Interview of Robert (Bob) Tomlinson, August 2, 2024
Interviewed by Chris Courtwright
Chris Courtwright's interview of Bob Tomlinson, former city councilman, legislator and Assistant Insurance Commissioner is one of the longest and most complete undertaken by KOHP. The entire interview (2 hours 23 minutes) is posted here. But in addition, several shorter clips, taken from the interview, are posted below and will also be used as part of Resources for Educators. Tomlinson's interview covers his wide political experience and lessons he learned. He tells lots of funny stories about other prominent politicians of the era and shares his political philosophy and technics for "vote-counting" for Speaker Glasscock and others. He also comments on the public policy issues of the day, including health insurance mandates, Medicaid expansion, school vouchers, the need for full funding for special education.
Highlights -- short excerpts from the interview
Boys State and Nation; Classification and reappraisal; Health Insurance Mandates; Medicaid Expansion; Obamacare; Property tax; School finance; School Funding Formula; school vouchers; Single-Payer System; Special Education; Tax Experiment of 2012
Bob Tomlinson has had a long, distinguished and diverse career in public service. In addition to serving as a Republican member of the Kansas Legislature from Johnson County from 1993-2002 representing Roeland Park and some of the surrounding area in the-then 24th District, he spent a decade at the Kansas Insurance Department as Assistant Commissioner, and then in late 2012 moved over to the Department of Administration and was named Director of the Kansas Office of Administrative Hearings. After a year or so at that job, he moved again and became Special Projects Coordinator for the State Employee Health Plan from roughly 2014-2018 and then in 2018 worked on behalf of the administration as a liaison who helped Department on Aging staff understand legislative nuances and procedures. A graduate of the University of Kansas with an undergraduate degree in education, he then moved on to acquire multiple master’s level degrees and certifications from Baker University. With certifications in both special education as well as administration, he worked for a number of years in both capacities at an alternative school affiliated with the Shawnee Mission School District./ He is now retired.
Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is August 2, 2024, and we’re in the historic House Chamber of the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas. I’m Chris Courtwright, who served for thirty-four years working as an economist for the Kansas Legislature in its nonpartisan Research Department before retiring in 2020. For full disclosure, Governor Kelly appointed me shortly thereafter to her bipartisan Council on Tax Reform.
Today I’m privileged to interview former Representative and Assistant Insurance Commissioner Bob Tomlinson, who has had a long, distinguished, and diverse career in public service. In addition to serving as a Republican member of the Kansas Legislature from Johnson County from 1993 to 2002, representing Roeland Park and some of the surrounding area in the-then 24th District, he spent a decade as number two in command at the Kansas Insurance Department as Assistant Commissioner, and then in late 2012, moved over to the Department of Administration and was named Director of the Kansas Office of Administrative Hearings.
After a year or so at that job, he moved on again and became Special Projects Coordinator for the State Employee Health Plan from roughly 2014 to 2018, and then in 2018, worked on behalf of the administration as a liaison who helped Department on Aging staff understand legislative nuances and procedures.
A proud graduate of the University of Kansas with his undergraduate degree in education, he then moved on to acquire what amounts to multiple master’s level degrees and certifications from Baker University. With such certifications in both special education as well as administration, he worked for a number of years in both capacities at an alternative school affiliated with the Shawnee Mission School District. Did I get most of that right?
Bob Tomlinson: Yes, I’m guilty as charged.
CC: This interview with Mr. Tomlinson is conducted on behalf of the Kansas Oral History Project, a not-for-profit corporation, created for the purpose of interviewing former legislators and significant leaders in state government, particularly those who served during the 1960s and subsequent decades. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, and the public through the KOHP website, ksoralhistory.org, and also the Kansas Historical Society and the State Library. Transcriptions are made possible as result of the generosity of KOHP donors. Former House Speaker Pro Tem David Heinemann is our videographer today.
During your ten years in the Legislature, Bob, I suppose it demonstrates your jack-of-all-trades, diverse skill set that you served on so many different committees. But looking over those records, I guess one of the highlights worth mentioning is that given your background, you of course served for many years on the Education Committee. And notably, you also ended up as Vice Chair and then ultimately Chair of the prestigious House Insurance Committee, which we are going to talk about shortly. But I see that you also served on the Local Government Committee, Elections, Financial Institutions, Taxation, Economic Development, Children’s Issues, and the Redistricting Panels, to name a few. I hope I cherry-picked most of the top ones, since there are in fact many others on your full list.
BT: I usually went where the Speaker at the time perceived a need, even if it was the Speaker perceiving a need to get rid of me.
CC: Okay, understood. Well, let’s delve into your legislative career and committee work and big issues and whatnot, but before we do that, let’s get into some additional background. Are you a native Kansan, and if not, when did your family move here?
BT: I am not a native Kansan. My grandfather and father are. My grandfather moved here in the 1890s when he was a little boy. His father was a veterinarian. My grandfather was a physician. My dad grew up in a little town in Wabaunsee County, Harveyville, but most of the time, we are from Osage County. I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska while my dad had a job with the federal government up there, and we moved down to Johnson County in 1961. I’ve been a resident of Kansas ever since.
CC: The records show that you were first elected in your early thirties to the Roeland Park City Council in 1989, in fact beating an incumbent, and in this era, also were active in KNEA and the Mission Area Chamber of Commerce during this time. And you end up making your first run for the Legislature in 1992 at the still relatively young age of thirty-five. But I’m guessing that the desire to run for elective office may have been seeded in your blood at a much earlier age, given that you interned in the late 1970s for two Kansas political powerhouses, then-Representative Anthony Hensley in 1978 here at the Statehouse and then US Senator Bob Dole in 1979. Can you tell us a little about those intern experiences?
