Legislature screeches to a stop, flinging lousy bills everywhere. Now, the governor has to clean up.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins, right, confers with House Majority Leader Chris Croft at the start of the March 26, 2026, House session. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Statehouse)

The Kansas Legislature shuddered to a bone-crunching stop early Saturday, with the House and Senate coughing up a property tax proposal and then lumbering sheepishly away.

The spectacle of the Statehouse in its final week — both lawmakers and the bills they shredded like so many caffeinated zombies — left onlookers aghast. State budget director Adam Proffitt, not normally an overheated sort, savaged “the worst budget I’ve seen come through this building during my time.” I heard similar shocked exhortations from other onlookers, advocates and journalists.

Since returning to Kansas in the summer of 2016, I’ve tracked 10 legislative sessions. Each year tends to be worse than the one before, with more procedural chicanery and ideological stonewalling. But 2026 was something to behold.

Lame duck House Speaker Dan Hawkins clashed with rebellious Republicans in his chamber last week. The great sausage maker churned for hour after hour, with GOP members huddling behind closed doors as Democrats fumed.

Senate President Ty Masterson put nerves further on edge by ringing a bell outside the chamber, prompting opposition outrage.

(Kansas Reflector video)

Yes, it was ridiculous bordering on comic for a few days there.

By early Saturday, time had run out. The session that was rumored to end in early March had instead stretched nearly to month’s end, leaving business undone. Members might take another whack at property taxes when they return for a veto session next month, but they passed a budget and a handful of other important bills (a couple worthy, a couple less so).

Kansas Reflector will catch up throughout this week and next, making sure that you know everything that happened in those waning hours and how it affects you. Keep refreshing those browser windows.

 

House Speaker Dan Hawkins, left, and Senate President Ty Masterson converse at a Jan. 8, 2026, legislative meeting. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

The real problem

Behind the silliness skulks a monstrous problem.

What happened in Topeka last week exemplifies the brokenness of Kansas politics. Bills affecting the entire state were drafted on the fly, debated in minutes and voted on by lawmakers who hadn’t read the text.

This isn’t some sort of rhetorical hyperbole. This is what happened, day in and day out.

Republicans have the votes to pass whatever they want. This has been true for years. If they want to pass a budget that cuts all spending except a gargantuan yearly payment to Koch Industries for the privilege of sharing the state, they can do so. Voters elected the officials they elected, and those officials will vote as they see fit.

This perversion of institutional, legislative and ethical norms cannot — and should not — be stomached by any Kansan. We all lose. Conservatives, centrists, liberals and libertarians alike. Leaders instead short-circuit public input, committee and chamber debate, and the time needed to reach good decisions.

Bills pass. But no one knows or grasps the consequences. This betrays every Kansan who expects a government to serve them.

Next session, the House will elect new leaders. The Senate may have a new president, too, depending on how the gubernatorial election goes. The time will be ripe to reconsider — from top to bottom — how bills become law in the Sunflower State. Our shared future depends on doing better.

 

Claeys redux

Believe me, I’d love for a few weeks to pass without writing about Sen. Joe Claeys, R-Wichita.

Yet he keeps saying things on the Senate floor that I can’t ignore. If he can’t help it, then I can’t help it either. On Thursday night he grumbled about the final budget, particularly the removal of a $1 million transportation project funded by cuts to public broadcasting and the state’s art commission.

Commission funding was cut by $250,000 (down from a proposed $500,000), but lawmakers actually increased public media funding by $300,000.

Claeys knew who to single out while belting “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on the Senate floor: Me.

“We made the right decision,” he told Senate colleagues of the original proposal. “We funded that. This ride (program) was paid for by reducing a television subsidy. I was told it was a false choice. The Kansas Reflector called it a nonsensical class warfare. Fine. But we’re deficit spending in this budget, in the red by $700 million last I looked.”

You can watch the senator’s full colloquy in the video above. He’s hanging onto that false choice rhetoric like his life depends on it.

GOP senators and representatives chose to pass repeated rounds of tax cuts for the richest Kansans. Now Claeys argues that the arts have to be cut — not because they’re bad or don’t serve the public, but because he wants to support another program. But his colleagues’ inept budgeting got them into this mess, not PBS.

If lawmakers can cut taxes year after year, they can manage to locate the revenue to support multiple good things. That might make the Wichita senator happy, besides.

 

Gov. Laura Kelly answers a reporter’s questions during a Feb. 24, 2026, interview in her office at the Statehouse in Topeka. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

All eyes on Kelly

Now it’s Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s turn.

The Legislature dumped a steaming bag of odiferous legislation on the front porch of Cedar Crest and sped off into the darkness. She has to decide whether to bring some or all of the contents of that bag inside her home.

Given the rebellion against Hawkins in the House, most bills coming through the chamber recently have been short of veto-proof majorities. The Senate has hung together better, but strain has begun to show there as well. In the House, a bill needs 84 votes set in stone to become law over Kelly’s objections. In the Senate, it needs 27. But look at some of the recent totals on important bills.

That property tax measure passed the House 63-59 and the Senate 22-18, according to the Kansas City Star’s Matthew Kelly.

A duo of troublesome elections bills passed the House 80-43 and 78-45. Both whipped through the Senate 28-12.

The budget passed the House 67-53, while clearing the Senate 23-17.

Kelly can delete individual spending line items in the budget, so she might be tempted to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet when it comes to overall state spending. But she could still go for the gusto and veto the whole megillah. As for those other bills, she has room to wield that veto pen.

We’ll see what she does over these next two weeks.

Programming note: Statehouse Scraps will skip next week but will return to cover the April 9-10 veto session. I’ll see you then!

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.