Just to bring this particular story to completion, The Kansas City Star reports that Governor Brownback is moving on from Kansas:
Gov. Sam Brownback will give up the governor’s mansion in Topeka to take a relatively obscure ambassadorship after seeing his power and popularity severely diminished in the last year.
The Kansas Legislature overrode Brownback’s veto to repeal his signature tax cuts a little more than a month before President Donald Trump selected him to serve as the next ambassador at-large for international religious freedom, a position based in Washington, D.C., where Brownback spent 16 years as a member of the U.S. House and Senate.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are sad to see him go.
House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat, said his first reaction to the announcement was “good riddance.”
“He’s left a lot of carnage and destruction, and he’s also put the incoming governor in a tough spot,” Ward said, noting that Kansas is awaiting a decision by the state’s Supreme Court on the fate of a new school finance formula. …
Rep. Joy Koesten, a Leawood Republican who was one of a slew of moderate Republicans swept into office in an anti-Brownback wave last year, said that lawmakers are going to be grappling for decades with the impact of Brownback’s policies.
“I don’t think we truly know what that is yet,” Koesten said. “I think we’ve seen the surface damage, but I don’t know that we’ve seen the depth of the damage. And I think it’s going to take us a decade or more to figure that out and to fix it. So if that’s a legacy, I’m not sure that it’s a positive one.”
Clay Barker, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said that while Brownback was controversial, he was a “very consequential governor.”
Quite consequential for the GOP, because his experiment put their economic ideology to the test – and the ideology failed the test.
Sarah Jones at The New Republic thinks he’s ill-suited for his new position as at-large ambassador for international religious freedom:
But this isn’t a meaningless appointment, either. The ambassador-at-large heads State’s Office of International Religious Freedom. Religious freedom is an integral plank in a broader human rights platform, and the position is also responsible for conducting outreach to various American religious groups.
Which means Brownback, an arch-Christian conservative, is exactly the wrong choice for the role. As governor, he signed a useless ban on Shariah law that singled out the state’s Muslim residents for no valid reason. He waged constant war on separation of church and state, especially in public schools, and consistently promoted religious events and programming in his official capacity as governor. His appointment sends a dangerous message, especially in light of a May speech delivered by Mike Pence that promised assembled religious leaders that the Trump administration considered global religious freedom a major priority.
I’m trying to see an atheist or an agnostic in the position, and I’m just not getting there. I suppose you need some religious person with a record of tolerance. Yeah, maybe Governor Brownback is moving out of his current crater just to dig another one?
Or perhaps we shouldn’t have such a position. From Sarah’s link to the US Dept of State:
The Office of International Religious Freedom has the mission of promoting religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The office is headed by the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. We monitor religious persecution and discrimination worldwide, recommend and implement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.
Leading to the always-delicate question of when “promoting” means “interfering,” and when “interfering” really means “rescuing from persecution.” Given how the current Administration has a certain, if confused, isolationist taste to it (or perhaps better yet would be xenophobic), I have to wonder how long the position will last before Bannon has it cut. And if I’d weep if it were cut. I’m a little conflicted…