BT: Oh, Hensley was the one that lit the fire, although my fire for public office was stoked a lot earlier. When I was a kid, I had problems with my eyes. I could not see well. I have one that droops. You can still see the remnants of those things today. But I got picked on a fair amount, any kid that’s different.
When I was in junior high, I wanted to be on the Student Council. So I ran for the 9th grade vice presidency. It’s a popularity contest. I was by far not popular. My dad wanted to know whether I wanted to win. Sure. He said, “Then take what they give you and run with it.” So they called me Popeye and Google Eyes. Popeye was the one most common. So I ran as Popeye on the Spinach ticket. When I got up in front of the school and I said, “Popeye. Eat spinach. Spinach is cultivated for its edible leaves and is a pot herb of the goosefoot family,” and they roared, and I won. The people that picked on me stopped. And I understood then what it was to put yourself out there, to expose yourself to people, and to run for office, and that’s what lit the fire.
Now Hensley, I knew from American Legion Boys State, and I knew several people from there that turned into folks that I ran into here. David Adkins became a state senator. He was there. Hensley, of course. Mark Parkinson was there the year I was there. He became Governor of the state and a number of attorneys and lobbyists and so forth that I met through the year that I met working as a counselor at Boys State under Anthony Hensley, and it was a lot of fun.
He taught me a great number of things. He taught me how to run a campaign. Back then, we had yard signs that aren’t these nice metal things.
CC: Right.
BT: They were on pine boards, and you had to hold them. Hensley wanted his held at an angle so that when you put the sign on it, it would look like it was standing out. He split my thumb with a sledgehammer, and you can still see the line where—it went all the way down to the base of the thumb. It was a learning experience.
CC: I can imagine.
BT: So the key to it all though, I got there—Dole was running for president when I was working on his staff, and I got to see a lot of things and a lot of people. I saw how Senator Dole reacted to people. I watched that. He got a call on his birthday. We were celebrating his birthday. We had a nice cake and so forth. He got a call from the president. I’ve never had a call from a president on my birthday even now. I’m lucky to get a call from my wife. So it was a lot of fun.
Now, every Kansan knows that Dole was injured in the war.
CC: Yes, sir.
BT: He had a shell go off inside him, explode inside him, and it took most of the use of his right hand. He would put a pen in it, and he would shake left-handed when you held up your right hand. I made a point of holding out my left hand, which I heard he appreciated because I remember when I was different to people. I still am. I wanted to make sure he knew that I understood.
And he told me one time how grateful he was that I was willing to do that. So when I ran for the Statehouse, his PAC gave me $1,000.
CC: Wow, your first campaign.
BT: Yes, which was a lot of money American. I hold loyalty to both of them. When I was in the Legislature, the ten years I was there, Hensley served in the Senate some of that time as Minority Leader. Only three times did he come to me and ask for a vote or a favor. All three times, I complied. He didn’t abuse the privilege, but I was always loyal.
The flip of that was one time when he was Minority Leader, I came to him for a favor, and he granted it. So it was a good relationship. It still is. I also wrecked his mother-in-law’s car.
CC: I think we want to hear that story.
BT: No, you don’t. I told you I couldn’t see. Why would you pull somebody—he was driving his mother-in-law’s car. Why would you pull in back of somebody who can’t see? What do you expect me to do? Have radar like a bat?
CC: Okay, you’ve anticipated my next questions, which was going to be favorite anecdotes or funny stories about Senators Hensley or Dole. Obviously you’ve continued—
BT: I got one about Dole, but I shouldn’t tell it.
CC: I think we’re going to have to hear it.
BT: They had a deal, a guys only deal, the staff did, and they were picking on us interns. They were making fun of our manly size. That would be the best way of saying it. Now, the senator was not participating, but he was not telling everybody to calm down either.
So they came to me and they go, “Oh, Tomlinson, oh, my heavens. Get out a magnifying glass.” And I looked at the senator because I’ve been picked on before. I know how to handle this. I said, “Senator, it’s not the length of the rope nor the depth of the well that matters. It’s how you dangle that bucket.” And I was his hero from then on. He had a great sense of humor.
CC: Yes, he did.
BT: I always thought that if he won the presidency and he had his finger on the nuke, he would remember that. I thought it would be a pretty good deal.
CC: I do have to ask, beyond the angle of the yard signs and the risk to staff that may be helping you, did either of the two senators impart any campaigning wisdom to you that helped you throughout the balance of your political career, in terms of connecting with voters and future constituents?
BT: Yes, Hensley. I watched Dole, but I was not at his pay grade at all. But Hensley was there constantly. The fact that I became a special education teacher and that Anthony is a special education teacher is not a coincidence. He is a very “people” person. He is very welcoming. He could separate the Christians from the heathens. He knew who the good guys were and the bad guys were. He taught me about being in the Legislature. Sometimes you have issues that are the haves versus the have nots, sometimes the haves versus the haves. He taught me a lot.
But more than anything he taught me, he represented a district in the House where he represented his own high school which is rare for an urban legislator. I did the same thing. And what he taught me was the people that raised you are worth your consideration now and forever, and he never left them, and I never left mine.
CC: A very important point. Okay. Prior to getting involved in the Boys State program when you were in high school, did your family have any kind of prior history in politics? Did you maybe have a favorite high school teacher or mentor who encouraged you to jump into electoral politics at some point in your own future? You mentioned that your dad helped you with the 9th grade vice presidential race.
BT: Yes. My grandfather who I never saw, he died before I was born, he had some interest in it. I had a great uncle who was sheriff of Sedgwick County.
CC: Okay.
