Steven Writes Back

Cynic grudgingly explores if it's possible to morally lobby an elected

Feb 27, 2025

Dear Steven:

Some Housekeeping

You may note, from the jump, that I’ve reverted to the less casual form of address1 this time, as opposed to the “Steve” of my last letter. This is in recognition and appreciation of the fact that I received a response from you, despite all my expectations to the contrary.2 I’ve been fishing for a change of heart and behavior, but a response is certainly…something. So thanks, I guess,3 and as a token of those thanks, I’m back to calling you Steven.4

Your response is found below. Since I’ve been making my letters to you public, it’s fair to make your reply public, I think. However, if our correspondence ever were to resemble what I initially hoped for…

I’d like it if we could sit down and jaw for a few hours over coffee, straight-up, honestly, human to human. Me, trying my best to reach you as a human being with some kind of soul and decency inside you. You, dropping all the learned aversions to consorting with the enemy or being tainted by by woke cooties or having to maintain some kind of persona that’s fit for the cameras, even if there’d be no cameras rolling.

…I would certainly be inclined to take the discussion private, if only because such candor would entail a kind of vulnerability as we earnestly tried to sway one another, and the public shouldn’t be offered any fare that isn’t finished cooking.

But I don’t think we’re there yet. I think I’m being as honest with you as my conscience allows, the conscience that says not to entirely write someone off as either stupid or evil, to show some grace and allow for the remote possibility of persuasion at the level of shared humanity, even as my anger seeps into tone and word choice. Anger isn’t bad, but I try not to let it become blind wrath, so if I have a hope beyond something I say simply worming its way into your conscience,5 then it’s that you’ll more fully drop the poses and just level with me, but as I say, based on your response, I don’t think we’re there yet.

Your Reply

Here’s what you sent me:

Sat, Feb 22 at 5:59 PM
Hi James,
I apologize for my delay in responding. Yes, I did read your earlier piece that you wrote about me on your blog, published February 1st. I haven't had too much time to personally respond to many emails this session.
The Reflector article you referenced gets some things correct, but it is only part of the narrative. Here is some additional context which may give a fuller picture of what's going on in the Legislsture [sic], from my perspective. I'll post a link to my remarks on the House floor at the bottom of this email.
I wish I was able to do more as it relates to special education. It seems the biggest obstacle to providing a bigger increase in SPED funding is the State's current budget situation. We are deficit spending over $600M dollars. The general public is mostly unaware of the current fiscal state of affairs. This is largely attributable to the budget surplus which is giving us a cushion. However, if revenues don't pick up enough to offset the annual deficit, then the surplus may be gone in 2-3 years leaving us with quite the mess. I think we have support for more SPED funding - the problem is trying to figure out how to pay for it. In this year's budget bill there is $10M more than last year for SPED, bringing the total state contribution to $611M dollars. The Legislature and Governor has in recent years enacted laws to eliminate Social Security income from the state income tax, eliminated the state sales tax on food, and gave financial incentives to a "mystery" company, now known as Panasonic. I only supported the first two items by the way. The first two items decrease our revenues - letting people keep more of their money. While the third one, as I understand it, may actually require writing checks to this multi-billion dollar international company. It's obvious that each of these items has a price tag. Moving forward the Legislature will hopefully be scrutinizing bills more closely to protect the financial well-being of Kansans, and our obligations as a State. I'll keep working on SPED, but I thought it may be helpful to provide some context as it relates to the budget.
My remarks begin approximately here: 7.26:23

- Steven

A Point of Potential Agreement

Before anything else, I do want to say that I don’t entirely disagree with your apparent dislike of the Panasonic package. I wasn’t thrilled with the “mystery” aspect of it, either, though I can imagine some valid reasons for keeping negotiations secret. I am also leery of massive incentive packages to huge corporations to locate here because they tend to pit state against state in races to the bottom to see which one can more fully give away the farm of public resources to already too-powerful private interests, for too little in return. It may turn out to be a net positive for our state, and maybe I would have made the same calculations had I been in a position to make the call, but I am opposed to the entire trend. This isn’t surprising: I’m often against a lot of things that constitute the way the world works these days.

Your Speech

I want you to know that I went to the link you provided, the YouTube coverage of your speech at the Well. I listened to it. I even transcribed it below, which took a while. I left out the vocal pauses—the ums and uhs—which would have made you look far worse than this reads, although reading it draws attention to the analysis and reasoning, which isn’t strong. I built back in what seemed to be reasonable punctuation and paragraph breaks. I may have flubbed a word or two here or there, but it’s 11 minutes long, and something like 1350 words, and I’m telling you this so you’ll know I took time with it—as I take time with these posts here—and I do this because I care about the issues I write about, and in this particular case, I care about trying to reach you. More on that below, but for now, let it serve as some evidence for my sincerity, the time I’ve invested in this entire project: if I didn’t care, Steven, why would I bother?

