Laura Kelly risks her legacy hoping the GOP will meet her in the middle on tax cuts | Opinion

It’s make-or-break time for Laura Kelly.

The Kansas governor last week vetoed yet another tax cut plan from the GOP-controlled Legislature and announced that she will call a special session so that lawmakers can make one more — smaller — attempt at slashing taxes before the November election.

“If we all work together,” Kelly said in a statement, “an affordable, bipartisan tax plan can be passed in less than a day.”

Maybe. It’s worth noting, though, that legislators just finished a 90-day session without producing a tax plan that meets the governor’s demands. Getting the final mile might take a bit longer yet — if, indeed, a compromise can be found at all.

So yeah, “less than a day” sounds wildly optimistic.

It’s not just tax cuts that are at stake in the coming special session, though. It’s Kelly’s legacy as governor.

Right now, that legacy is largely defined by two factors. First is her leadership in helping pull Kansas out of the budget disaster left behind by former Gov. Sam Brownback’s famously ill-advised tax experiment of a decade ago. The second is the “meet me in the middle” persona she used to win gubernatorial elections twice as a Democrat in a resoundingly Republican state.

The special session pits those two elements against each other.

Why? Because Kelly clearly sees the tax cut options offered so far this year — a Republican-sponsored flat tax plan passed and vetoed during the early days of the session, then a pair of two-tier tax bills that passed on a bipartisan basis — as threatening the “fiscal responsibility” part of her legacy.

She wants to limit the tax cuts to $425 million a year. The most recent bill from the Legislature was projected to cost between $462 million and $472 million a year during the first five years.

Too much, Kelly said in her veto statement. Cuts that size “endanger all the progress we’ve made in restoring services for Kansans, funding our public schools, and investing in our infrastructure.”

No going back to the Brownbackian bad days, in other words. So she’s putting her foot down. And maybe that’s necessary.

But it’s a hard thing to do while also meeting in the middle.

Democrats worry about low-income Kansans

It’s also difficult for Kelly to continue claiming the middle ground when so many of her fellow Democrats in the Kansas House joined Republicans to pass the tax bill she just vetoed. Some of those Democrats are now openly fretting that she’s passed on the best chance to deliver tax relief for the state’s lowest-income earners.

It’s to be expected that Kelly isn’t on the same page as Republicans. But if she’s also not on the same page as a critical mass of Democrats — well, what’s left?

And where is the middle, exactly, in that scenario?

“I’ve been through different governors and I’ve been through different Houses and different speakers,” Democratic state Rep. Barbara Ballard, a 30-year vet of the Legislature, told The Star last month. “But I’ve never seen the frustration as high.”

All this amounts to a high-stakes gamble for Kelly. Even with a special session in place, there’s a risk that no deal at all gets done in a year where just about everybody was expecting tax cuts and extra money in their wallets come November. That would probably make voters cranky. Maybe that’s a small risk, given the desire on all sides to finish the job. But it’s a risk nonetheless.

More likely, though, is that Kelly gets the deal that she’s aiming for — Republicans aren’t going to give up on tax cuts just to make her look bad, are they? — but does so at a steep cost to her image as a compromise-ready moderate.

Kelly isn’t up for election this fall, and she can’t run for reelection two years from now. Maybe she doesn’t need that middle-of-the-road reputation anymore. Or maybe — maybe — she figures it’s worth risking a key element of her political persona to keep her fiscal legacy intact.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.