BT: But no, not really anybody. I had a lot of wonderful teachers, but the fact of the matter was, my father was closest to someone who inspired me. He was not interested in politics. He read the newspapers and so forth, but he encouraged any decent thing that his sons did. He was for it. He bought me a book that had the presidents of the United States in it. I think he did it to shut me up. We were on vacation. I was tired and so forth. It had their official portraits in it. I fell in love with Gilbert Stuart who did the Washington portrait, and John Singer Sargent who did Theodore Roosevelt, and G. P. A. Healy who did a number of them, and Samuel Finley Breese Morse who invented the Morse Code who did Monroe’s official portrait. And I memorized the presidents from there, and it was always a neat, neat thing in school when the teacher would say in the first grade, “This boy knows all the presidents in order.”
So I was rewarded for my knowledge, but it was all me. I just liked people, and this was—and politics was easy.
CC: Politics is a good line of work if you like people.
BT: It was easy.
CC: I would note that it was a decade from your internship with Dole in ’79 until you first ran for the Roeland Park City Council in ’89. Was there some issue in particular going on in your city that prompted you to undertake that initial race? Were local infrastructure issues or property taxes or anything getting you and some of the citizens up in arms? What prompted you to jump in to the Roeland Park City Council race in ’89?
BT: I thought I could win. You know what the key—having beaten two incumbents—you know what the key to beating an incumbent is?
CC: No, I don’t.
BT: It’s easy. Choose the right incumbent. The guys that represented my ward before me, nice guys. They’d been there a long time. They were neighbors, next-door neighbors. They got along swimmingly. Our area had not had curb and gutter work done for a long time. They got some bond money together. They were going to do the curb and gutter work, and they did their own street first, which is probably a poor choice. It turned out to be.
My debate colleague in high school, she wanted to run. So I ran her campaign, and then two years later, she ran mine. We both won. We were just a new generation coming on.
CC: Coming to power in Roeland Park. Okay, in 1992, you run for your House seat for the first time and find yourself up against another incumbent, Democratic incumbent, Tom Thompson, who had been swept into office two years earlier when the Democrats took control of this Chamber for just the third time in state history. I found some reference to the 24th District in 1992 as having a 44 to 24 GOP registration advantage over the Democrats. But you were still nevertheless the new kid on the block running against an incumbent, and the Kansas City Star in fact endorsed Representative Thompson that year.
So please tell us a little more about that 1992 race. You ended up winning a tight race with around 51 percent of the vote and from what I could tell, it looks like school finance, the death penalty and even water and environmental issues all may have been in play during that campaign. Were there debates and forums that you both attended, or was the campaign fought more along the lines of radio ads, yard signs, and postcards? Also, if you have any funny front-porch stories to tell about the first time you were going door-to-door—
BT: Like being bit by a dog?
CC: Like being bit by a dog. Dog stories are my favorite.
BT: Three times. I must be sweet or chewy or something. None of the dogs in my district were as big as the ones I found in Hensley’s. Oh, Lordy!
Anyway, no, you got some of it. Your research tells the political science part of it, most of which is not true. Remember I told you that the way to beat an incumbent is to pick the right incumbent? Tommy Thompson was a good guy. He was a special ed teacher. He was very, very interested in the environment, an interest which I share, but I wasn’t a devotee to it absolutely like he was. He would fit well in this society now. I’d find myself supporting him, a great guy, but he was the right incumbent.
In order to get there in 1990, he had beaten a twelve-term incumbent, twenty-four years in the House.
CC: Who is this?
BT: Rex Hoy.
CC: That’s right. I remember Rex.
BT: An insurance salesman. Rex was a nice guy, a great guy, very friendly, very gregarious, slap-you-on-the-back kind of a guy. Thompson was very serious. But Rex had gotten some loans from the Shawnee Mission Credit Union, which he paid back right when the Credit Union failed, and it was a part of the credit union scandal.
What Thompson failed to understand was that he did not beat Rex Hoy. Rex Hoy lost. So there was considerable angst to run – all along the Republican Party in Johnson County thought they could beat him, and they had somebody picked up. The Democrats weren’t asleep. They had to redistrict again in ’92. I think the Court ordered some sort of change of the ’90 maps. They set out to try to protect Thompson.
What they did was threefold: they drew the 24th District, got rid of Fairway where Hoy was, and in so doing got rid of all of their favorite challengers who would have beaten me in a primary.
CC: Okay.
BT: They put in half of Roeland Park where I was the incumbent. That was the third of the district they gave him. They put all of Mission where he lived, which means that I worked, my school was in Mission, right in the heart of the district. And they included the most Democrat area in northern Overland Park, which was where I was raised. And when it came down to it, I broke even in that Democrat area, and that’s what beat him. The people that had raised me came through.
I went to the forums. We did all the things. The key was school finance. The Legislature had passed in the ’91 session a school finance formula which was—it may have been the ’92 session.
CC: ’92, yes.
BT: The ’92 session. It took Johnson County money and for good or for evil, it restricted the amount that we could raise to try to bring what was given to students, per student down to a median level together. And we wound up losing money, and it also raised property taxes, which was not a horrific problem, but people in Johnson County were upset.
Senator Dave Kerr one time told me, “Johnson County is the golden goose, and every once in a while, the Legislature will come along and pluck a feather from you, and we expect the goose to squawk.” Well, they were squawking in 1992, and the district had been built for Thompson but without considering me at all.
Now in terms of yard signs and the other type of things, I won doing one thing and one thing only. I knocked on over 1,000 doors, one after the other after the other after the other. I had dogs sicced on me. I did it in all kinds of weather. I was the one that counted. I’d knock on the door and the guy would say, “I’m not going to vote for you. I like Thompson.” Fine, he didn’t count. It’s still 0-0. I knocked on the next door. The guy said, “Yeah, you went to school with my son. I’ll vote for you.” Okay, I’m up 1-0.
