{"id":10673,"date":"2017-07-31T17:53:54","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T22:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=10673"},"modified":"2017-07-31T17:54:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T22:54:29","slug":"10673","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/07\/31\/10673\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s Your Reward For Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just to bring this particular story<\/a> to completion,\u00a0The Kansas City Star\u00a0<\/b><\/i>reports\u00a0<\/a>that Governor Brownback is moving on from Kansas:<\/p>\n

Gov. Sam Brownback will give up the governor\u2019s mansion in Topeka to take a relatively obscure ambassadorship after seeing his power and popularity severely diminished in the last year.<\/p>\n

The Kansas Legislature overrode Brownback\u2019s veto to\u00a0repeal his signature tax cuts<\/a>\u00a0a little more than a month before President Donald Trump\u00a0selected him<\/a>\u00a0to 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neither Democrats nor Republicans are sad to see him go.<\/p>\n

House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat, said his first reaction to the announcement was \u201cgood riddance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s left a lot of carnage and destruction, and he\u2019s also put the incoming governor in a tough spot,\u201d Ward said, noting that Kansas is awaiting a decision by the state\u2019s Supreme Court on the\u00a0<\/span>fate of a new school finance formula<\/a>.\u3000 …<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we truly know what that is yet,\u201d Koesten said. \u201cI think we\u2019ve seen the surface damage, but I don\u2019t know that we\u2019ve seen the depth of the damage. And I think it\u2019s going to take us a decade or more to figure that out and to fix it. So if that\u2019s a legacy, I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s a positive one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clay Barker, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said that while Brownback was controversial, he was a \u201cvery consequential governor.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite consequential for the\u00a0GOP<\/b><\/i>, because his experiment put their economic ideology to the test – and the ideology failed the test.<\/p>\n

Sarah Jones at\u00a0The New Republic\u00a0<\/b><\/i>thinks\u00a0<\/a>he’s ill-suited for his new position as at-large ambassador for international religious freedom:<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t a meaningless appointment, either. The ambassador-at-large heads State\u2019s\u00a0Office of International Religious Freedom.\u00a0<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

Which means Brownback, an arch-Christian conservative, is exactly the wrong choice for the role.\u00a0As governor, he signed a\u00a0useless ban<\/a>\u00a0on Shariah law that singled out the state\u2019s Muslim residents for no valid reason. He waged constant war on separation of church and state, especially\u00a0in public schools<\/a>, and consistently\u00a0promoted<\/a>\u00a0religious events and programming in his official capacity as governor.\u00a0His 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\u00a0a major priority.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Or perhaps we shouldn’t have such a position. From Sarah’s link to the US Dept of State:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0xenophobic<\/i>), 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just to bring this particular story to completion,\u00a0The Kansas City Star\u00a0reports\u00a0that Governor Brownback is moving on from Kansas: Gov. Sam Brownback will give up the governor\u2019s mansion in Topeka to take a relatively obscure ambassadorship after seeing his power and popularity severely diminished in the last year. The Kansas Legislature \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10673"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10675,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10673\/revisions\/10675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}