One thing that Governor Laura Kelly’s hit squad of Leftist funded legislative candidate recruits knows as they take aim at key Kansas House and Senate posts in the 2024 election is that this may be their last shot for a long time to substantially crash the conservative party that’s made Kansas a better place for Kansans.
If they fail, Kelly’s governorship will only be remembered for an unfounded and economically disastrous statewide Covid lockdown, for vetoing tax cuts during a record state cash surplus and for championing “women’s rights” by fighting tooth and nail to keep biological boys competing in girls sports and dressing in their locker rooms.
This makes it critical to maintain the conservative bulwark in the legislature which has fostered legislative successes more along the lines of common sense Kansas values. Rick Kloos in the Kansas Senate 3rd District has been a vital vote to defend those values, and voters there should send him back for another term.
At a time when the state of Kansas has tapped taxpayer wallets for unprecedented surpluses of cash, Kloos recognized the innate fairness of returning some of that money to its rightful owners through this past session’s legislative machinations – including finally exempting Social Security payments from state income tax. He’s pledged to push ahead on this effort as Kansas continues to rake in money more it simply doesn’t need to spend. Kloos supported open enrollment in Kansas schools to provide better educational opportunities for students, a precursor we hope to an eventual School Choice rewriting of Kansas education law. His votes along general conservative lines have notched scores as high as 88 percent on the rigorous Kansas Policy Institute’s Freedom Index voting evaluations of legislators each session.
His record has generated some powerful endorsements from organizations that recognize his value to the state. He gets a thumbs up from the Topeka Area Chamber of Commerce, from the Kansas Livestock Association, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the Kansas Farm Bureau PAC.
Conversely, the bevy of liberals recruited by Kelly’s “Middle Of The Road” political action committee tasked with thwarting conservatives’ veto-proof majority seeks to undo the good that’s been done and recognized statewide. Kloos’ Democrat opponent Dena Sattler, a graduate of the failed Harris Newspapers’ infamously liberal editor training program that tried for decades to foster East Coast liberalism in red counties through its once storied chain of publications (until their neglect of proper business practices eventually brought about the chain’s collapse) offers a throwback to the kind of Kansas leftism Kloos defeated in 2020 when 3rd District voters ousted the moss-covered Anthony Hensley.
Amid what will later this year be reported as Kansas’ record-breaking abortion statistics for 2023 after voters turned the state into a Midwest abortion destination, Sattler, like other abortion-obsessed liberals, continues to lament some alternative reality where Kansas legislators somehow keep trying to halt a woman’s “reproductive rights” after the state’s voters made their decision.
And as October yielded more news of the decline in Kansas ACT college testing scores, Sattler pledges her allegiance to the public education system that continues to devour more and more money and deliver worse and worse results. After recent legislative terms that delivered real results to Kansans in so many area, Sattler’s just the same decades-old failed Democrat song.
Kloos and other conservatives have truly delivered in the Kansas Legislature, and smart Kansans will vote to keep them there.
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.
