Reb Moti’s End-of-Session Report, 2026
Every year in mid-April or early May when I look at my Facebook memories, I find myself having said in previous years that “This was the worst session ever.” But this one really was.
There are many important issues facing Kansans: affordable housing and health care, food deserts, the dire state of the agriculture community, the health of our public schools, and skyrocketing home valuations leading to high property taxes, among many others. You wouldn't know that these were concerns at all based on what went through the Kansas legislature this year, which focused almost exclusively on culture-war issues like Trans rights, making life worse for immigrants, stifling voter participation, and honoring far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk. Having a supermajority in both chambers means that leadership doesn’t really have to deal with anything substantial at all; they can go through their laundry list of what they think is important to their primary voters and have their members dutifully pass it, whether over the veto or not.
Legislative sessions are supposed to be 90 days; this year they gaveled out after 55. This unnecessary shortening of the session meant that everything was done at a breakneck pace: hearings were on top of hearings, and dozens of bills were run on the floor at the same time -- all for the sake of the Senate President and the House Speaker gaveling out early so they could start raising money for their statewide races.
In addition to focusing almost exclusively on red-meat issues, leadership in both chambers used every procedural trick in the book to skip or stifle public debate and move bills directly to passage.
The most egregious example was probably the first one: SB-244 the anti-Trans driver's license / bathroom bill, where the bathroom provision (forbidding Trans people from using the bathroom aligned with their gender identity) was stuffed into the bill in committee, without a public hearing. The reason to have hearings is not only so opponents can have their say, but also so that problems with the bill can be raised in committee and perhaps fixed. That was not done with this bill, which will probably lead to expensive litigation later.
The use and abuse of both “gut and go-s” and the “Frankenstein” process of bundling bills together. This is linked to the abuse of the conference committee process, where a small group of four or six legislators decide what stays in a bill, which bills get combined, etc., with the results then brought to the floor for a straight up-or-down vote. Virtually every single bill that came to the floor at the end of the session went through this process, with a different bill number and a number of tangentially related bills put together.
The abuse of the “call the question” rule which, during floor debate, allows any legislator to make a motion to cut off debate and bring the bill to a vote. Formerly used sparingly, it was used early and often this year, cutting off debate and treating minority opinion as a procedural inconvenience rather than as an integral part of the legislative process.
The expansion and abuse of the “impugning” rule, which supposedly limits personal attacks by legislators against legislators, but has now been expanded to members of the public, such as when our colleague Melissa Stiehler of Loud Light told the elections committee that “lawmaking based on xenophobic propaganda is morally disgusting,” for which (accurate) insight she was loudly upbraided by Rep. Kristey Williams. It wasn’t even “impugning” because it was phrased as a general principle -- “lawmaking based on xenophobic propaganda” -- and not directed at representatives personally, such as “you are a xenophobe” – justifiable as that might have been. This example illustrates how the idea is used to stifle debate and to allow those in power to posture as if they are the ones under attack.
The legislative process in Kansas is badly broken. The fact that some good legislation actually passed, and that some of the bad legislation was stymied, doesn’t change that. As I said when the veto on SB 244 was overridden, the legislative process this year was a combination of bigotry, political motivation, and unchecked power. It’s no way to run a railroad.
We believe that KIFA made a real difference in the legislature this year – setting a moral tone and witnessing for inclusiveness and justice throughout the session. There is only so much we can do in a climate like this, but what we did manage to accomplish was remarkable. Now we turn our attention to our organizing and engagement work, which is such an important part of making positive change in Kansas. We are grateful to our supporters for empowering us to do this important work.