Here’s my transcript of your remarks:

I appreciate the opportunity extended to me to serve on the special committee on legislative budget, the Appropriations Committee and to chair the higher education budget. I consider it a privilege and I've learned a lot.
So in the legislature, many of us wear a lot of hats, and we serve in various roles, and each one of those is important, but at least for me, my favorite part is just getting to represent my district and the people that gave me the privilege of coming up here to serve them. And so I represent the 71st district of Kansas in Saline County, East Salina, and when I ran for office, one of my first priority issues was to see what I could do to add more support for special education in the state of Kansas.
As many of you know, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires states to provide special education services to children with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 21. This includes children with developmental delays, hearing or visual impairments, emotional disturbance or autism. IDEA requires each special education student to receive an IEP that identifies the services that will be provided to that student. Here at the state level, our state our state law generally mirrors what's at the federal level, however we do impose three additional special ed requirements on school districts which are above and beyond what the federal mandate requires. These include identifying and providing services to gifted students, using interventions in the regular education classroom before referring a student to special education, thirdly, providing special education services to children who reside in the district but attend to private school. So that's something that distinguishes the state of Kansas from other states.
To me it's really not all about the money, but in some ways it kinda is just because we have to manage a budget. For me it's more—my motivation is the ability to come alongside our school kids and their families and to support them and to equip them, our next generation, in their learning. I guess in Higher Education, I've come to learn that's called Student Success.
So Kansas law does provide for state aid in the form of reimbursement for the excess costs associated with providing special education services. And so that is set at 92% of total excess costs. And so that's the number that we all talk about and seem to argue about every year.
I do want to acknowledge that the legislature and the governor together have made progress in providing additional funding in recent years, especially since I've got to the legislature. However, despite these recent investments, we are still short of providing 92% of excess costs, and we're currently right around 75.4%.
So what's the big deal, you might ask. You know, after all, Kansas does spend $600 million a year on special education in state aid. Isn't that enough? $600 million. Isn't that enough to go around? Well, that's the quandary we're in. And there's disagreement in this body.
So the state of Kansas last fully funded special education, as I understand it, in the year 2011. Ever since then we've been playing catch-up. And that's for a variety of reasons. There's probably more students on IEPs than ever before. In addition, there's probably been some years where we haven't really put the money towards fully funding special education. So since that time, since 2011, there's been 14 graduating classes that have exited K-12 and 14 new ones that have come in.
My other point I want to make is that, at least in my district, I've gotten to know my superintendent and school board members and teachers and principals. But for my school district, they have to make up the difference because they're mandated to provide the service in special ed. So locally, in my district, that means my local school district diverts about $5.4 million from their general fund to special education. Now, why is that problematic? Well, for a number of reasons. You have your general education student population, and if you're taking money from them to satisfy the mandate and special ed, in a way you're—there could be an argument, a legal argument, that could pose some liability to the state of Kansas because you're taking constitutional funding and diverting it, and anyways it does essentially seem like we robbed Peter to pay Paul in this whole process and perhaps we need to revisit this model in the future with the school finance formula expiring in 2027.
So in Appropriations, I guess that was last week—it's been a blur, this session—but there was a motion to eliminate the $30 million increase for special education funding. However there was a substitute motion to at least get us to $10 million and that's additional monies. So right now currently the state of Kansas, I think, if I'm not mistaken, appropriates $601 million in special education funding, so with this 10 million, if it stays in the budget, it'll be $611 million.
Can we do better? That's the question. When I first woke up this morning at 5—well, I woke up before 5, I got on the road at 5 from Salina, I commute daily—I was intending to bring an amendment subject to the Pay-Go rules. However I've come to learn that I probably don't have the votes to see it to fruition, to get it passed. And also recognizing the fact that, you know, we're as divided as ever as a country on a number of issues, and I didn't come here to play political games or to get likes on Facebook and I'm not insinuating that anybody here is motivated by that but I just don't participate in that, so I don't understand all of the politics that go on here in the Capitol. I want to represent students of my district and their families, students like Murray who's confined to a wheelchair and … sorry… so I think about people I know, and people I'm neighbors with and people that—their kids go to school with my kids—and I see how much they struggle, especially with high need special needs, and the teachers who come alongside them to support them and to work through whether it's an intellectual disability or a physical disability but to really given them a chance at independence if that's possible—it's not always possible in all cases, but I think we can do better.
So in this budget bill, $600 million we're spending more than we're bringing in with receipts, and that's a problem for all of us, Republican, Democrat, those of all political stripes. We're going to have to work together on this, not only special education but the overall budget. It's going to take all of us to solve this problem about spending too much and I know some of the legislation that we have passed in recent years, and some of you weren't here for some of those bills, but they do have a price tag. And so we're living with the consequences of some of these bills that we've passed.
I would just like to invite anybody here to work with me on ways that we can help address the special education state aid or special education services that we provide to our families, to our students, because I really want to support the next generation. I want to leave it a better place than when I found it, so I will not be offering my amendment, and I know that's probably disappointing to some in this chamber but I have to look at the long game here and realize that sometimes you've got to know—you've got to be able to read the room and so, with that, Mr. Chair, I'll yield back, and I appreciate the chamber's indulgence in listening to me and I pray for you all to have a peaceful evening and pray that you all be safe out in the weather. So thank you.

