Once again the Kansas Legislature has completed its session without actually doing the work it should be doing. Once, again, we have a budget that does not balance and will require the governor to make cuts at his discretion without legislative guidance. The Legislature, so quick to condemn the Supreme Court for violating the principle of separation of powers and interfering in the Legislature’s work, violated this same principle by turning over its constitutional duties to the governor and then went home to hit the election trail.

I love Kansas. I have lived here for half my adult life and I have tried to be a good Kansan. It pains me when I see a group of politicians go about the process of destroying much that is the best of this state. Political advantage and self-interest have replaced responsibility. Lobbyists have replaced neutral experts. Cant and illusion have replaced facts and reality in the legislative halls in Topeka. To say that I find the whole thing depressing is to state the obvious.

When I become depressed about the ways in which the modern world is heading I tend to go back into the past and see what our forebears did in similar situations. In the case of our current hardhearted, hyper-political, cynical government leadership in Kansas today I think it is instructive to look back at Kansas at another time, a time when the economy was also problematic, but in which our governor and the Legislature took a very different tack. The following are quotes from the “Governor’s Message” of Gov. John W. Leedy, to the Kansas Legislature for 1895-96:

On social services and those who need them: “No class of people should receive the pity of their fellowman more than the inmates of our charitable institutions … all of them are human, born in the likeness of their Maker… Their care and comfort are a sacred duty imposed upon us by humanity and all the better elements of our nature.”

On education: “The public school system of Kansas is the best evidence of the character of our people and the best promise of our future …Ignorance and freedom never go hand in hand. The founders of this commonwealth were determined that Kansas should not be ignorant and should be free. In order to achieve that general intelligence which is essential to successful citizenship, it is absolutely necessary that we should maintain a system of public schools that shall give the youth of this state ample opportunity to fit themselves for the duty of citizenship. In dealing with the educational institutions of the state, no niggardly hand should be used, whether you touch the humble country school or enter the halls of the great state institutions.”

If we Kansans once believed these words –and I hope we still believe these words — it is time to do something to bring us back to what we once were, what we once aspired to be and still can be if we simply tell our elected representatives that it is time for a change. ?

— Mike Hoeflich, a distinguished professor in the Kansas University School of Law, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.