That’s how I did it. I had interesting times. I was walking down the hill one time, and there was a tree branch there, and I figured as I was walking down this hill that I would get under it, and I was wrong. I was looking at my walk list to see who I was going to see next, and I hit that branch, crack, and it lay me flat out on a hill.
So I got myself up and dusted myself off, and I guess I was trickling a little blood, and I got to the next door. It was this sweet, sweet, elderly lady. Oh, she was so nice and so sweet. She said, “You’re bleeding.” “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, not too much.” “Oh, come in.” “No, I can’t really. I’m just running for office.” It took me a while to tell her I couldn’t come in. Well, she said, “Okay, if you need anything, you let me know.” Fine.
I turned around, whack, and hit her awning. I really opened it up that time. I was bleeding all over everywhere. So I just kept at it.
CC: It sounds like the map drawing for the district was critical. You likely would not have won had the new map not been rolled out for the 1992 election. Did you only run as a result, when you realized that they made Roeland Park and your old stomping grounds a major player? Were you going to run in any case?
BT: Well, the guy that was in office before Thompson had been there twenty-four years. Now I wanted to run at some point. That was my ambition in life. And you don’t get a chance like that very often. So I was all in. I was going to do whatever it took to get there, a Type A candidate. I wanted it.
They called us to the Register of Deeds’ office. I was also a Precinct Committeeman. They called all the Republican Precinct Committeemen there. It was to show who wants to run for the 24th District. And one after the other, they stood up and said, “We can’t run with this map.” They lived in Fairway. There were a couple of them in which the powers that be, the elected officials in Johnson County at the time, liked one guy in particular, an attorney, and he was going to get all the money.
Vince Snowbarger was a conservative, and he was not in that power moderate group. He was the one that was in charge of drawing the maps for that county. He came to the meeting. They stood up one after the other. We got to give a speech. He said, “We’ve got to change the map,” and I stood up and I said, “I can win with this map. This map right here, I can win with it.” And Snowbarger said, “Well, I’ve got other fish I need to fry. You guys have got your candidate.” And they were unhappy, but they helped me.
CC: And you were right. You were able to win with that map.
BT: Now the Star, by the way, never even bothered to interview me.
CC: Really?
BT: Yes. But we had a throw-away paper at the time called the Sun with the Roses, and they interviewed me. I had pre-scouted them, and they gave me a front-page endorsement just under the fold. That’s right the day before the election. That’s what helped.
CC: I remember the Roses well: Steve and Stan, if memory serves.
BT: Yes.
CC: Yes.
BT: Steve’s the kid, and Stan was the father.
CC: Let’s talk about the environment you arrived in for your first term during the 1993-94 biennium. I’ve always thought the early nineties was maybe the most fascinating time in post-WWII Kansas legislative history because of how competitive and dynamic things were here at the Statehouse. Setting the table for your arrival, and you’ve already talked a little about this, we know that Democratic Governor Joan Finney had gotten elected in 1990 at least in part because both of her predecessors, Governors Carlin and Hayden, had been blamed for the property tax reappraisal and classification upheavals of the late 1980s. And Democrats as a result of that 1990 election, as we mentioned, had taken control of the House for just the third time in state history.
Then, in 1992, as you mentioned, the Legislature, at Finney’s urging, had just passed arguably the most significant piece of public policy in this state in the last fifty years with the historic new K-12 school finance law, and that measure was designed to comply with constitutional mandates regarding both adequacy and equity in the funding of our public schools, and also to, in most areas of the state, dramatically reduce property taxes.
Then in 1992, even though Democrat Bill Clinton is elected President, Republicans here in Kansas do win back control of the Kansas House by a few seats – thanks to results like an upset win from a scrappy newcomer in the 24th District—I think it was 66-59, Republicans, when you came in that session.
BT: Yes.
CC: So when you get here in 1993, you and your party were once again seated over here on the majority side of the aisle.
BT: We were.
CC: Can you tell us what the experience was like for you when you showed up for your very first session, and maybe how you went about learning all the legislative procedure and nuances; who the key stakeholders and lobbyists were; and whether some more senior members of the GOP caucus took you under their wing and helped mentor you and the other freshmen?
BT: They did. They did. I told you I was a people person. I got to meet some wonderful, wonderful, very intelligent people on both sides of the aisle.
When I got, my first session, I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to compete, that I was going to be too stupid. I was also afraid that every little thing that I did, every minute thing that I did was going to be closely, closely watched. And I was wrong on both counts. Maybe five, maybe ten bills in the whole session somebody outside of here is really going to care about unless it’s in their particular district or their bailiwick.
I told you I did not do well with people considering me different, but for the first time in my life, the first time, I thought that I was representing people, 27,000 people, that raised me, and I got in the Chamber, and I could not see the board. I couldn’t see well enough to see the lights.
So I went to the Speaker-Elect R. H. Miller, Wellington, and I said, “Bob, I can’t see the board. When you seat me, I need to be a little further up front.” So he had me go out and test chairs in the Chamber. He said, “I want you as far back as you can comfortably see,” which put me further forward.
It also put me between two veteran legislators, Garry Boston in Newton who was just a wonderful, gregarious guy. He was an insurance salesman and he always had a joke. Half of them you could repeat. Well, maybe not even half. He was a great guy. He’d been a former professional catcher, and he was a pretty good guy.
But the guy on my right was from the 120th District in Atwood, and his name was Fred Gatlin. Fred was well respected. He was serving on the Appropriations Committee. He was a policy wonk of which I am not. He cared about the policies. He would calm me down when I’d get too excited. He said, “Just give it a moment. They’re going to let your bill pass. Just let them sort them out.” He encouraged me to learn how to count, which frankly he was never too good, but I got to be. And he was a wonderful fellow. Dave Heinemann, also, Heinemann used to fly him around in his plane, and he’d drop Fred off and then go home to Garden City.
