Kansas Week 6: Kansas City Shooting, Conspiracies, Special Education, and more 🚨
Video Script
Intro
Hey I’m Davis Hammet with Loud Light! Here’s what happened the 6th week inside the Kansas Statehouse.
Super Bowl Shooting
A shooting at the Kansas City Super Bowl parade left 1 Johnson County woman dead and over 20 people injured, half of them children. This is the nation's 48th mass shooting in 2024 alone. Missouri has some of the most relaxed gun laws in the nation. In 2021 the Missouri’s legislature passed the “Second Amendment Protection Act” that tried to bypass federal gun regulations, but has since been struck down by Federal Courts. Kansas Republican legislators have proposed a similar policy through a constitutional amendment.. If passed the amendment would make it nearly impossible for state and local governments to regulate guns, ammunition, or accessories in any way. Following the shooting Attorney General Kris Kobach argued the solution to gun violence is more guns despite 800 armed officers at the parade being unable to prevent the KC mass shooting.
Special Education (HB2738)
Days after the Kansas Supreme Court ended their oversight of school funding, the House K-12 Budget committee heard a bill that would begin defunding public education, but would manipulate the formulas used to calculate school funding to make it look like the Legislature is fully funding Special Education when the opposite is true. This school formula gamesmanship is a strategy former Gov. Brownback tried, but was struck down by the Kansas Supreme Court. The bill faced opposition from school district leaders across the state, who called on the Legislature to reconvene the Special Education Task Force. In January the Task Force voted to recommend that the Legislature fully fund the state’s share of special education required under state law. Despite this, the Legislature has yet to hear any bills to properly fund special education.
Statute of Limitations Bill (HB2721)
Last year, the Kansas Bureau of Investigations concluded that every Catholic Diocese in Kansas had conspired to cover up the sexual abuse of children by nearly 200 priests. In response, victims of abuse and several legislators pushed to remove the statute of limitations that was protecting the alleged pedophiles, but a watered down version of the bill was passed into law. It’s now unclear if it applies only to new victims or if it’s retroactive for existing victims. New bills have been proposed to ensure retroactivity so that pedophiles identified in the KBI investigation can be charged, but legislative leadership such as Speaker Hawkins have blocked bills from being heard through a variety of maneuvers such as shuffling bills between committees. The lobbying arm of the Catholic Church has spent millions in the United States fighting bills to extend the statute of limitations in the face of the global sex abuse scandal.
More Conspiracies
Opportunity Solutions Project returned to the Statehouse after their conspiracy driven presentations to the Special Elections Committee last Fall made national headlines. The conservative think tank testified this week in support of a bill to put federal election funding up for legislative approval. During testimony, the group continued to promote a conspiracy that Pres. Joe Biden used federal agencies and Kansas nonprofits to register specific people to vote and said that Joe Biden was using Haskell University to register voters. The Secretary of State’s office quickly debunked the claim explaining that Haskell has been a voter registration site under federal law since 1996. In response to the bill’s conspiracy basis being debunked, Chairman Thompson suspended the hearing.
Coming Up
Tuesday is the last day for committees to hear new bills before legislators spend the rest of the week debating bills on the floor before Friday’s Turnaround deadline when most bills that haven’t passed one chamber will die. Additionally, the flat tax vetoed by Gov. Kelly will die unless the House overrides her veto next week. Stay tuned, stay engaged, and until next time, thank you so much Kansas!