State Sen. Jean Schodorf, a moderate Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee and has held her office since 2001, has announced that she is leaving the Republican Party. She hasn’t made up her mind whether to become a Democrat or an independent, she told the Wichita Eagle.
Sen. Schodorf was one of the victims of Gov. Sam Brownback’s war on moderate Republicans in the Legislature. She was defeated in the August primary by Michael O’Donnell, a Wichita City Council member who was backed by the anti-tax, anti-government Americans for Prosperity (read David and Charles Koch), the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, which is also heavily supported by the Koch brothers, and Brownback.
In her statement, Sen. Schodorf said:
“My family has been Republican since Lincoln — since the party started. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents were all Republicans But it’s changed. There’s no room for people who actually think in moderation.
“I kept thinking, ‘We’re in the same party. Why are we crucifying ourselves?’”
That’s a good question with an apparent answer: Gov. Sam Brownback wants a Legislature that will pass his legislation. The Kansas House of Representatives became very conservative before Brownback became governor and welcomed his hard right agenda. The Senate was different. It was led by moderate Steve Morris and enough other moderates that the governor felt frustrated.
He responded by breaking all precedent and organizing challenges in the primary election to the senators he saw as roadblocks to his efforts to reshape Kansas government. He found well-heeled allies in the Koch brothers and the state Chamber of Commerce.
So Kansans were treated to the ugly spectacle of Republicans attacking Republicans in the August election.
CHANCES ARE Schodorf’s decision to leave the party will be welcomed by the new GOP majority, which sits far to the right of the Republican leaders who went before the present batch. She has been dismissed with a smear as a RINO — a Republican in name only.
Name-calling aside, traditional Republicans like Bill Graves, Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, James B. Pearson and, before them, Alf Landon, put Kansas on the national political map. Those leaders had national reputations as solid thinkers. Not one of them would win a Republican Party nomination in today’s political climate.
Today, the only Kansas politician of national standing is Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat who made her reputation as a progressive moderate two-term governor who was also an expert on health care issues.
Optimistic RINOS — who think things will get better after they get much worse — will not leave the GOP, but will stick with it until the rebirth. On some even-numbered year ahead, Kansas voters will come to the realization that a teensy-weensy state government gets teensy-weensy results and decide to rebuild Kansas from the wreckage now being made in Topeka.
Then the party will need to move back toward center and elect a band of builders to move into the Capitol and go to work.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.