These guys, they were wonderful to be around. So they did something also extraordinary for me. I shut up and absorbed and learned by just keeping my mouth. I had wonderful committee chairs. Duane Goossen who was my first Chair, was the Chair of the Education Committee. He went on to be Director of the Administration, Secretary of the Administration.
Nancy Brown who was a tough-minded woman if ever there was one. They’d call her liberal now. She was a moderate Republican, and she meant business. She was one of my first Chairs.
Rochelle Chronister who was on the Appropriation Committee. Then they asked her to take Education when she was running the Graves School Finance Formula. These people were professional and not mean-spirited, but you didn’t want to cross them.
And then I got to meet people on the other side of the aisle. One guy in particular, when we got to counting votes was a guy from Harper, a one-armed man who lost an arm in an industrial accident when he was younger named Richard Aldritt. Richard had the advantage of being very, very smart and also crazy as a March hare, just nuts. You didn’t want to be in the car while he was driving because he only had one hand, but he used it to smoke cigarettes and gesture, and anything but be on the wheel. These were wonderful, wonderful people, wonderful, and I just listened a lot.
CC: I have always thought Governor Finney was such an interesting figure politically because sometimes it seemed like she was from a third party—at least from the standpoint that she was not at all shy—
BT: Chris, sometimes it seemed like she was from a third planet.
CC: Sometimes from a third planet. I’ve heard that used as well. Certainly she was not shy about clashing with legislative Democrats any more than she was with legislative Republicans.
BT: No. You know what? They overrode her vetoes like eating peanuts. They overrode one for me.
CC: Yes, I recall the early nineties quite well. Even though you were just a freshman during her final two years, did you have any kind of a personal relationship with her? And how would you characterize her relationship with the House GOP caucus as well as the full Legislature? Do you have any funny or fascinating stories about her you can tell us?
BT: I don’t know how fascinating they are. Being a freshman, I did have a bill one time that she vetoed, but I had gone to her staff and asked for an appointment to explain it to her once it hit her desk. And they said, “No, it’s okay. It will be fine.” And she vetoed it. And then she said in her veto message that I was from Johnson County and trying to complete disrupt the school finance formula.
So I went to her staff and the guy that I talked to and I said, “Hey, if you had a freshman that had the power to overturn the school finance formula, don’t you think the Governor would want to meet him?” But she did not.
And the Caucus, we were pretty situational with her. If she was on our side on something, “Oh, Governor, we love you. I’m glad we’re crossing aisles.” If she was opposed to us, we didn’t answer her phone calls because she did not have discipline on her own side.
She invited me out to Cedar Crest for brunch one day. Well, I’d never been to Cedar Crest, and I started out there, and somebody said, “Now, Bob, she is the Governor of the state.” I get it. So I vowed, “I am going to be good. I’m not going to complain. I’m not going to get in an argument with her. I’m going to introduce myself. I’m going to be happy to be in Cedar Crest,” which I was. “I’m going to be honored that the Governor would invite me to this freshman brunch.”
And I was in the receiving line, and I shook her line, and she said hello, and then she blurted out a little statement, and I immediately violated my pledge completely. It so thoroughly made her angry. What she said was, “You’re from Johnson County.” She said, “I could teach you something about school finance.” She said, “They had a new school built, and they got all new desks.” She goes, “They couldn’t save one single desk? They waste money over there. They couldn’t save a single desk?” And I go, “Governor, if you had done your research, if your staff had been on the ball, they would have told you that that Perry school that they got brand new had been destroyed by lightning, and the desks were ashes, and they’re hard to sit behind that way.” Oh, I was mad.
CC: Can I ask what the look on her face was when you relayed that?
BT: “Thank you,” you know, go on to the next person. I mean, what could she say? Clearly, we’re not going to get along. I was never invited back, by the way.
CC: That was your one and only trip to Cedar Crest under Governor Finney. One of her big initiatives that never got across the finish line was she was always pushing for initiative and referendum powers to be given to the people of Kansas. I gather you were opposed to—
BT: I was. I am still.
CC: You like the policy to be made here by elected officials.
BT: By people who are elected. It’s the same theory that I had when the Legislature would get together, which we did frequently, and then we’d try to pass laws about how local governments should behave, and I was always opposed to those because the same people who elected me also elected the folks on the local level. Just because I happen to serve in the state legislature rather than on the local city council of which I had some experience doesn’t mean that I was any smarter than the other folks that they raised. And they could always come get them in the next election if they didn’t like what they were doing. So I … should shut up.
CC: Understood. At the risk of messing up our timeline regarding your own legislative path for a question or two, as long as we are still talking about prominent people you interacted with, let me take a minute and ask about a couple of them who were still around here when you arrived.
You served in the House for a couple of years with future Governor Kathleen Sebelius before she ran for Insurance Commissioner in 1994. And you also had future US Senator Jerry Moran working just across the rotunda over in the state senate until he first got elected to Congress in 1996. Can you tell us about your initial impressions of them and whether you had any inkling as to whether they had bright political futures, and then any stories or anecdotes you can share about future interactions you have had with them over the past 30 years?
BT: Well, I’ll start with Moran. My interactions with him were not—I didn’t have many. But he did do something that—I took a page out of his book. When he was running for Congress for the first time, the first district, he sent out a survey and he asked people—it was a pretty basic survey, very nicely done—and he asked people to fund it. “Could you give me $5 for this survey?” And a lot of them did.