Part of me wants to parse these remarks, to shoot your fish in its barrel. Because I’m angry. To go line by line or paragraph by paragraph with a critique of your reasoning and argument, your rhetoric, since you’re up there speaking to your colleagues in a legislative forum, representing my hometown, and I tend to believe we deserve the very best.

I get that you’re tired by the time you’re speaking. I also get that the reason you’re tired is that the folks who run the legislature set things up this way. I also get that important discussions like the budget and special education funding have to be speed-run into wee hours when the legislature spends its initial weeks debating and passing cruel and harmful laws that target inoffensive and tiny minorities of, yes, school children and their supportive families and teachers (and doctors and counselors and other health care providers). You yourself spend a good chunk of your time in Higher Education last year going after a made-up “ideology” no one in your party could—or rather, had the guts to—define in order to make our Regents schools safer for those who reject the idea that “all people are created equal.” Meanwhile, Medicaid expansion died again this year, despite its 90 percent coverage by the feds and its strong majority support by Kansans across the state.

At first, I thought you wanted me to watch your speech because you felt the Kansas Reflector coverage left out some important context in its quotes from you. But after viewing, I think the reason you directed me to the remarks themselves was because of the boldfaced portion above (approx. 7:34:32 in the video), where you seem momentarily overcome by emotion, to demonstrate your sincerity in wanting more funding for special education.

If that was your intent, fair enough. I can believe that you are sincerely moved by the plight of disabled kids you know personally. I can stipulate to it: you do seem to sincerely care about Murray.

But what I see in your speech overall is helplessness. It’s a display of your feelings about a certain population of people while you confess your unwillingness to do anything about it. You say an amendment you thought to propose would stand no chance of passing. Probably—no, almost certainly—true. But why not have the courage of your convictions and propose it anyway? That it was very likely doomed does not mean the effort would be pointless. It could highlight the callousness or indifference or immoral priorities of those in charge of the legislature.

Rep. Ousley’s amendment—which was proposed—had this effect. It would have raised the amount of money for special education by transferring funding from the “attracting professional sports to Kansas fund.” As such, Rep. Ousley was calling you to put sports money where your special education mouth was. Yet you voted against that amendment, along with 75 of your fellow, mostly Republican, colleagues.

Your vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome on that amendment, of course, but it would have at least shown that your care for special education funding was strong enough to cause you to stand against your own party, to say These kids are more important than getting a major franchise to locate on the Kansas side of KC instead of the Missouri side. A chance to tell Rep. Tarwater, who said,

The fact that you’re going to take the money out of this sports fund in the middle of negotiating with a couple of great opportunities for the state of Kansas …. one of the teams is close to announcing a deal. What if that deal is in the state of Kansas? We’re sending them a message that says, “Hey, you know, never mind. We’re going to be just like Jackson County and we’re going to pull the rug out from underneath you and look like a bunch of idiots.”

…Okay, then: I’d rather look like a fool to some billionaire sports franchise owners if it means kids like Murray and his parents get the support they need, and if that happens, I think I’ll sleep like a baby at night, Representative Tarwater.

But you didn’t do that. You did nothing except tell us how much you care. With that and $116, Murray can buy a basic wheelchair through Walmart, not including tax. I hope his needs don’t run to pricier models.6

If you don’t have courage to back your professed convictions, Steven, what good are you? If you don’t act, even in ways that may sometimes set you apart from others, what good are testimonials about your feelings?

