GOP vs. GOP: Kansas Republicans’ soul at stake in fight over minority group inclusion | Opinion

The Kansas Republican Party has a big problem at the moment.

Republicans.

Not all of them, maybe not even a majority of them. But there’s a faction that’s taken control of the state party apparatus, saying and doing some really self-destructive things.

If you don’t keep up on this stuff, here’s a synopsis:

At a February state committee meeting, Mike Brown was elected party chairman, 90-88.

You may remember Brown. A former Johnson County commissioner who, after losing that job, ran unsuccessfully last year against incumbent Scott Schwab in the GOP primary for Kansas secretary of state.

Brown attacked Schwab from the right. If you’d ever seen Schwab in action when he was a state legislator, you may ask how that’s even possible.

It is, if you jump on the “stop the steal” bandwagon with both feet, embracing and promoting election conspiracy theories and attacking mail voting and ballot drop boxes — Brown’s signature move.

His tenure as party chairman has been marked by paranoia and an effort to consolidate the power of his insurgent faction. This has alienated conservative, yet traditional Republicans who’ve been the backbone of the party for years.

Among Brown’s critics is his immediate predecessor, Mike Kuckelman. Brown accused the former GOP chairman of basically stalking him and his wife.

“Recently I have seen you around in multiple venues while I was with friends and family,” Brown wrote in an email to Kuckelman. “The number of times is concerning and more than what I believe to be a coincidence. As my wife feels very uncomfortable, I believe it is best we avoid each other to the maximum extent possible.”

But what’s really gotten Brown in hot water lately is an effort by his supporters to shrink the Republican State Committee and its influential executive committee, which would consolidate the power of the Brown faction.

As things stand now, those committees include representation from congressional and statewide officeholders, along with leaders of groups representing Black Republicans, Hispanic Republicans, young Republicans, college Republicans and Republican women.

A proposal from the party rules committee would take those seats away.

This got talked out Friday at the Wichita Pachyderm Club in a panel discussion, including Sedgwick County Clerk and former GOP state chairman Kelly Arnold, state Sen. Renee Erickson, Black Republican Talia Penn and Hispanic Republican Ben Sauceda.

The panelists weren’t taking the proposed rule changes lightly. “I’m still an American and I still have a right to be heard,” said Sauceda, a second-generation Hispanic American, chair of the Kansas chapter of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly and a Park City Council member.

Arnold serves on the rules committee and was on the short end of an 8-3 vote that advanced the changes. Brown has encouraged the committee to take another look at the plan, but Arnold said he doesn’t see that happening.

He said if the attempted purging of minority, women and elected voices had happened on his watch, he’d have removed his appointees and replaced them.

“Nobody would have thought of doing this when I was chairman,” he said.

But the effort to steer the party in the direction it’s going didn’t start with Brown. It started with Brownback.

In 2012, then-Gov. Sam Brownback didn’t like moderate Republicans getting in the way of his ill-advised and radical tax cut proposals, the brainchild of Koch Industries front groups and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce. They recruited and backed Brownback supporters in a concerted effort to purge the moderates in Republican primaries.

It worked. Numerous moderates, including then-Senate President Steve Morris, were voted out. The message was loud and clear: Back Brownback, or lose your seat.

I knew we were headed for a dark place when I’d cover the Capitol back then and hear the word “moderate” attached to people like former state senators Phil Journey, tireless champion of the National Rifle Association, or Dick Kelsey, Baptist pastor and pro-life crusader.

The Legislature has moved steadily rightward ever since to where it is today — veto-proof majorities in both houses and leadership that punishes members who step out of line.

It works in the carefully gerrymandered Legislature, but not as well at the macro level.

Cracks in GOP dominance began to show when voters soundly rejected the anti-abortion-rights “Value Them Both” constitutional amendment in August. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids won their elections in November, despite Republicans’ best efforts to unseat them.

Arnold and co-panelists at the Pachyderm meeting made a compelling case for minority representatives and elected officials to remain on the state leadership committees, saying that inclusion is vital to the party’s future, especially when it comes to fundraising.

Their comments were mostly well-received, but a few had other thoughts.

Pachyderm Ed Myers, wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Purge The RINOs” (short for Republican in Name Only), demanded to know if the panelists intended to invite gay Republican groups to have a seat on the party committees. He didn’t get an answer.

After the meeting, he explained that in his view, the Republicans are following a Democratic playbook by offering special representation to minorities in the party.

“We are promoting segregation,” he said. “We are pitting one group against another.”

Traditional conservatives find themselves in a pickle. They purged Morris and the moderates and rode that dark energy to near-dominance of Kansas politics.

But now, they find themselves in a spot where the farther-right might be ready to move on without them — and they could be on the outside looking in.

It’s brings to mind the popular group r/LeopardsAteMyFace on message board site Reddit, which started six years ago with the tweet: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

The group revels in telling stories of people suffering consequences from something they voted for, but that got out of control.

Arnold acknowledges that previous purges played a role in bringing the state party to its current crossroads. “Hopefully, over time, we have learned the lessons of mistakes of the past,” he said.

The rules committee majority members have asked for and been granted a speaking slot at the Pachyderm Club to tell their side of story, two weeks from now.

I can hardly wait.

Dion Lefler: 316-268-6527, @DionKansas