‘Intoxicated by their own power.’ Will the Kentucky General Assembly go too far?
The 2022 General Assembly is the first budget session in modern Kentucky history with a Republican supermajorities in both houses. And boy, did they throw themselves a party.
It was an orgy of right-wing fantasies, a wild smorgasbord of Republican wish lists on abortion, taxes, CRT and charter schools, with extra screw yous to teachers, transgender kids, women and girls, public libraries and many rural folks who put the legislators in office in the first place. It looked like bingo cards from ALEC, the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers got filled all at once.
It was such a crazy three months that sometimes they had to pull back because it was just TOO obvious what was going on. Tax breaks for private jet owners were, in fact, a step too far. HB 7 started as a bill aimed at kicking people off benefits like SNAP and Medicaid, but was amended to up the penalties for fraud after Republicans found out it would cost about $500 million to implement. Plus, folks pointed out how mean a bill it was. Same with House Bill 4 to cut back on unemployment benefits for the hordes of unemployed moochers the GOP is convinced are out there. It is so severe that even some Republican legislators from Eastern Kentucky — where unemployment is high — said they couldn’t support it.
Then there are teachers, who get pilloried for their awfulness on a daily basis. The people who tried their best to teach through a pandemic, first online and then in person get called names, blamed for the downfall of civilization, then told they’re not worthy of raises. Let local districts pay for them, declared a lofty Sen.. Chris McDaniel. But what McDaniel knows perfectly well is that the small increases they gave school districts will hardly cover the costs of inflation for everything else, much less a teacher raise. It’s quite a strategy, to starve public schools until they suffer, then say they should be replaced with charter schools.
Even former Republican House Speaker Jeff Hoover was appalled.
“The state budget just adopted gives state employees an 8% pay raise next year and then 12% on top of that in two years, effectively greater than 20% pay raise over two years, but giving teachers ZERO pay raise is the biggest smack down and slap to public education in history,” he wrote on Twitter. “But we as a state do not want to reward young people who want to teach and make a difference in kids lives. And we wonder why there is a shortage of teachers?”
State workers deserved their big bumps of 8 and 12% over two years, to be sure. School districts deserve money for all-day kindergarten, which they’ve been requesting for decades. But Kentuckians do not deserve this kind of crazed leadership that seems to target the most vulnerable among us.
“For years recently we’ve looked at the GA and said that’s dumb or bad policy, but now they kind of ventured into this meanness, they’re acting like bullies, they’re trying to push around the weakest and most vulnerable Kentuckians, and to what purpose?” said Dee Davis of the Center for Rural Strategies. “This is basically a General Assembly that’s prone to meanness and intoxicated by their own power.”
Fighting battles on every front
It was a long list and they got nearly everything checked off. But to everyone out there who is seething — from teachers to abortion rights supporters to public library employees worried they’ll have to start burning books — it’s possible that the universe will start to correct itself.
University of Kentucky political science professor D. Stephen Voss is currently an expert witness in the Kentucky redistricting court fight and has been looking closely at the new maps. He said the biggest changes are largely focused on suburban swing districts, the kinds of places that might be light pink or light blue, the ones that helped elect Gov. Andy Beshear by a whisker in 2019.
“This aggressive legislative activity fighting the culture war that we’ve seen this session risks turning off the swing voters in all the places that tend to be up for grabs,” he said. “They’re not just being aggressive on the culture wars, the things that might alienate center right suburban voters, but they’re aggressively moving in the socioeconomic sphere and putting Republicans from Eastern Kentucky in a difficult position.”
Voss said the session appeared to be wild and uncontrolled with forced compromises that played out in public because they had not been planned enough beforehand.
“The GOP super majority decided to fight battles on every policy front in what very much feels like an uncoordinated fashion,” he said. “There was all this pent up frustration exploding all over the place with no one in the driver’s seat or in control of the legislative agenda.”
Voss said even parties that seem unassailable can lose ground when they become too extreme for places like Eastern Kentucky, or when they make large groups like teachers too angry, as Gov. Matt Bevin learned to his peril. So seats could flip or the General Assembly could turn back to more what it looked like when the Democrats had the supermajority. Some were conservative enough that they sometimes voted with Republicans, and it created much-needed roadblocks for the governing party, rather than the steamroller we’ve just seen.
It may be that the GOP believes that because they have effectively made Kentucky an abortion-free state, they will get a pass from every conservative in it forever. But as Voss noted, educators are thought leaders in many communities, including rural and conservative ones. Fired-up urban cores worried about living in a Margaret Atwood novel combined with people who like public schools everywhere else could mean some nasty surprises for the GOP next fall. It happened in 2019. Most people’s views are somewhere in the middle, after all, and they like politicians who reflect that, too. Kentucky is reliably red for now, but that doesn’t mean it will be forever.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
