Tag Archives: politics

House GOP ousts Trump critic Liz Cheney from top post

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WASHINGTON (AP) – House Republicans ousted Rep. Liz Cheney from her post as the chamber’s No. 3 GOP leader on Wednesday, punishing her after she repeatedly rebuked former President Donald Trump for his false claims of election fraud and his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Meeting behind closed doors for less than 20 minutes, GOP lawmakers used a voice vote to remove Cheney, R-Wyo., from the party’s No. 3 House position, a jarring turnabout to what’s been her fast-rising career within the party.

She was Congress’ highest-ranking Republican woman and is a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and her demotion was the latest evidence that challenging Trump can be career-threatening.

Cheney has refused to stop repudiating Trump and defiantly signaled after the meeting that she intended to use her overthrow to try pointing the party away from the former president.

“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” she told reporters.

Cheney’s replacement was widely expected to be Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who entered the House in 2015 at age 30, then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Stefanik owns a more moderate voting record than Cheney but has evolved into a vigorous Trump defender who’s echoed some of his unfounded claims about widespread election cheating.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP) – House Republicans seem ready to toss Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post after she repeatedly rebuked former President Donald Trump for his false claims of election fraud and his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.

GOP lawmakers gathered privately in the Capitol Visitor Center on Wednesday and were expected to vote to remove Cheney, R-Wyo., from the party’s No. 3 House position, a jarring turnabout to what’s been her fast-rising career within the party. She is Congress’ highest-ranking Republican woman and a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and her demotion would provide the latest evidence that challenging Trump can be career-threatening.

In an audacious signal that she was not backing down, Cheney took to a nearly empty House chamber Tuesday evening to deliver an unapologetic four-minute assault on her GOP adversaries and defense of her own position.

“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said, adding, “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”

Cheney’s replacement was widely expected to be Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who entered the House in 2015 at age 30, then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Stefanik owns a more moderate voting record than Cheney but has evolved into a vigorous Trump defender who’s echoed some of his unfounded claims about widespread election cheating.

It was initially unclear when the separate vote on Cheney’s replacement would be.

Stripping Cheney, 54, of her leadership job would stand as a striking, perhaps historic moment for the GOP.

One of the nation’s two major parties was in effect declaring an extraordinary admission requirement to its highest ranks: fealty to, or at least silence about, Trump’s lie that he lost his November reelection bid due to widespread fraud. In states around the country, officials and judges of both parties found no evidence to support Trump’s claims that extensive illegalities caused his defeat.

It’s been clear that Cheney’s days in leadership were numbered as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., No. 2 leader Steve Scalise, R-La., joined Trump and other Republicans from across the party’s spectrum aligned against her.

Critics said Cheney’s offense wasn’t her views on Trump but her persistence in publicly expressing them, undermining the unity they want party leaders to display as they message in advance of next year’s elections, when they hope to win House control.

“It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about the focus” of House Republicans, Scalise said Tuesday.

Many Republicans also agree with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’s said the allegiance many GOP voters have to Trump is so intense that the party can’t succeed without him.

A small number of Republicans have spoken out against removing Cheney.

“It will do nothing but drive some people away from our party,” said Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee and one who has clashed often with Trump.

Seemingly conceding that the numbers were against her, Cheney made no discernible effort to cement support ahead of Wednesday’s vote, several Republicans said.

Rather, she all but erected billboards advertising her clash with Trump, declaring in a Washington Post column last week, “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

Cheney has told Republicans she intends to remain in Congress and seek reelection next year in her solidly pro-Trump state. The former president has said he’ll find a GOP primary challenger to oppose her.

Cheney arrived in Congress in 2017 with a well-known brand as an old-school conservative, favoring tax cuts, energy development and an assertive use of U.S. power abroad. By November 2018 she was elected to her current leadership job unopposed and seemed on an ambitious pathway, potentially including runs at becoming speaker, senator or even president.

She occasionally disagreed with Trump during his presidency over issues like his withdrawal from Syria and attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci over the pandemic. But her career hit turbulence in January once she became one of 10 House Republicans to back his second impeachment for inciting his supporters’ deadly Capitol assault of Jan. 6. The Senate acquitted him.

In a memorable statement before the House impeachment vote, Cheney said: “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”

Her words – and her pre-vote announcement, which allowed Democrats to cite her opposition during the debate – infuriated many House conservatives.