Then he took all of those $5 contributions—you don’t have to record their names. You can just record the bulk if it’s under $50. Not Moran. He recorded every name and every address if it was in his district. I thought, “Huh, that’s pretty smart.” So I did the same thing, and I got maybe ten, fifteen surveys back with a little cash in them, and I wrote them a nice letter and thanked them and put it towards the survey costs, which I said I would do. But I wrote their name and addresses down.
Sure enough, when the conservatives were considering finding somebody for me in the primary, they looked at all of those local addresses and said, “Unh unh. He’s got grassroots.” That was Moran’s idea. He should get credit for it.
Now, Sebelius and I spent a lot of time with one another because I’d been appointed Vice Chair and eventually Chairman in the Insurance Committee. Committee Chairs are appointed by Speakers as are Vice Chairs. Now I got to be Vice Chair because—I’d been thrown to the Insurance Committee because they wanted me off the Education Committee. The Speaker at the time, Shallenburger, came up with something he wanted done in the Insurance Committee, and the Chair had resigned, Tom Bradley of Topeka had resigned from the Legislature. So he appointed his friend, Dennis Wilson. And Dennis said, “If we’re going to get this deal done”—it dealt with premium taxes—“no one here understands it. I’ve got to have somebody able to stand up and speak to it.” He said, “I want Bob Tomlinson.”
Well, the Speaker said, “No, no, no, no.” The year before, they’d had an abortion bill come out of the Insurance Committee. I was pro-choice, and they did not want me on that conference committee.
So I had to go to Shallenburger at a fundraiser for Clifford Franklin, a Republican in Merriam, take him aside, say, “Look, if you make me Vice Chair, I promise you if an abortion bill comes up there, I will let you take me off of the conference committee without any objection.” Well, Chris, I wasn’t going to be at that conference committee anyway because he wasn’t going to appoint me. So I wasn’t giving up anything. And he said, “You know, that helps a lot,” and he made me Vice Chair.
Well, all this time now, Jennison made me Chair, and then Glasscock reupped it. Glasscock wanted to run for Governor. So did Sebelius. So Glasscock had his guy on the Insurance Committee, and to say I was a thorn in Sebelius’s side—obviously not effective. She wound up Governor. But I was a pain. She had to prove everything. I was a pain.
At one point in time, word got back to me that she called me out with her staff, she called me “the asshole.” Well, I was a little disappointed. I thought I should be Representative Asshole or Chairman Asshole or something, but I understood the point. I was not nice to her. I was fated not to be nice to her. I was civil. She was smart. She dodged every bullet I shot at her. When she became Governor, she was a good Governor, and I like to think that I helped her mold her skills.
CC: Trial by fire.
BT: Yes. I had nothing really to do with it. I had quite a bit of experience with her. We communicated quite a bit.
CC: Okay, one more of these for now. The record shows your legislative career also overlapped with future Governor Mark Parkinson, who you said you first met back during some of the Boys State days.
BT: Yes.
CC: Albeit during the era when he was still a Republican.
BT: Yes.
CC: A similar question: do you have any amusing anecdotes or recollections about him or how effective he seemed to be when he was a legislator? And then also did either of two of the more significant events in his political career subsequently surprise you at all—when he switched parties; and then when he opted not to run for Governor in his own right in 2010?
BT: No. That didn’t surprise me at all. Mark Parkinson was a very, very cautious man, and he was a very, very—is a wonderful man. I knew his wife in college. Mark and I have a mutual friend who has quite a name—J. Frederick Hambright IV. I knew him as Johnny. His father Fred ran Hambright Oil and is a member of the Oil Hall of Fame in Great Bend as is my cousin, Warren Tomlinson, who ran Tomlinson Oil.
But I knew Johnny with Hensley at Boys State. He was a year behind us. When I ran for student body president at KU, Johnny was my running mate. So Johnny was Parkinson’s best man, knew him forever.
I have nothing but good things to say about Mark Parkinson. I think his wife’s a wonderful gal. I think he’s wonderful. When I told him I wanted to run, he encouraged me. Nothing intelligent that Mark Parkinson did surprised me at all, and Mark’s ability to count and read the tea leaves doesn’t surprise me at all either.
CC: We’re going to talk about some of the dynamics within the Republican Party and the caucus here as we get back to your legislative career. But as long as we’re talking about Parkinson, you said it did not surprise you that a former Chair of the Republican Party switched parties, became a Democrat, and then Lieutenant Governor, and then Governor. Is it your sense that it was one of those things where he felt like he didn’t leave the party, the party left him? Again, you said you were not surprised.
BT: I think so. His district—when he was in the House, his district was the 14th District of Kansas, an Olathe district. Do you have any idea who replaced him when he went to the Senate?
CC: I do not recall.
BT: Kay O’Connor. Now you can’t have two people on this planet that are farther apart in their ideologies than those two. It’s not possible. The planet’s a small place.
Mark cared about the policies of Kansans. I do remember saying to myself, to others—Mark had problems with AFL-CIO when he changed to become the Lieutenant Governor. He had never been union supportive. I was endorsed by AFL-CIO because I’d always been union supportive. I had a heavy labor contingency in my district, and that’s just the way it was. I thought, “Crap, I’d do better than Parkinson,” but Sebelius would have never in a billion years appointed me. Oh, my word.
CC: Because you’d been lighting her up in the Insurance Committee for a number of years.
BT: She would have said, “I’d rather die.”
CC: Ok, let’s talk about the 1994 election, which was a smashing success pretty much up and down the ballot for your party, as well as its aftermath.
BT: Yes.
CC: Former Representative Thompson opted to run against you in a rematch, but now you had the Star endorsement and got over 59 percent of the vote and had little trouble dispatching him this time around.
BT: That’s right.
