06.18.13
Kansas secession & the Cold Second Civil War
Back in April I posted that Kansas had essentially seceded:
The latest extremist tactic in legislatures of red states is to practice nullifications, tactics to supersede settled federal law. Its white Confederacy strategy without firing on Ft. Sumter.
This issue of Rolling Stone goes into it in some detail.
From deep inna heart of WhiteManistan, the description of a place you’ll never visit:
It’s been nearly 10 years since Thomas Frank wrote about the conservative takeover of his home state in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Back then, Kansas still had a Democratic governor in Kathleen Sebelius. But after last fall’s civil war, Kansas has emerged a more intense shade of red than even Frank imagined. The state legislature is the most conservative in the United States, and now there is absolutely nothing stopping the Brownback revolution one which happens to be entirely at odds with any notion of the GOP adapting to the broader social and demographic changes in the country. If anything, these purists argue, Republicans lost in 2012 because the party wasn’t conservative enough.
No one can say that about Sam Brownback, who is rumored to be mulling his own presidential run in 2016 and using Kansas as a sort of laboratory, in which ideas cooked up by Koch-funded libertarian think tanks can be released like viruses on live subjects. At a national level, the GOP remains stuck in a reactive position, pursuing executive branch “scandals” and blocking Obama’s policies with no real power to effect changes of their own, and so states like Kansas have become very important to the future of the party’s far-right wing. Consider it a test, a case study proof, finally, that an unfettered hybrid of Randian free-market dogma and theocratic intolerance can create, in the bitter words of outgoing Senate President Steve Morris, one of the ousted moderates, an “ultraconservative utopia.”
The RS piece charts the evolution of it up to and including Sam Brownback’s tenure as governor. The end result is a state that will eliminate taxation for the sake of Koch industries and destroy its educational system. Other matters include declaring an embryo feel pain at 21 days and adjusting state abortion law accordingly while simultaneously creating an environment which encourages violence toward people who work in an abortion clinic. (There is only one in the entire state, George Tiller’s, who you will recall was assassinated.)
In addition, the Kansas legislature has passed an unconstitutional gun law that maintains arms manufactured and sold within the state are not subject to federal laws. It’s a nullification act and a sovereign citizen type of extremism. Indeed, Brownback even uses the word sovereign in a letter warning Attorney General Eric Holder not to mess with Kansas.
All this only underlines the Republican Party’s problem with young people, Rolling Stone’s core audience. Those who read the article would view Kansas as full of bad — old, angry white guys fulminating against the US government and everyone else not exactly like them.
Yet they still lack the nerve to seize a federal facility or jail those passing through from those places in the country they view as un-American.
“[Brownback’s Kansas budget bill] was designed, frankly, to take care of Koch Industries,” one conservative but not crazy politician tells the magazine. “I could see that it took money from very poor people and benefitted me, personally, too significantly. And I’m not poor.”
They subsequently ran him out of office.
Rolling Stone calls Kansas a “rogue state.” A better description is “pariah state.” And the United States has a number of them, all engaged in what people see but awkwardly refuse to acknowledge as a Cold Civil War.
What’s the answer? What was the answer to apartheid South Africa? Putting the squeeze on economically and socially.
What does Kansas export? Aircraft engines, wheat and meat, primarily. But it’s a puny exporter compared to a state like California. Kansas exports grossed 12 billion in 2012, California — 162 billion.
Canada is Kansas’ primary buyer, taking 22 percent of the trade.
Encouraging a major trading partner not to do business with a state with discriminatory law and a government inimical to social welfare and science would be a start. Kansas is a poor state and its current trajectory will make it more so. Even a small number of percentage points shaved off business would hurt under such conditions.
Certainly not easy but conceptually easy to grasp.
“Pariah state” might not even be strong enough.
Sample this, also excerpted from the Rolling Stone piece:
In the current legislative session, the House and Senate voted to rescind a 25-year-old ban on quarantining people with AIDS, and Rep. Steve Brunk of Wichita introduced a bill that would require cities that put fluoride in their water to inform customers that fluoridation lowers the I.Q. of children. The latter claim, of course, is patently false, but somehow fluoride has become a source of paranoia out in the chemtrail/Alex Jones corner of the wackosphere. A group with anti-abortion ties called Wichitans Opposed to Fluoridation actually managed to pass a ballot initiative last fall that would remove fluoride from Wichita’s drinking water.
People ought to be protected from government predation. In this case, the benighted people of Kansas are the ones who need protection — from their state.
Naturally, there is no way a law that enables the quarantining of people with HIV is constitutional or enforceable in the 2013 US.
Nevertheless, its passage illustrates what the red state GOP crazies grasp instinctively once they are in control: They can pass bad or predatory law no civilized society would tolerate faster than it can be brought before the courts to be struck down.
A new term is needed for it, in addition to nullification. How about vexatious legislating?