She withstood a February effort by conservatives to boot her from leadership in a 145-61 secret ballot, but a McCarthy speech on her behalf is credited with saving her. That wasn’t expected to happen this time.

Since then, she’s stood by her views, in one noteworthy incident while McCarthy stood awkwardly nearby at a news conference.

Stefanik also arrived in Congress with sterling GOP establishment credentials. A Harvard graduate, she worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and for the campaign of the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, Wisconsin Rep. and later Speaker Paul Ryan.

Her district, bordering Canada and Vermont, voted twice for Barack Obama and then twice for Trump in the past four presidential elections. She opposed Trump’s trademark 2017 tax cut and his efforts to unilaterally spend billions on his southwestern border wall.

Stefanik grabbed center stage as a fierce Trump defender in 2019 as the House impeached him over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to produce damaging information about Joe Biden, his Democratic rival. Senate acquittal followed.

While Stefanik has won adoration from Trump, some of Washington’s hardest-right conservatives have remained suspicious of her moderate record.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote colleagues Tuesday chastising “Republicans who campaign as Republicans but then vote for and advance the Democrats’ agenda once sworn in.”

No Stefanik challenger has yet emerged, and other conservatives like Scalise and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, are in her camp.

“We have a great deal of support from the Freedom Caucus and others,” she said Tuesday.

Missouri lawmakers pass gas tax hike

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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – Republican lawmakers in Missouri have passed a bill to raise the gas tax for the first time in decades.

The GOP-led House on Tuesday voted 104-52 to gradually raise Missouri’s 17-cent gas tax to pay for road and bridge maintenance. If signed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson, the measure would raise the tax by 2.5 cents a year until it hits 29.5 cents per gallon in 2025. Drivers could get a refund if they save their gas receipts.

Some GOP lawmakers argued the tax hike will impact poor families the most.

Kansas House approves medical marijuana; Senate won’t follow

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By ANDY TSUBASA FIELD Associated Press/Report for America

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas House voted for the first time Thursday to legalize medical marijuana in the state, but Republican leaders signaled the Senate wouldn’t consider the bill in the final days of the legislative session.

Before the House advanced the measure on a 79-42 vote, Senate President Ty Masterson’s spokesperson, Mike Pirner, told The Associated Press that a budget bill and school funding legislation have emerged as higher priorities for the Senate this week.

Thirty-six states allow medical marijuana and Kansas is only one of three states without a comprehensive medical or recreational marijuana program, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures website. Some Kansas lawmakers in favor of the bill said the state shouldn’t wait for the federal government to act.

“Kansans are tired of waiting on Kansas being last, or falling behind other states on major issues such as this. And it’s time we end that and we show our people that Kansas can do it better,” said Rep. Adam Thomas, an Olathe Republican.

The House vote Thursday marked the first time Kansas legislators passed a bill to legalize medical marijuana in either chamber, according to the Legislature’s research staff. Before a House panel approved the bill in March, previous proposals had failed to even pass out of committee.

The bill would allow patients and caregivers to register to get medical marijuana identification cards for a list of conditions that include cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The measure would have also set up a licensing process for growers and dispensary owners. Medical marijuana could be sold as oils, tinctures, patches or potent edibles, but not in smoking or vaping products.

During Thursday’s debate, support came mostly from Democrats and some Republican lawmakers who said many of their constituents support medical marijuana legalization. But some GOP House members expressed concern that passing the bill into law would be the first step to legalizing recreational pot, and a few others adamantly opposed the bill, calling marijuana a dangerous “gateway” drug.

Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican, said he was concerned that passing the bill into law would set up the infrastructure for recreational marijuana.

“With these dispensaries, all they got to do is, you know, change your name to ‘pot store’ from ‘dispensary’ and they’re ready to go,” Proctor said.

Before the measure made its way to the House, the bill received pushback, mainly from law enforcement groups that say that there’s not enough evidence that marijuana can treat medical conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

During the debate, some Republican lawmakers cited that the federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD, with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.

Rep. Russ Jennings, a Republican from Lakin in southwest Kansas, said that Kansas should have waited for Congress to act on medical marijuana legalization before debating on the bill. He called passing the bill a “terrible message in a nation that is governed under the rule of law.”

But medical marijuana advocates note it’s been tough to get evidence due to pot’s legal status in the U.S. Parents of children with disabilities have testified to lawmakers that marijuana would help relieve symptoms such as seizures. Veterans pushing for the bill say marijuana has reduced trauma-induced dreams by helping them get a deep sleep.

