By Don C. Reed

In the last debate in the 2018 Kansas governor’s race, the moderator asked the candidates: “Do you think Sam Brownback was a good governor?”

Kris Kobach raised his hand. He did not raise it very high, and he did not hold it up very long — but now he was linked with the man who had been the least popular governor in America.

The ultra-conservative Brownback had cut taxes so deeply that the state’s schools could only run four days a week, and the children’s test scores went down.

Year after year, taxes were cut; bills could not be paid. Money was even taken from the highway repair fund. Holes in the roads could not be fixed. The state workers’ retirement fund was raided. And year after year, things got worse.

Finally, Brownback’s own Republican party realized things were out of control. They voted to raise taxes by more than one billion dollars, reversing the Brownback cuts, over-riding his veto to do so.

Kris Kobach’s reaction? He wants to do it again, enthusiastically promising to bring back the tax cuts.

On a annual poll, Sam Brownback was voted the nation’s most unpopular Governor. He must have welcomed his rescue by President Trump, who gave him an out-of-state job: International Ambassador of Religious Freedom.

Brownback did have a caring heart, often raising funds for the starving in Africa.

But Kobach? The man is genuinely cruel.

Where did Donald Trump get the idea that Mexico would pay for our Southern border wall? Kris Kobach. How would it work?

As anyone knows who has done the backbreaking work in the fields, Mexican laborers get very little pay, seldom even a minimum wage. Yet somehow they manage to scrape together a few dollars every month to send home to their families in Mexico: remittances.

How low it would be to take away that little bit of money from those hard-working people… but Kobach considers it “quite reasonable” to tax it, to pay for Donald Trump’s wall.

Remember Mitt Romney’s plan that Mexican-Americans would “self-deport”? Also Kobach’s idea. He figured if you make migrant workers miserable enough, they will leave.

Arizona’s anti-immigant law, widely attributed to Joe Arpaio? Kobach was the original source. Arpaio, by the way, wants Kobach for President. (Note: an article which should become a book is “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession” by Ari Berman.

And Donald Trump’s notion that illegal immigrants are voting by the millions? Trump says it, but it was Kobach’s nonsense.

Kobach is definitely not someone I would want in charge of my vote ballot. His method of what I would call “voter suppression” was recently declared illegal.

As Secretary of State for Kansas, Kobach has tried to impose voting laws that would disenfranchise many, stripping away their right to vote.

The alleged voter fraud which he and President Trump make such a fuss about? It essentially does not exist. Many Republicans have hunted for it; they just can’t find it.

How do the courts feel about his efforts, which denied the vote to thousands?

On June 18th, 2018, a federal judge “struck down Kansas’…proof of citizenship law, which disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters. The judge found that the law violates the…U.S. Constitution.”

To have your vote stolen is to lose power over your life.

Kansans: please do not give Kris Kobach the governorship over your state. He lusts for power, plainly wants to ride his issues to the Presidency.

We are already experiencing one Trump in office.

I do not think we need another.

Don C. Reed is a writer in Northern California.

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