My uncle Gene is a state legislator in Topeka. This year, he and his fellow Republicans tried to do something pretty drastic with the state budget. And I got to watch the whole thing.
When I think of my uncle Gene, I think of a man who, late into the night at a particularly boisterous family wedding, would flatten his palms against the dance floor, extend his body parallel to the ground and then begin to undulate his legs and torso in a move known as the worm. Or I think of how, even later that same evening, he would agitate for a midnight meal at a diner in west Wichita, Kan., called the Golden Bell. Or of how, in his more abstemious workaday life, he left the family business — a small bank based in Colwich, a town of about 1,000 people in south-central Kansas, where he grew up alongside my father and 11 other siblings — so that he could expand a chain of pizzerias, which grew to include 48 franchises in five states.
But when you think of Gene Suellentrop — and you do think of him, even if you don’t know it yet — you just might regard him as a blight on the Republic. He is a partisan political warrior, which is a social type whose popularity probably ranks somewhere just above that of journalists, even for those who share his deeply conservative fiscal politics. And if you’re a liberal, coastal, cosmopolitan sort, at best you probably see him as a deluded if well-intentioned peddler of what the New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has called ‘‘right-wing derp, of doctrines that just get repeated (and indeed strengthen their political hold) no matter how wrong they prove.’’ Maybe you think my uncle Gene is an ideologue. Or maybe that’s another word for idealist.
Gene is 63 now, and his worm-dancing days are well behind him. He has served in the Kansas Legislature for the past six years, the last four as an ally of Gov. Sam Brownback, who is best known for his crusading social conservatism, including an unwavering opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Yet as governor, Brownback’s fiscal politics may be more remarkable.
In keeping with the state motto — ad astra per aspera, or ‘‘to the stars through difficulties’’ — Kansas politics have always been touched with a spirit of the avant-garde and the unorthodox, from popular sovereignty to prohibition and beyond. Today, thanks in large part to Brownback, the state is a petri dish for movement conservatism, a window into how the national Republican Party might govern if the opposition vanished. The 125 legislators of the House of Representatives include 97 Republicans; the Senate has an even greater percentage of Republicans, with only 8 Democrats among the 40 senators. With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.
This fervor for budget-cutting is hardly unique to Kansas. At the federal level, the opposition party in the White House has kept the Republican majority in Congress from making much headway. But there are 23 states in the Union controlled entirely by Republicans, from statehouse to governor’s mansion — 24, if you count Nebraska’s technically nonpartisan, unicameral legislature — compared with just six (and Washington, D.C.) on the Democratic side. In these Republican states, the combination of the Great Recession with the anti-Obama elections of 2010 and 2014 has allowed legislators to make deeper cuts to the size and scope of government than has been possible in Washington for decades. In 2012, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, state governments spent $9 billion less than they did the previous year — the first such decline in 50 years. Many of these cuts have fallen on education. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Tom Corbett cut funding for the state’s public universities by 20 percent, a compromise from his original proposal of 50 percent. Last month in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, backed by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system.
As many tax-cutting states have found later on, the party’s deep-seated opposition to tax increases of any kind can make balancing the budget a high-wire act. In Alabama this year, the state’s Republican governor, Robert Bentley, vetoed a bill from the Republican-controlled statehouse that would have removed $200 million from the state’s budget, including 5 percent cuts for Medicaid, prisons and the state’s department of mental health. Instead, he called the Legislature into a special session and asked for more than $300 million in new taxes.
The situation in Kansas was just as dire, if not more so. Brownback began the year by cutting education in the face of the state’s budget crisis, but he also proposed that legislators raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. The new taxes were part of an effort to close a staggering gap for fiscal 2016, estimated at $650 million in January, or more than 10 percent of the state’s $6 billion general fund. More urgent, the state still needed to cut about $300 million from this year’s budget as, month after month, tax revenues continued to arrive well below expectations. In January alone, the state took in $47 million less than anticipated. As Brownback saw it, these new taxes on consumption were necessary so that his priority — the march to zero on income taxes — could proceed.
Uncle Gene is not an architect of the march to zero, but he supports it, and he is one of the legislators in the Kansas statehouse who has helped to enact it and to preserve it. He is the vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House, and he also sits on the Appropriations Committee. There are more important figures — the speaker of the House, the Senate president, the leaders of the Tax and Appropriations Committees in both houses, for starters — in the statehouse, but Gene is in the next tier. He’s one of the people whose support the governor usually relies on to get something done, according to Tim Shallenburger, Brownback’s legislative liaison and a former speaker of the Kansas House.
I called Gene in January, as this year’s legislative session began in Topeka. For a Kansan, and a Suellentrop, Gene is a talker, but if you met him you would probably find him a little bit reserved, although not taciturn. On this call, he sounded worried. ‘‘People are leaving Kansas,’’ he told me. The state has no mountains and no beaches, and thousands of jobs that were lost during the Great Recession, especially in Wichita’s aircraft industry, never returned. The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state, perhaps akin to the way the national debate over the expansion of slavery once drew young abolitionists from New England to the plains. At the very least, they hope it will prevent young people and existing businesses from moving elsewhere, to places with ski lodges or surf shops.
A couple of weeks later, I landed at the airport in Kansas City, Mo., and drove an hour or so west to Topeka, where Gene offered to be a sort of Virgil on my tour. He would introduce me to the principals in the state’s budget negotiations in the hope of highlighting what he called ‘‘a different philosophy’’ of how to make a state’s government revenues match its expenditures. I’ve spent much of my life moving between America’s two political territories — between places like Topeka and places like Washington, Boston and New York — and generally found that neither knows much about the other beyond caricature. For my part, I hoped to be able to reveal Gene and his colleagues as something other than the monolith of monsters and morons that they’re so often taken for in the political conversation, perhaps out of disregard for the moral disagreements that underlie the American political divide.
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Poster Comment:
Interesting (albeit lengthy) article revealing how blind adherence to conservative ideology leads to economic ruin.