The bill would require physicians to have a six-month relationship with a patient before recommending marijuana, with an exception for military veterans.

Local government officials would be able to ban dispensaries in their jurisdictions.

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Andy Tsubasa Field is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

GOP leaders, governor negotiating over Kansas school funding

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By JOHN HANNA AP Political Writer

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Top Republican legislators and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly negotiated Thursday over funding for Kansas’ public schools and proposals aimed at helping some parents send their children to private schools.

Conservative Republicans have tried to tie an increase in aid to the state’s 286 local public school districts to “school choice” initiatives but have been unable to pass a bill with that combination. Democrats and education groups would prefer to provide the money with no new strings.

Kelly’s office and GOP leaders hadn’t reached a deal as of Thursday afternoon. However, legislative leaders where hopeful enough to appoint three senators and three House members to draft the final version of an education funding and policy bill with whatever the governor and top Republicans eventually work out.

The Republican-controlled Legislature cannot wrap up its business for the year without finishing work on a spending blueprint for state government approaching $21 billion for the budget year that begins July 1. Funding for public schools would account for $5.2 billion in spending.

“It’s just a back and forth,” said House Speaker Ron Ryckman Jr., an Olathe Republican, who is involved in the talks with Kelly.

Ryckman and other GOP legislative leaders hoped lawmakers could finish the year’s business late Friday or on Saturday, but lawmakers on Thursday still had to hash out numerous budget and policy issues.

Those issues included additional funding for the state’s court system, pay raises for state government employees and additional funding for higher education.

Kelly proposed an increase in education funding of $263 million, or 5.3%, in line with a law enacted in 2019 to resolve a 2010 lawsuit against the state brought by four school districts. That lawsuit remains before the Kansas Supreme Court, and Democrats believe failing to provide as money as Kelly has recommended will prompt the justices to intervene.

“I want to keep us out of court,” said Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Republican.

The House last month approved a bill containing Kelly’s spending, but it also passed a proposal from conservative Republicans that would send education funds to education savings accounts for academically troubled students that could be used to pay for private schooling. The bill also would have expanded a program that gives a state income tax credit for donations to scholarship funds that help at-risk students attend private schools.

Democrats and education groups argue that education savings accounts potentially could siphon tens of millions of dollars from public schools.

“The education savings account piece is extremely problematic and needs to go,” said Mark Desetti, a lobbyist for the state’s largest teachers union.

House Republicans’ combination of proposals failed in the Senate on a 20-20 vote last month, lessening some conservatives’ expectations for what can pass. Sen. Beverly Gossage, a Eudora Republican, said giving parents a choice of where to send their children to school is important because not all students flourish in public schools.

But, she added, “We do have to have something that will pass.”

Yet some Republicans haven’t given up on getting some version of their initiatives tied to public school funding.

“I think there will be good policy in it,” said Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican and chair of a House committee on education funding.

The debate is complicated by questions about higher education funding.

Kelly’s budget director, Adam Proffitt, told lawmakers in a memo Sunday that the U.S. Department of Education is requiring states to maintain “historic funding” for higher education to receive their full share of coronavirus relief funds.

Proffitt recommended an additional $53 million for the next budget and $106 million more for the budget year beginning July 1, 2022. Some Republicans are skeptical, and lawmakers were negotiating among themselves Thursday.

Missouri House votes to crack down on highway protests

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COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – The Missouri House has passed legislation to crack down on protesters who block roadways. The Republican-led House voted 98-50 to pass the bill.

The legislation would make repeatedly blocking traffic a felony. The tactic is often used to draw attention to racial injustice. Protesters angered by the death of George Floyd blocked traffic on Interstate 70 in the St. Louis area last summer. The House also amended the bill to cram in provisions from dozens of other loosely related bills.

The number of changes made to the Senate bill likely means negotiators will pare it back in the final version.

Facebook board upholds Trump suspension

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Former President Donald Trump won’t return to Facebook — for now.

The social network’s quasi-independent Oversight Board voted to uphold his ban from the platform after his account was suspended four months ago for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

While upholding the suspension, the board faulted Facebook for the way it made the decision.

“It was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension,” it said.

The board agreed with Facebook that that two of Trump’s Jan. 6 posts “severely violated” the content standards of both Facebook and Instagram.

“We love you. You’re very special,” he said in the first post, and “great patriots” and “remember this day forever” in the second. Those violated Facebook’s rules against praising or supporting people engaged in violence, the board said.