Your speech contained several moments where you approached saying something mildly pointed or controversial, only to back off, back down, backpedal, frame your remarks in “just my personal opinion” or other such inoffensive twaddle. It’s as if you’re afraid of saying or doing anything that might cost you a warm greeting at the caucus or a hearty handshake from this or that legislative leader. You note that political division is high. Yes, indeed. But in such a climate, milquetoast mewling does nothing. You didn’t even name the person who moved to zero out special education funding in the first place (“there was a motion to eliminate the $30 million increase for special education funding”), even though such a move must have shocked and appalled you, or praise the person who moved to plug in the $10 million. Representing your constituents sometimes means standing up for them and that sometimes means being more than a mouse.

I can, perhaps, anticipate your objections: But if I did as you say, I’d alienate this person, that person, endanger my chairmanship, court opposition within my own party to things that would benefit my constituents or even invite targeted attacks on my district.

To which I have two responses:

All of these are different ways of saying “I can’t.” They’re just different ways of saying you’re trapped and powerless, or that your freedom of speech, of witness, of action, are so constrained that you can only squirm a little here and there within the narrow bindings placed upon you. But this is an office you sought, and representing the public is a duty, as is service to the common good. Nobody forced your situation upon you. You signed up for this. If you dislike the constraints, resist them. Defeatism without even trying is pitiful.
Take a look at who is imposing those restraints. Who is it that would vindictively target you or your district if you spoke or acted conscientiously? Who would strip you of a chair? Who has the power? We tell kids that if their friends treat them badly for being themselves, those aren’t their real friends. So how much of your integrity do you have to swallow before you acknowledge that you’re in a clique with some terrible people who are expecting you to go along with terrible things, under threat of ostracism or punishment?

As for the lament about tight belts and the revenue outlook, I’ll just quote Davis Hammet:

For the first time Republican legislators have written the state budget on their own instead of using the Governor’s proposal as a starting point. Due to the last few rounds of tax cuts, the state is facing revenue shortfalls and now has an unbalanced budget. The Republican budget seeks to address the shortfall by cut spending in a 1.5% across the board budget cut. All together the proposed budget cuts roughly $250 million per year in spending which covers about 2/3rds of the lost state revenue caused by tax cuts passed last Summer. The cuts don’t balance the budget though as it’s still trending toward red and the estimates do not include the costs of more tax cuts which Republican leaders have promised to deliver.

Of course, he’s part of Loud Light, who, along with Kansas Appleseed, are a bunch of “bomb throwers,” according to leaked video from your Republican colleague Pat Proctor, who chairs the House Elections Committee and, despite his previous public statements to the contrary, desires to eliminate Kansas’ already-brief grace period for properly postmarked ballots. These are your colleagues. Surely you know that disabled folks (and many others) benefit from the grace-period and would benefit more from more hospitable and inclusive election laws.

Share Know Your Place

Narrative

You wrote to me:

The Reflector article you referenced gets some things correct, but it is only part of the narrative.

So let’s talk about narratives.

Your letter focused on the kitchen table, the available dollars. But as so many folks have paraphrased from Dr. King, budgets are moral documents

My letters to you and about you have overwhelmingly followed a narrative of right and wrong, of morality. Whether it’s the question of your character as a human being, your commitment to Constitutional, democratic republican government in America, and so on. Frankly, you dodge that narrative in your reply to me.

And a high-minded, moral framework is one you raised in January 2024 with your “Stand” piece in the Salina Post, attempting to distinguish yourself from other Kansas Republicans as you declared you would not support Donald Trump for president again. Before you flipped back. In that piece you spoke of lies, integrity, the rule of law, virtues and values, of standing for the truth “even when it does not benefit us politically.”

You opened the door of my “narrative.” I’ve simply walked through it and begun to search for you in the land of high-minded principles and integrity.

When you reply to my letters merely citing dollars and cents, you evade that narrative, that framework. I have to wonder why.

Complicity With Evil

My last letter to you rattled off several glaring inconsistencies in your and your party’s positions, between alleged concern for special needs/disabled public school children and support for policies and politicians (especially Donald Trump and his cabinet) who are doing or attempting active harm to the disabled and public school kids more generally.

I honestly have no way of making the two positions cohere. Are you so focused on special ed funding that you cannot see anything else that impacts this population? Are you are unaware of what’s happening in national politics? Are you unaware of the influence and political positions of the Koch network, members of ALEC, the Kansas Policy Institute, those who support school vouchers? Did you completely miss the alarms virtually every public health group in the country sounded about our new HHS Secretary, beginning while he was a candidate for President? Do you not grasp the implications of the bills you vote on?

