InsaniTEA in Kansas

 Posted by at 12:01 am  Politics
Sep 212014
 

I trust that most of you are aware that the there will be no Democratic candidate for Senator from KS this year.  The Democrat dropped out and the Democratic party is supporting the Independent.  The Kansas Supreme Court has ruled that Kris Kobach, Republican Secretary of State. can not force the Democrat to stay on the ballot, and now the InsaniTEA is flying fast and furious.  First, here’s the background.

0921KobitchThe Senate race in Kansas may suddenly be the most crucial contest in the country. Republicans are scrambling to protect a longtime incumbent. Bob Dole is back on the campaign trail. The state’s Democrats have no candidate and are trying to say as little about that as possible. And a 45-year-old investor from suburban Kansas City may hold the key to control of the Senate in January.

At the beginning of the year, no one thought that Kansas — which has sent only Republicans to the Senate since 1938 — would be critical in determining the balance of the Senate. But a Kansas Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that allowed the Democratic nominee to withdraw his name from the ballot made that prospect real.

Democrats are celebrating the ruling. Their candidate may be off the ballot, but his departure benefits the investor, Greg Orman, who is running as an independent, and hurts the longtime Republican incumbent, Senator Pat Roberts, who had already been tripped up in his expected waltz to re-election.

A major factor in Mr. Roberts’s troubles has been the unexpected rise of Mr. Orman, who has been coy about his intentions if he should be elected, refusing to say if he would caucus with Democrats or Republicans. But his election has the potential of keeping the Senate out of Republican hands if the chamber is narrowly divided after the elections…

Inserted from <NY Times>

Next Kobach (pictured above) demanded that the Democrats put another candidate on the ballot, and claimed to have a waiver from the federal government to delay today’s deadline for finalizing the ballot and mailing it to overseas troops for one week.  But he lied.  He had never even asked for such a waiver. He gets worse from there, as Rachel Maddow explains.

Readers who cannot view clips fro, MSNBC can see this on YouTube.

The bottom line here is quite simple.  There’s a good chance Republicans will lose one they thought was in the bag.  They have nobody to blame but themselves.  And the level of hypocrisy to which Kobarf is going in order to steal it back boggles the mind!

Share

  16 Responses to “InsaniTEA in Kansas”

  1. My first reaction: INSANITEA!!!

    Kobach is no longer in Kansas.  He's in the Twilight Zone!

  2. Some Republicans are just batshit crazy and that's that.  But some – and I believe Kris falls in this group – wear a name, let us say unusual enough, that it puts them into the Boy Named Sue category, where besides just being batshit insane, they are also always trying to prove their manhood.  He can't be truthful about what the law says, he can't be truthful about what the court says, he can't be truthful about the waiver, because any of those admissions would weaken his control (in his own mind).  All of the admissions would destroy his manhood.  Yes, you know and I know there's not much there to destroy, but he seems to think there is.

  3. Has he been sniffing too much methane? I think it would be hilarious if most of the people who don't qualify to vote under his "new proposed rules" were TeapublicanTs.

  4. Can Mr. Orman go to Washington … and fix it?  If he holds true to what he believes "working with both paeties".  Maybe!  Put one thing is for sure the clowns who sleep with goats, will not have change to keep Kansas in the tonate that Kobach has been tring to create. 

  5. Kris Kobach Race: America’s Worst Republican May Lose His Office

    Kris is up for re-election in Kansas for 2014

    Why everyone must tune in to Kris Kobach’s race in Kansas

    The Kansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Democrat Chad Taylor could vacate his ballot spot in the Senate election, creating a two-man race between Republican Senator Pat Roberts and ex-Democrat-turned-Independent Greg Orman. That’s a victory for Kansas Democrats who believed that Orman has a much better chance of unseating Roberts than Taylor did, and it’s a setback for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who tried to block Taylor from removing his name.

    Kobach is running for re-election against Republican-turned-Democrat Jean Schodorf. Ordinarily, a race like this would be irrelevant in national politics, but Kobach is a crusader against illegal immigrants—and, by extension, most immigrants not of European extraction—and has used a minor state office to rewrite Kansas’s voting laws. He has long been associated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization founded by a proponent of eugenics and population control and funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded to promote “race betterment.” He is also quite effective, and even brilliant, at what he does.

