The Atlantic: Kansas republicans rebel against Brownback in primary
Kansas Republicans Rebuke Their Conservative Governor
The verdict on Governor Sam Brownback’s self-described “real live experiment” in conservative economics came back a long time ago, delivered through a budget gap that grew steadily into a chasm. On Tuesday, Kansas voters in the governor’s own party issued their sentence in a primary-day rout.
Moderate Republican candidates ousted 14 conservative state legislators allied with the governor in primary elections across the state, while anti-Brownback contenders won nominations for open seats in another seven races. The results were widely seen as a repudiation of a second-term governor whose popularity has plummeted amid sustained budget gaps and ensuing sharp cuts in state spending. And they likely mean that the staunchly conservative state legislature in Topeka will move back toward the center in 2017, increasing the chances that lawmakers could roll back deep income-tax cuts that Brownback successfully enacted in his first years in office.
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Yet in spite of the Trump phenomenon, incumbent legislators have actually done quite well so far this year. Tea Party Representative Tim Huelskamp’s loss on Tuesday in Kansas’s 1st congressional district was just the second defeat for a sitting member of Congress who was not either under federal indictment or facing a fellow Republican congressman.
No, this Republican revolt was about Kansas, and a budget crisis that has spiraled out of control since Brownback and the state legislature slashed income taxes and exempted some 330,000 small business owners who file as individuals from paying state income taxes. The economic plan did not unleash the economic growth conservatives promised, and state budget revenues consistently fell short of projections.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/kansas-republicans-rebuke-their-conservative-governor-brownback/494405/
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