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Kansas Liberty: 19 February 2009
ANALYSIS: In sorting out the conflicting claims, it was down to she-said, they-said. One side or the other was playing political games with state money. Kansas was the loser.
Was the 'no-tax-refund' emergency a manufactured crisis?
Everyone agrees the cash-flow crisis that broke over Kansas earlier this week came in the wake of several related events.
- The state really did run out of cash.
- The necessary certificate permitting additional internal borrowing either could not or would not be signed by legislative leaders.
- The Financial Council meeting scheduled to discuss the certificates was canceled.
- The governor, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a press release saying the state could not issue income tax refunds or pay state workers or fund a raft of social programs. She blamed this on the Legislature.
- The state's media ran with the no-tax-refund headline and provided almost no other useful context to the story for at least 12 hours, by which time the story had been catapulted, via the Drudge Report, into the national spotlight.
In a series of statements and flurry of documents, the legislative leadership attempted to explain its side of the story, burdened as it was by explanations of legality and apparent surprise that the governor had not taken advantage of established procedures to solve the cash-flow problem long ago.
The governor's office responded with statements of their own, including a personal letter sent by Sebelius to every state worker urging them to complain to the Legislature. She claimed the Legislature was trying to force her to sign a budget bill that she hadn't yet received.
Yet the budget bill arrived on her desk in the time normally given for such things. In fact, according to sources in the Legislature, if anything, it was rushed through to get to her as quickly as possible.
Kansas Liberty has assembled documents that reveal the two versions of the truth in this week's political melodrama.
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Statements from the House leadership on the sequence of events and on the need for action.
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A statement from the governor's office on the inability of the state to meet its financial responsibilities and a letter sent to all state employees on the possibility of missing the state payroll.
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