    Kobach, who is now 48, grew up in Topeka. He went to Harvard, where he studied under Samuel Huntington, who at the end of a long and glorious career, had become obsessed himself with the threat that immigrants from the south posed to American civilization. Kobach wrote a prize-winning senior thesis on the efforts during the apartheid era of South African business to evade the effects of sanctions. He got a law degree from Yale and returned to Kansas where he practiced law in Kansas City and taught law at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

    In 2001, he joined the Bush administration, first as a White House fellow and then as an aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft, where he helped devise the national security visa system that required Muslims and Middle Easterners to register and be finger-printed. (It was suspended in 2011 because it had proved both ineffective and discriminatory.) In 2003, he returned to Kansas City, where he ran for Congress against Democratic incumbent Dennis Moore. He called for keeping out illegal immigrants and making English America’s official language. He lost, but six years later ran for secretary of state on a platform of preventing immigrant voter fraud.

    In the meantime, Kobach had become the senior counsel for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute. He remains today their senior counsel. With FAIR, Kobach helped write Arizona’s highly discriminatory immigration law, which required police to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally and advised other states, including Alabama, that have passed similar legislation. He also filed suit to prevent Kansas, Nebraska, and California from offering in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants, and he has defended laws in Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania that would make it illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants.

    In his 2010 campaign for secretary of state, he promised to stamp out voter fraud. (Kobach has been able to come up with one case—from 1997—that involved fraud by an undocumented immigrant.) After Kobach was elected, he got the Kansas legislature to pass and Governor Sam Brownback to sign a law that allowed him to rewrite the state’s election registration laws. Kobach adopted rules requiring all new registrants to show documented proof of citizenship to obtain Kansas registration. At the polls, all registered voters had to show photo identification.

    In the run-up to this year’s election, Kobach was able to disqualify almost 20,000 new registrants because they hadn’t proven their citizenship. These had to include many people (including a 92-year-old woman who appealed her denial) who for one reason or another didn’t have passports or birth certificates on hand. Kobach’s ruling created a weird two-tier system, where Kansans who had national voter registration, which only requires a registrant to swear that he or she is a citizen, could vote in congressional or senate selections, but unless they had a Kansas voter registration, which requires proof of citizenship, could not vote in a state or local race.

    There are, of course, anti-immigration nuts who don’t care about any other issues or about politics in general, but Kobach is also an avid partisan who was chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. His rulings on voter registration appear equally designed to help Republicans and to eliminate an alien presence in American life. His attempt to keep Taylor on the ballot—and his subsequent threat to force the Democrats to replace him on the ballot—reflects a diehard partisanship that shows little concern for legal niceties. In 2012, he even justified an attempt to keep Obama off the Kansas ballot on the grounds he had not proved his citizenship. And he is also a hardline rightwinger on the welfare state (he wants to remove Kansas entirely from the purview of the Affordable Care Act) and on guns, championing a law that has made guns produced in Kansas not subject to federal regulation. (He is a shareholder in a new Kansas gun firm aptly called Minuteman Defense.)

    Kobach is running again on his attempt to stamp out voter fraud, and enjoys the enthusiastic support of anti-Obama stalwart Ted Nugent. “The Leftists and commies are working overtime to defeat him in this year’s election,” Nugent warned. Kobach’s opponent, Schodorf, is a former Republican state senator who was ousted in the 2010 primary by a more conservative challenger backed by Brownback and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and Kansas Chamber of Commerce. She switched parties to run against Kobach. Schodorf has never run statewide before, and faces a two-to-one Republican edge in registration in a race that voters don’t normally pay attention to, but she has been running even in the polls and could benefit from the snafu over keeping Taylor on the ballot.

    If Schodorf does win, it will be a victory for American democracy and not simply the Democratic Party. Kobach is that bad. To be sure, there has always been a case to be made for better controlling American borders and for discouraging entry by undocumented workers, but Kobach’s position, like that of FAIR, edges into the dark corners of nativism. And his attempt to manipulate state election laws is quite simply an attempt to subvert the democratic process. Here’s to his defeat and banishment from elected office.

    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119514/kris-kobach-race-americas-worst-republican-may-lose-his-office
    .

  6. This reminds me of the "hanging chads" and the Secretary of State from Florida.  Who knew that such a minor title could give an egomaniac such power?  Hopefully, he will crash under his own weight, since he is determined to destoy the right to vote in Kansas.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.