MONDAY, JULY 16, 2012
PAGE 20
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
POLITICS
Redrawn districts cause political problems
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOPEKA, Kan. — Each of Kansas' major political factions want voters to blame someone else for this year's bitter legislative wrangling over redrawn election districts, which ended up in federal court and could stick taxpayers with big legal bills.
Conservative Republicans, their moderate counterparts and Democrats all are working before the November election to get voters to buy their respective narratives about why a Legislature with huge Republican majorities couldn't pass a single new political map
to ensure equal representation. The redistricting stalemate led to a lawsuit, and three federal judges ended up redrawing congressional, legislative and State Board of Education districts to account for population shifts during the past decade.
The judges still must determine which legal bills will be covered by the state. Attorneys for 15 people who signed onto the lawsuit have filed requests totaling more than $669,000. The fiscal fallout is likely to get the most attention from voter-taxpayers.
stuck with this? This is not our fault," said House Speaker Mike O'Neal, a Hutchinson Republican and attorney who was involved in the lawsuit but hasn't asked to be reimbursed. "It's an election year, and everybody wants to make it political."
The redistricting impasse arose from a fierce internal struggle between moderate Republicans who currently control the state Senate and their conservative colleagues. The moderates have been skeptical and even openly critical of GOP Gov. Sam Brownback's initiatives to slash income taxes, overhaul the public pension system, remake appellate courts and change how the state finances public schools. The conservatives are looking to push back by gaining more seats in the
"They're going, 'Why are we being
"They're going, 'Why are we being stuck with this? This is not our fault.'"
MIKE O'NEAL
House Speaker
chamber come November.
Conservatives cast Senate Reapportionment Committee Chairman Tim Owens, a moderate Overland Park Republican, as the main villain in the redistricting saga. The first new Senate district map that cleared his committee drew three conservative GOP incumbents out of the districts of the
moderate incumbents they expected to challenge — including Owens' expected challenger, Rep. Greg Smith of Overland Park.
Smith had lived in the center of Owens' old district. But the first map positioned his home about a tenth of a mile beyond the district's northern boundary, West 87th Street, with the street sign just visible from Smith's front yard.
"I think a lot of people look at that as a gauntlet being thrown down," Smith said. Ultimately, the federal judges' lines separated him and Owens as Senate candidates, though both have primary contests.
Owens called it "almost laughable" to blame him for the legislative impasse. He said conservatives went into the redistricting debate hoping to punish their opponents. As for his committee's first map, he said West 87th Street routinely served as a boundary in Overland Park for city council and state House districts.
"There was a lot of stuff in the air before that," he said.
Democrats and GOP moderates eventually pushed Senate maps opposed by conservatives through that chamber. Conservatives, led by O'Neal, blocked them in the House. That move broke decades of tradition of one chamber not interfering with the other's
maps. So GOP moderates cast O'Neal as a key villain in the stalemate.
But O'Neal notes senators wouldn't act quickly on a bipartisan plan for new House districts after it cleared his chamber early in the session.
"They intended all along to hold it hostage," he said. "Should that behavior be rewarded? No, it shouldn't."
"It's crystal clear that this mess was caused by Brownback and the right wing of the Republican Party," said House Minority Leader Paul Davis, a Lawrence Democrat whose legal team has submitted $101,000 in expenses for reimbursement.
Davis and his fellow Democrats frame the impasse as Brownback fracturing the GOP so badly that it can't effectively govern. Moderates allege arrogant conservatives want to crush dissent. Conservatives' take is that out-of-touch moderates are desperate to cling to power that voters wouldn't want them to have. Each narrative serves larger political goals.
Brownback's response to Davis' comments points to what comes next.
"This is now in the hands of Kansas voters," he said.
RESEARCH
KSU professor finds new profiling info
It already was known that white women are less likely to be ticketed, searched or arrested than men. But The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that sociology doctoral candidate Jeremy Briggs found black and Hispanic women are ticketed, arrested or searched during traffic stops more often than white women and at a level comparable to white men.
"What I found in the case of traffic stops was that racial differences are deeply gendered as well," he said. This connection should be a part of the larger racial profiling discussion."
TOPEKA, Kan. — A Kansas State University researcher's analysis has found that racial profiling is intertwined with gender.
Briggs said black drivers overall were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be arrested. The rate was even higher among black men, with them 2 1/2 times as likely as white men to be arrested.
Briggs said he became interested in racial profiling as a dissertation topic in 2008 while teaching a Police in Society class at Kansas State.
He based his findings on an analysis of the 2005 Police Public Contact Survey, which is collected every three years, serves as a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey and is sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Now Briggs is in the process of updating his findings based on the 2008 survey, which was released a few months ago.
For his research, Briggs studied reasons for the traffic stops, such as speeding, stop sign violations and drunken driving check lanes. He also looked at the outcomes of the traffic stop, such as a ticket, warning, search or arrest.
"The real issue I'm trying to get across is that race is only one part of the (racial profiling) story," he said. "When you consider gender as well as race, you get a different picture. It's not as clear as when you keep race and sex separate.
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