The board says Facebook has six months to reexamine the “arbitrary penalty” it imposed on Jan. 7 and decide on another penalty that reflects the “gravity of the violation and the prospect of future harm.”

The board says the new penalty must be “clear, necessary and proportionate” and consistent with Facebook’s rules for severe violations.

The board says if Facebook decides to restore Trump’s accounts, the company must be able to promptly address further violations.

Trump has also been permanently banned from Twitter.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

Since the day after the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump’s social media accounts have been silent — muzzled for inciting violence using the platforms as online megaphones.

On Wednesday, his fate on Facebook, the biggest social platform around, will be decided. The company’s quasi-independent Oversight Board will announce its ruling around 9 a.m. ET. If it rules in Trump’s favor, Facebook has seven days to reinstate the account. If the board upholds Facebook’s decision, Trump will remain “indefinitely” suspended.

Politicians, free speech experts and activists around the world are watching the decision closely. It has implications not only for Trump but for tech companies, world leaders and people across the political spectrum — many of whom have wildly conflicting views of the proper role for technology companies when it comes to regulating online speech and protecting people from abuse and misinformation.

After years of handling Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric with a light touch, Facebook and Instagram took the drastic step of silencing his accounts in January. In announcing the unprecedented move, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the risk of allowing Trump to continue using the platform was too great.

“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 7.

A day before the announcement, Trump unveiled a new blog on his personal website, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” While the page includes a dramatic video claiming, “A BEACON OF FREEDOM ARISES” and hailing “A PLACE TO SPEAK FREELY AND SAFELY,” the page is little more than a display of Trump’s recent statements — available elsewhere on the website — that can be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter, the platforms that banished him after the riot.

While Trump aides have spent months teasing his plans to launch his own social media platform, his spokesman Jason Miller said the blog was something separate.

“President Trump’s website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform,” he tweeted. “We’ll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future.”

Barred from social media, Trump has embraced other platforms for getting his message out. He does frequent interviews with friendly news outlets and has emailed a flurry of statements to reporters through his official office and political group.

Trump has even said he prefers the statements to his old tweets, often describing them as more “elegant.”

Facebook created the oversight panel to rule on thorny content on its platforms following widespread criticism of its difficulty responding swiftly and effectively to misinformation, hate speech and nefarious influence campaigns. Its decisions so far — all nine of them — have tended to favor free expression over the restriction of content.

In its first rulings, the panel overturned four out of five decisions by the social network to take down questionable material. It ordered Facebook to restore posts by users that the company said broke standards on adult nudity, hate speech, or dangerous individuals.

Critics of Facebook, however, worry that the Oversight Board is a mere distraction from the company’s deeper problems — ones that can’t be addressed in a handful of high-profile cases by a semi-independent body of experts.

“Facebook set the rules, are judge, jury and executioner and control their own appeals court and their own Supreme Court. The decisions they make have an impact on our democracies, national security and biosecurity and cannot be left to their own in house theatre of the absurd,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit critical of Facebook. “Whatever the judgement tomorrow, this whole fiasco shows why we need democratic regulation of Big Tech.”

Gautam Hans, a technology law and free speech expert and professor at Vanderbilt University, said he finds the Oversight Board structure to be “frustrating and a bit of a sideshow from the larger policy and social questions that we have about these companies.”

“To some degree, Facebook is trying to create an accountability mechanism that I think undermines efforts to have government regulation and legislation,” Hans said. “If any other company decided, well, we’re just going to outsource our decision-making to some quasi-independent body, that would be thought of as ridiculous.”

Sen. Jerry Moran tours Parsons Cytocheck Laboratory

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PARSONS, Kan. – U.S. Senator Jerry Moran made a stop in Parsons, Kansas.

Among his stops was Cytocheck Laboratory. The lab provides pathology services to doctors offices.

“If you want rural America to grow and our kids to stay or to return home, these kinds of opportunities are ways that we can do it,” said Sen. Moran. “So from a health public safety point of view, (it’s) great to see this laboratory and what they do from the growth of Parsons, Kansas. It’s great to see these employment opportunities are here.”

During the pandemic, the lab got permission to process COVID-19 tests for local hospitals and providers.

Kansas lawmakers override vetoes on taxes, guns, elections

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republican lawmakers on Monday cut Kansas’ income taxes, lowered the age for carrying a concealed gun and tightened state election laws by overriding Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of those measures.