CC: Governor Finney had decided to not run again, and GOP Kansas Secretary of State Bill Graves was elected Governor after defeating Democratic Congressman Jim Slattery in that year’s gubernatorial race. Graves was a moderate Republican, but a great many Republicans elected to the House that year in 1994 turned out to be more conservative than did the new Governor.
BT: More conservative! I’ll say! A couple years later, they booed him in our caucus. Boo! The sitting Republican Governor! Boo! I was appalled. Fortunately, they served pizza. So it wasn’t that bad.
CC: This led to a fairly dramatic event that occurred here at the Statehouse prior to the 1995 session when Speaker Miller was challenged within the GOP caucus and subsequently defeated by Tim Shallenburger, long a champion of that more conservative faction, in the race to determine who was going to be Speaker of the House for 1995 and 96.
BT: Yes.
CC: Can you tell us what you recall about that Speaker’s race—and maybe if you are willing, who you supported, although I suspect I know—
BT: I supported Miller. That’s why I was assigned to Outer Mongolia.
CC: Generally, how did that shake things up here starting with the 1995 session?
BT: It sucked. Outer Mongolia is a horrible place to be. Eventually the second time he was elected, we were moved—Adkins and I were put together. We were moved to the fourth floor, and we called that office—it was so small and so up above. We called that “The Sniper’s Nest” because that’s about all we could do there.
But, no, Shallenburger did what he had to do. He earned my respect as I earned his over time because just like I did when I first got in there, I thought, “Well, you know, there’s something to this if a majority of people are going to vote,” and I didn’t know what else to do because I was in Mongolia. So I watched him carefully. I tried to introduce a few things in Committee that I thought might go through. Some of them did. He ran them on the floor when I asked him to.
Shallenburger has a couple of things that I remember distinctly. One is, you can count votes by looking around. I remember if I needed nothing further, I went to a reception, and I was still working for Miller, trying to gain votes, and Susan Wagle took me aside. It was just a Shallenburger kind of—and she said, “Bob, give it up, it’s over.” And then she listed the representatives who are all moderates who weren’t at the reception. I said, “They’re gone. Where are they?” “They’re gone because they know they’re going to lose,” and she was right.
So I learned to count that way. The other thing that Shallenburger told me later on—he told me two other things. The first thing he told me was, “No Republican Speaker can appoint you, a teacher like you are, NEA like you are, chairman of the Education Committee. You can’t do it. It’s a dead end for you.” He said, “You’re going to have to find another way,” and he was right.
A committee Chair has no power that the Speaker and the caucus don’t grant them. If you’re going to be a committee Chair, you have to align yourself or believe as the majority of the caucus does, and then you can have tremendous power over your area. He was right there.
And the final thing he told me was, “Always give people the best political advice you can even if they’re your enemies because they will never take it. They will ignore you.” And he was good. He never got flustered. He let people—he had two or three bills a year that he wanted, and other than that, he didn’t much care. People would come to him all excited. He was just mellow.
CC: It sounds like you worked your way through the rapport over time, worked your way through some of the initial challenges with the new Speaker.
BT: He’s the boss.
CC: And the new leadership team.
BT: Once again, I represented 27,000 people as everyone did. If I had dug in my heels and spit on him like I wanted to, he would have kept me on the back bench. That’s not representing those people very well, not being informed, not reaching out to be able to do things for them. No.
CC: Relative to some of your fellow moderates, I guess I’ve always thought that some of the brightest young minds in your caucus, especially David Adkins and Kent Glasscock, sort of similarly had some of their upward mobility at least temporarily derailed when this whole 1995 shakeup happened.
BT: That’s a nice way to say it. Yes. They were in Mongolia with me.
CC: I know that young Phill Kline was quickly installed as Tax Chair under the new regime, notwithstanding the fact he had never served on the committee before, and at the same time a lot of the more moderate members who’d been on the committee were purged. Everyone had been assuming that Kent Glasscock, who had been Vice Chair of Tax, was going to be taking over as Chair when Keith Roe did not run for the Legislature again in 1994. During the ’95 session, a lot of lobbyists and reporters would still talk to Kent in the hallways and then tell me they thought of him as the Tax-Chair-in-exile. Your example of Mongolia, he must have felt like he was in it, too. Do you have any other reflections about what you and Adkins and Glasscock and some of you all were – was it your sense they navigated many of the same challenges you were?
CC: Yes, you know what? You—we made considerable headway enjoying ourselves, taking pot shots at our own leadership. And the other thing that was—we were never really out of power, the mods, because at the time, the conservatives had the majority of the caucus, but not the majority of the Chamber. The mods had the minority of the caucus, but combined with the Democrats, we had the majority of the Chamber. The Democrats were extraordinarily willing to talk to us because we were their ticket to power. They could get a great deal of things done, particularly with the budget, if they would sit down with us.
They had two leaders during my service. One was Michael Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer, and the other was Jim Garner, and both of those guys were more than willing to sit down with us, and they had some extraordinarily talented people on top of their caucus. They were really good to us. That’s where I got to be most of a counter. Kenny Wilk would work something out with the Chairs, the former Chairs-in-exile, and the leadership of the Democrats, and then it was my job to tell everyone how many votes I could deliver for a particular proposal. Would we get to 63? That was the count. The Democrats almost always had 100 percent of their people in line. Would we get to 63?
We were interested in working with our own caucus, but they weren’t interested in working with us. Eventually, they figured out, you know, if we send this budget back—the next time it comes out, if the moderates and the Democrats are together, it will be more money. They said, “We’re working against ourselves.” They never learned.
So we did work with the Democrats, and I got some extraordinary experiences out of that, one in particular that I remember in counting. We were working on a deal, on a tax deal. I forget the detail of the bill. It wasn’t my part of the world. But Glasscock is in there, working on a tax deal as Chairman of the Local Government Committee. Michael Tom Sawyer had his folks in there. They were working it out. I was just standing around, waiting to be helpful.