That’s why I’m constantly tempted back toward the binary of “Evil or Stupid?” I can only fathom a truly good-faith advocate of disabled children voting for, enabling, and cooperating with a President, a party, and specific bills and resolutions that actively jeopardize health and safety of the disabled by attributing the behavior to extraordinary levels of obliviousness. Perhaps you exist within a social circle that simple denies these things happened or are happening, consuming news coverage that conveniently ignores such implications, much like Fox News peddled the stolen election lies you condemned so fervently in January of 2024. Such would spare your conscience from taint until the moment when the spell of ignorance or deception is broken, but it would be a damning indict of your qualifications to serve as any kind of political decision-maker in this moment.

Please know that I never expected you to answer with meticulous explainers for how you slalomed around each of the moral pitfalls and contradictions I cited. Hell, I never expected you to reply at all. I’m surprised you even read what I sent you. But since you did reply, I am curious if you can justify these positions, this support, those votes.

I’m especially interested in how you can justify targeting transgender children in our state, especially given your apparently sincere concern for other children. The same goes for the respective families of both groups. My first letter to you was pretty exclusively focused on trans rights, asking you, specifically, to help sustain the governor’s veto of SB 63. You didn’t do so. Advocacy for trans folks has been prominent in all my letters to you, yet you said not a word in response about it.

Why care about disabled kids yet target trans kids? Is it because you believe transness is a choice, while disability isn’t? Is it because of religious convictions that you’re importing into your judgment to make binding laws for a widely pluralistic state population? Is it because you simply don’t know anything except vitriol and negativity about trans folks, and you haven’t gone looking for counterpoints?

Why do you—as your votes, party affiliation, actions, and silence on the very plain and dominant theme of trans rights in my letters to you strongly indicate—hate trans people?

Please don’t bother merely claiming otherwise; until I can read minds, I can’t verify what you might assert is “in your heart” about any specific group of people. All I can go by is watching what you and your colleagues do, your documented behavior. And that behavior has been to vote for SB 63 and vote to override Governor Kelly’s veto of SB 63, making it state law.

So while I’ve written much in these letters to you, while I’ve cited a lot that I think begs for explanations of how a conscientious, decent, caring person can justify supporting various policies, persons, and positions, I will ask you to focus, in any future replies, on trans healthcare and rights.

Budgetarily, SB 63 goes out of its way to court expenditures for the state as it defends this law in court, to say nothing of the downstream “costs” someone will have to bear for the damage it will cause to innocent folks just trying to live their lives. We’ll likely lose some Kansans over this to other, more humane states, and maybe that was the plan, but they’ll be leaving the tax base, and jobs, and consumer niches, taking their unique contributions with them. Enforcing this law will consume court resources and damage the reputations of health care providers who actually understand gender identity and wish to humanely care for people, unlike most of those who voted to pass this law. More, it places them in an ethical bind of having to choose between their oaths and their livelihoods.

If you’re comfortable making them face such dire ethical consequences, the least you can do is explain to me how you can morally and ethically justify voting to oppress trans kids.

Yours,

James

P.S. Why do I give a damn about trying to get through to you? Several reasons.

First, you represent my town, if not my neighborhood. Every time you act in ways that offend my conscience, my sense of decency, I see “R-Salina” behind your name, and it reminds me that you are from here, my home. Many things dissatisfy me about Salina, but it’s where was born and will likely live out my days, and I don’t take kindly to its name being associated in any way with bullying trans children.

Yes, there are other Salina representatives, and I know one fairly well, but they haven’t come out claiming to have much in the way of a conscience, a concern for integrity, values, virtues, truth, and so on, as you did, so on the theory that you aren’t blowing smoke up my skirt, I’m trying to appeal to you in those terms.

I’m also trying to see if I really do believe that moral suasion, honest, sincere, good-faith work to reach the humanity of an elected official currently doing harm, is worth a damn. There’s a long line of advocates, from Frederick Douglas to George Jackson, who argue otherwise. I resist that idea. I want to live in a world where it’s still possible to morally lobby an elected. The alternative is just overpowering them, be it through votes or something less civilized, and might—even electoral—doesn’t make lasting right.

I believe in accountability from elected officials. I mean that literally and substantively, not just “If he pisses you off, throw the bum out of office next election.” I mean that civilization relies on the giving of reasons. I’m asking you to give me yours, and hoping you have enough cognitive and moral maturity to recognize their flaws and inconsistencies as well as superior reasons if and when I offer them, then enough ethical courage to take a stand on what I may convince you of. I’m asking you to give me an account of yourself, as a human being who happens to have the power to help make laws and who acted to make a particularly egregious atrocity of a law.

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