A series of votes in the GOP-controlled Legislature demonstrated that its Republican supermajorities can control policy — and push the state back to the right — if they hold together. Centrist and left-of-center activists took Kelly’s election in 2018 as a sign that voters were repudiating conservative management of state government, but elections in 2020 moved the Legislature to the right.

“They listened to folks back home,” House Speaker Tem Blaine Finch, an Ottawa Republican, said of GOP lawmakers. “It’s because of, really, the grassroots in their communities telling (them), ‘Hey, this is important to us.’”

But Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Democrat, derided the “veto override-a-rama.”

“Today leaves no doubt: The Kansas Legislature is more extreme than ever,” she said in a statement.

Republican leaders realized their goal of tax relief for individuals and businesses that have been paying more in state income taxes because of changes in federal tax laws at the end of 2017. The measure will save Kansas taxpayers about $284 million over three years.

The vote to override Kelly’s veto was 30-10 in the Senate, giving GOP leaders three votes more than the two-thirds majority needed. The House vote was 84-39, the exact number of required yes votes.

A key change will allow people to claim itemized deductions on their state returns even if they don’t on their federal returns. The federal tax changes in 2017 discouraged itemizing, making some Kansans unable to itemize on their state returns.

“This bill corrects a huge injustice for our middle-income taxpayers,” said Republican Sen. Jeff Longbine, of Emporia.

Democrats criticized the bill because it also contained tax relief for some large businesses. Kelly vetoed two tax-cutting bills in 2019, and she called this year’s bill “reckless” and “short-sighted.”

She suggested Republicans were moving back toward a nationally notorious tax-cutting experiment in 2012 and 2013 under then-GOP Gov. Sam Brownback. Those cuts were followed by persistent budget shortfalls and were mostly repealed in 2017.

“It’s as if legislative leaders want to return to the days of budget crises,” Kelly said in a statement. “I’ve never met a Kansan who wants that.”

The Legislature overrode Kelly’s veto of a bill that would create a special concealed carry permit for 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds, and that’s a major victory for gun-rights advocates. The state already allows people 21 and older to carry concealed guns without a permit and adults can carry them openly, but Kelly’s election had advocates of tougher gun laws hoping for a roll back of Kansas’ generally loose policies.

The votes were 84-39 in the House and 31-8 in the Senate. The measure also expands Kansas’ recognition of other states’ concealed carry permits.

Republicans overturned Kelly’s veto of an elections bill making it harder for individuals and groups to collect absentee ballots and deliver them for voters. It will be a misdemeanor for someone to collect and return more than 10 ballots.

The votes were 85-38 in the House and 28-12 in the Senate.

GOP lawmakers said they are preventing fraud, arguing that the more people who handle absentee ballots, the more likely those ballots are to go missing or be altered.

“Having someone cherry pick whose ballot gets picked up and turned in is not appropriate,” Finch said.

But Republicans are curbing a practice used by some Democrats and Democratic-leaning groups for decades to help disabled, elderly and poor voters.

“We should be making it easier for people to legitimately vote,” said Rep. Brett Parker, an Overland Park Democrat.

Republicans also overrode Kelly’s veto of a bill expanding the number of specialty license plates available to drivers willing to pay an extra fee. The votes were 86-37 in the House and 28-12 in the Senate.

The governor and other Democrats objected to a provision allowing a special plate featuring a coiled snake and a “Don’t Tread on Me” slogan. They’re featured on what’s known as the Gadsen flag, after its Revolutionary War-era creator, who owned a wharf where an estimated 100,000 African slaves arrived. Critics also see the flag as a symbol of white supremacist and alt-right groups.

Supporters of the bill rejected those associations. The money raised by the $25 fee would go to the Kansas State Rifle Association.

Push against trans athletes in girls’ sports fails in Kansas

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Conservative Republicans in Kansas failed Monday to overturn the Democratic governor’s veto of a proposed ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, unable to convert successes in other states or Caitlyn Jenner’s support into enough momentum.

The state Senate voted 26-14 to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto, leaving supporters a single vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Senators’ decision blocked a vote in the House.

Kansas became the second state within two weeks, after North Dakota, where a legislature with Republican supermajorities failed to override a GOP governor’s veto of such a measure. Lawmakers in more than 20 states have considered such bans, and they’ve become law in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia after Idaho enacted one last year. Florida lawmakers recently approved such a measure, and South Dakota’s governor imposed a policy by executive order.

