against it, and it may take a long time, or it may not happen at all.”
Authoritarianism is appealing because things can happen quickly and opposing opinions can be eliminated, Beatty said.
Public input is one of democracy’s strengths, but also its weakness, he said.
“If democracy is to be true to itself, to actually be what you want it to be, the process can be slow, laborious, because it’sopen,” Beatty said. “When you have an open process on anything, it takes time, and it takes politics. It takes convincing. It might take an election.”
