Kansas Week 1 2025: Kansas House BANS reporters on floor, Republican control, taxes, and more🚨
Video Script
Intro
Welcome to Loud Light’s 9th year covering what happens each week inside the Kansas Statehouse. I’m Davis Hammet and this is week 1 of the 2025 Kansas legislative session.
Kansas Legislative Makeup
Kansas Republicans won big in 2024. It was the first full election under their newly drawn district maps that former Republican Senate President Susan Wagle promised donors would slice, dice, pack and crack neighborhoods to allow Republicans to keep a supermajority regardless of how the people vote. Republicans now control 70% of the House and 78% of the Senate giving them so much power that they can force any bill into law regardless of if the Democratic Governor vetoes it. Assuming all Democratic legislators vote to sustain a Governor's veto, they will need 5 Republicans in either chamber to join them to stop a bill. The last time Republicans gained this much power it was the catalyst for enacting the Brownback Tax experiment resulting in a billion dollar deficit. The big question is how they will use all this power and if they will show restraint.
State of the State
The Governor's annual State of the State address this week asked legislators to think not just about how bills will impact next year, but how they will impact Kansas decades from now. She focused on child care access, increasing water conservation efforts as areas of Kansas are beginning to run dry, and discouraging the Legislature from passing unsustainable tax measures that would prevent them from taking action on the state’s biggest challenges. Specifically, the Governor called Republican leadership’s goal of slashing corporate taxes to zero a “nonstarter”. Senate President Ty Masterson issued the Republican Party’s response calling for money to be diverted from public to private schools, passing more laws to target transgender
Journalists Banned on House Floor
House Speaker Daniel Hawkins spent the first day of the legislative session breaking a century old precedent by banning journalists from the House floor. Hawkins was following in the footsteps of Senate President Ty Mastersons who banned reporters from the Senate floor in 2022. This is part of a national trend of lawmakers targeting journalists and undermining transparency and accountability in government.
Immigration Resolution (SCR 1602)
With less than 24-hours of public notice, Senator Mike Thompson held a committee hearing on a resolution encouraging the Governor to work with Trump on his deportation policies. Attorney General Kris Kobach testified in support citing reports by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that has been designated as a hate group with ties to white supremacists. FAIR was co-founded by white nationalist, John Tanton, and has faced decades of controversy due to their collaboration with holocaust deniers, and overtly anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic beliefs. Kobach previously worked for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
Coming Up/Session Preview
This session, like most sessions, Republican leaders are heavily focused on passing a wide range of tax cuts, but face an obstacle as their recently passed tax cuts have made the state's budget increasingly unbalanced and it's now trending toward red. We expect a lot of contentious issues to come up in 2025 from medical marijuana and medicaid expansion to abortion restrictions and even proposals to overhaul sections of the state’s constitution to make Judges more partisan and voting more difficult. All of this will happen against the backdrop of an expedited timeline as leadership is planning to end the session in early April instead of early May. Be sure to sign up at loudlight.org to get updates right to your inbox. Stay tuned, stay engaged, and until next time, thank you so much Kansas!