Carrie Barth of Baldwin City probably didn’t imagine when she filed to run for the Kansas Legislature’s 5th District House seat that she would become the legislative pivot point in opposition to the federal tax credit gluttony of the industrial wind and solar industry in the state.
But as was proven by other tough issues she’s engaged in her freshman term, Barth never hesitated to dive into topics, make the right judgments on them and figure out the mechanics to be effective in legislating on them.
That’s why voters in the 5th should send her back for another term in this November’s election.
Barth’s signature achievement in her first term was the approval of stand alone Kansas law dealing specifically with human trafficking and defining it as a severity level 5 person felony in the state’s criminal code. Although other laws might come into play in human smuggling and trafficking incidents, Barth’s law provides a separate and distinct realm of prosecution with its own specific penalties and provides an additional and effective weapon against those charged with kidnapping, drugging and selling children and young adults into local or interstate sexual bondage.
Barth and other incoming freshman legislators in the Kansas House were literally the tie-breaking margin in the 2023 overturning of Laura Kelly’s third veto of a law protecting women’s sports at the high school and college level from incursion by men who pretend to be women. These legislators stood up for Title IX and women’s right to privacy as a whole – something liberal feminists and other so-called women’s rights activists have run away from as the transgender sports debacle has bloomed.
Barth has seized the lead in legislative monitoring of a plan for a massive electrical transmission line – “The Grain Belt Express” – designed to gather exponentially higher priced wind and solar generated electricity across the state from just south of Dodge City to the Missouri line and then all the way to Illinois. If completed, this behemoth will compromise private property and farm ground within what is expected to be a 5-mile buffer of the proposed power lines – and the concerns on this whispered project have only begun. Barth voted for tax relief, for dropping state income tax on Social Security, and she stood against HB2591, which would allowed the Kansas Corporation Commission to slip the state’s Open Meeting Act and conduct business outside the public eye.
Kansas at large – not just the 5th District – needs to keep her in the Kansas Legislature. Carrie Barth is what good government is made of.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
