A photo taken early Friday morning showed a couple of Kansas House members shaking hands in a seemingly congratulatory gesture.

No one in the Kansas Legislature or the Kansas governor’s office should be congratulating themselves on this year’s legislative session or the manner in which the final tax bills eventually were passed.

The deadlock on a tax plan was broken at about 4 a.m. Friday when the Kansas House finally mustered the bare minimum of votes to pass two measures that will impose large tax increases on many Kansas residents, while continuing to protect the income tax exemption for businesses in the state.

Friday morning’s action came only after a coercive meeting on Thursday afternoon — a joint House-Senate meeting for Republicans only — during which Gov. Sam Brownback and his budget director threw out an array of threats for what could happen if the Legislature failed to approve tax increases. Among those was the outlandish proposal that the governor might use his line-item veto to completely cancel allocations for the state’s six universities. At some point, enough legislators apparently decided it wasn’t in the state’s best interests to risk leaving the decisions in the governor’s hands.

At no time during this debate did Brownback express willingness to compromise on his “march to zero” income tax cuts. Instead, he was focused on “consumption” taxes like sales tax. In 2010, the Legislature increased the state sales tax from 5.3 percent to 6.3 percent to deal with the impact of the national recession. Because they assumed the situation would be temporary, legislators agreed to a sunset provision that would reduce the sales tax to 5.7 percent in 2013. Instead of sunsetting the tax, the Brownback administration continued a sales tax of 6.15 percent in order to balance the state budget.

Now the state will raise that tax to 6.5 percent, but there is no sunset provision. That’s interesting, because if the governor truly believes that the state’s current revenue problems are only a short-term situation that will disappear when his income tax initiative provides that “shot of adrenaline” to the state economy, why wouldn’t he suggest setting a sunset date to eliminate the sales tax increase?

The House also decided to remove a provision to reduce the sales tax on groceries, which would have been a small bright spot for low-income Kansans. During the debate, the chairman of the House tax committee actually said that he favored delaying approval of the lower food sales tax until next session because “we’d like to be able to vote on that next January or February and have a nice positive thing to vote on.”

He and many of his colleagues must think Kansans have very short memories. What are the chances that legislators will decide next year that the state’s financial situation isn’t good enough to allow a reduction in the sales tax on groceries? Even if the tax on food is lowered, do legislators think Kansans will believe that is an adequate trade-off for the increased taxes they are paying in other areas?

The financial crisis that hit Kansas this year had been developing for years, ever since the passage of large income tax reductions started to erode state revenues. Faced with that crisis, Kansans were hoping to see some rational thinking and real leadership in Topeka. Unfortunately, they got little of either.