This time, it’s impeachable.
As if closing down the state’s businesses, churches and schools for no reason, trying to mandate useless masks on the populace and throwing women under the bus in the name of preference for sexual deviants in women’s athletics isn’t enough to disavow her oath of office, now Kansas Governor Laura Kelly blatantly defies the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” duly passed by the 2023 Kansas Legislature to protect women and girls and ensure gender truth in official state documents.
State legislators should do more than castigate her for violating the state constitution and her role as set forth within it. They should impeach her for dereliction of her official duty and violation of her oath of office.
Her public announcement that she won’t direct the Kansas Department of Revenue to require true-sex at birth statements on Kansas driver’s licenses as required by the Women’s Bill of Rights (SB 180) is evidence enough. Besides her public statements, the banner at the top of the KDOR web page is clear enough justification for impeachment and her removal from office.
In the meantime the rest of us are left wondering what’s next. Will Kalamity Kelly hold up a liquor store and somehow claim Kansas laws against armed robbery don’t apply to her?
So much for America’s constitutional premise of being a nation of laws, not of men. In that vein the lawsuit filed Friday by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is a good start but it’s not enough – the Kansas House should immediately bring forward articles of impeachment.
Impeachment of the governor isn’t new ground in Kansas. The state’s first Governor, Charles Robinson, was impeached in 1862 along with the then state treasurer and state auditor for authorizing a big commission on bonds sold by a third party with the intent of raising funds to pay for the operation of the fledgling Sunflower State.
Robinson found himself in the position of having to make a sweeter offer to sell those funding instruments at the time, because try as he might he couldn’t find buyers for bonds to fund the new state which investors viewed as barren plains – not to mention in the midst of a Civil War – without offering a whopper of an incentive. He survived his impeachment trial in the Senate after all the facts were considered.
Like her disastrous Covid policies, Kelly’s look-for-another-Liberal-with-an-answer programming has her following the lead established by other Democrats who think they can pick and choose what laws apply to them.
This time she proclaims a law she vetoed but which Legislators overrode –SB 180 – which sets down a scientific definition of male and female (yes, the Legislature actually had to spend time clarifying that), guarantees women their rights to privacy against the trespass of men who say they’re women, and requires one’s true sex be listed on his/her driver’s license – is a lesser law that’s somehow optional. Kelly thinks the text of the law includes a “but only if you feel like it” addendum at the end.
But that’s how Liberals view law and morality nowadays, as evidenced by a joint letter sent to Kansas school districts from the Kansas National Education Association teachers union and the ACLU, suggesting districts ignore SB 180. Why? Forget readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic; their educational priority is that boys are allowed to use girls’ restrooms.
Even Liberal prosecutors are in on the act. Douglas County prosecuting attorney Suzanne Valdez has publicly said she won’t prosecute anyone under SB 180. So much for the rights of women in Lawrence and Douglas County.
Such blatant disregard for bona fide law indicates a bigger threat to Leftism, and for Kelly and her ilk that’s terrifying. The intersectional coalition of leftist influencers sees their grasp on government, institutions and culture slipping away. Mind blowing decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on abortion, affirmative action and rejecting Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student loans have shaken them to their core; startling revelations even among some Lefties that government and Big Tech shouldn’t be manipulating and censoring speech with which they disagree, and the realization that Democrats will likely lose the presidency in 2024 has left them unmoored on seas they are increasingly unable to rule. The world they used to own is unraveling, and they’re scared to death.
In Kansas we should put another stick on that camel’s back, and send Laura Kelly home.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.