The vote in Kansas came two days after Jenner, the former Olympic decathlon champion and reality television figure who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, said she opposes transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports as a “question of fairness.” Kansas conservatives seized upon her comments to a TMZ reporter in arguing that they were trying to protect fair competition and opportunities for female athletes.

“No one can accuse her of being anti-trans or interested in causing suicides, or whatever accusation they had of me for that,” Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican, told reporters before the vote.

Kelly had called the proposed ban “regressive,” said it would send a message that Kansas was not a welcoming place and predicted it would hurt the state’s attempts to recruit businesses. LGBTQ-rights advocates said it would increase bullying of already vulnerable children.

“We’re not going to legislate discrimination here,” said state Rep. Stephanie Byers, a Wichita Democrat and the state’s first transgender lawmaker. “It’s going to be tough thing to fight, but we’re always going to do it.”

Many transgender-rights advocates have criticized Jenner, saying she has failed to convince them that she is a major asset to their cause. Byers suggested that Jenner is trying get attention for herself.

The proposed ban is likely to be an issue in the 2022 governor’s race, when Kelly seeks a second term. The top two Republican candidates, Attorney General Derek Schmidt and former Gov. Jeff Colyer, have said they would have signed the measure.

Kelly ran as a centrist in 2018 against polarizing conservative Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state nationally known for advocating restrictive immigration policies and tough voter identification laws. Republicans already have started trying to paint Kelly as a liberal and see her veto of the measure on transgender athletes as evidence of that.

“It shows her true, far-left leanings,” said state Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican, a former college basketball player and the bill’s main sponsor. “I think if we make it about what it truly is — it’s protecting those opportunities for girls — that those are Kansas values and that at the end of the day, it will hurt the governor politically.”

Supporters of such proposals across the U.S. generally have been unable to cite local examples of problems. The association overseeing extracurricular activities in Kansas K-12 schools says it has been notified of only five active transgender participants in extracurricular activities, and there is no known case of a transgender athlete having won a Kansas championship.

“After a long reputation of being anti-LGBT, this state is making progress on rights for LGBT people, and it’s making progress on rights for transgender people,” said Tom Witt, executive director of the LGBTQ-rights group Equality Kansas, after tears of relief over the vote.

The decisive factor may have been a concern that sports bodies such as the NCAA would avoid scheduling tournament games in Kansas. Kansas City, Kansas, Sen. David Haley, the only Democrat who was wavering, cited that issue to reporters in explaining his no vote.

Haley previously abstained on the measure, but the Senate forced him to vote Monday. He wrestled with his decision, hashing over both sides’ arguments in an extraordinary six-minute speech.

“David Haley can’t win in this discussion,” he told his colleagues.

Oklahoma House OKs ban on teaching critical race theory

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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – Oklahoma public school teachers would be prohibited from teaching certain concepts of race and racism under a bill given final approval by the state House on Thursday.

The GOP-controlled House voted 70-19 for the bill that prohibits teaching of so-called “critical race theory.”

“Students are being taught that because they’re a certain race or sex, they’re inherently superior to others or should feel guilty for something that happened in the past,” said Rep. Kevin West, a Moore Republican who sponsored the bill. “We’re trying to set boundaries that we as a state say will not be crossed when we’re teaching these kinds of subjects.”

Among the concepts that would be prohibited are that individuals, by virtue of race or gender, are inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Some Republicans expressed concerns that public school children are being indoctrinated into thinking that white people are inherently racist or sexist.

Democrats said the bill was a waste of time and addressed a non-existent problem.

“Instead of focusing on the real issues facing Oklahomans, the majority party continues their attack on anyone in Oklahoma who might not look, think, love, or act like them,” said House Minority Leader Rep. Emily Virgin, a Democrat from Norman.

The bill is similar to measures signed into law in Utah and Arkansas.

The measure would also prevent colleges and universities from requiring students to undergo training on gender or sexual diversity. Virgin, whose district includes the University of Oklahoma, said that provision is particularly troubling because the university is one of several in the state that provides training on gender and sexual diversity and for incoming students.

“That’s what freshman orientations are about: making it clear that this is an inclusive space and inclusive environment and no one should be made to feel that they don’t belong,” Virgin said. “To say in this building that we should prohibit that sort of training goes against the very fabric and very idea of higher education.”

The bill now heads to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt for final approval.