Well, they were running a tax bill. Shallenburger wasn’t a fool. He ran a tax bill because he knew we weren’t ready. And they were running a tax bill. They were almost there. We were almost of an agreement. And Heinemann here, he can write those things on the floor. So we were ready to go. We just had to have an agreement. We needed about ten more minutes, and the bill was running.
Sawyer asked me, “Can you go get Bruce Larkin for me?” Bruce is—
CC: This is filibuster time, I gather, or stall time?
BT: Yes. Bruce was a farmer who looked like a farmer, and he’d wear a suit, and he’d look like a farmer in his suit. But when you got blue jeans on him, he’s a big guy. He’s got big shoulders. He reminded me of my uncle who was a farmer, and here this guy was. You’d underestimate him because he was a farmer, I guess. I don’t know.
But Tom wanted him. I went out and said, “Bruce, do you have a moment? Tom wants to see you.” He comes back and Tom said, “Bruce, can you give me ten minutes on taxes?” and he goes, “Okay.” He presses speak, and he comes up to the well, and he started in on a tax bill. It was relevant, and it was intelligent, and it was to the point, and it was totally off the cuff. I’m going, “These people are good.”
And he had several others, Tom had several others he could call upon there. One of them, Joan Wagnon, is sitting right here. He could call on her. They were good. They helped us a lot.
No, we weren’t out of power. We had busy things to do that really were important to the state, and they let me play. They let me count votes, and they were the nicest group of people, and they got where they relied on me. Both sides did. I was flabbergasted.
CC: We’re going to talk about your vote-counting skills here in just a minute. But one other issue I wanted to ask you about from this era that still resonates today is vouchers. I was a little surprised to see that as far back as 1995, vouchers were enough of a hot issue even in that era that you and your fellow GOP House member Kay O’Connor, who you mentioned a minute ago, held a debate in front of the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce back in ’95. Kay was an advocate, of course, while you argued in staunch opposition to any form of K-12 vouchers. I gather your position has not changed over the last three decades?
BT: No, if anything, it’s hardened. Kay was a wonderful gal. She kept a purse full of toys. My kids were all little, and she would always entertain them. She’d—they whizzed and popped and banged and did all kinds of good stuff. She was adamant, and she really believed in vouchers. She called herself the “Voucher Lady”.
You remember that I worked with kids in an alternative school.
CC: Yes.
BT: Those kids weren’t welcome in every public school setting. Some of them were wards of the Court. Some of them were unhappy. Some of them were teenage mothers. Some of them were just plain mean, dangerous. They weren’t welcome in every setting. None of them would have had a Kansas voucher in their hand and be able to go to any school they wanted. They would have been told, “No. We can’t have that. We can’t discriminate with public funds. We cannot send a kid out with a voucher that’s not as good as anybody else’s kid.”
They argue, “Let’s hold them accountable.” To what? So that the kids who are well adjusted can have the education with all the frills and fancies they want? Or that every kid in every school has a chance?
Yes, I debated Kay because I felt then and feel now that it’s wholly discriminatory, and that education is the basis of a democratic society. It gives the opportunity for everyone to participate. If you like the American dream, it gives them the opportunity to pull themselves up, but they’ve got to have the tools. I’m distinctly opposed to it, and I think I’ve got reasons. I never forgot the kids; as well as I never forgot the people that raised me.
CC: Understood. You always seemed to have a good working relationship with Governor Graves during his time in office.
BT: Yes. He couldn’t count.
CC: So your vote-counting skills came in handy. If you could characterize for us a little bit the extent to which the two of you relied on one another from 1995 through 2002? Obviously, you helped him with vote counting and other skills that he may not have understood the nuances of when he was Secretary of State.
BT: He was good though. He was good. His heart was always in the right place. If you want to know what kind of Republican I am, just look at his State of the State speeches, and you’ll find out. That’s the kind of Republican I wanted to be.
CC: We discussed how the mid to late 90s was this time defined by some strong internal disagreements within the increasingly dominant Republican legislative majority, and Graves himself frequently sided with the more moderate faction.
BT: Yes.
CC: As you noted. This was a period where both the state and national economies were quite strong, and one of the flash points involved tax policy, with major reductions being a top priority of many conservatives. During these years, Kansas in fact enacted a major car tax cut plan in 1995.
BT: We did.
CC: Several reductions in the statewide mill levy for schools and then a broad smorgasbord of tax cuts in 1998. Graves and other moderates during this time, especially over in the Senate, as well as a few of you rebels here in the House, were wanting to move a lot slower on many of these cuts than did many of the more conservative House members.
BT: You may substitute in this question the word “more responsibly” for ”slower.”
CC: Okay. More responsibly. I know that you were not yet serving on the tax panel, which we’re going to get to in a minute, but do you have any stories or recollections about these tax cut battles here on the floor of the mid to late 1990s?
BT: Yes. One in particular. The idea that the conservatives had—the conservatives wanted to spend less on government. That was the idea. We’re going to spend less. We’re going to spend less. We’re going to spend less. Well, we put them on Appropriations. We filled the Appropriations Committee with them when Shallenburger was there. They couldn’t cut their finger. They were too scared. “If I cut that, these people will be mad.” Well, yes, that’s the whole idea.
So they hit upon another strategy. Phill Kline brought them another strategy, and that is we will cut the revenue stream. We will cut it below levels, and then we will have to cut spending. That’s the most irresponsible—you can’t do that. I once went to a forum with him, and I stood up when it was time to speak, and I stood up and I go, “You know, I listened to Phill. I’ve got a good idea. I’ve been trying to cut my personal budget, and now I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to go to the school district and I’m going to ask them to give me 10 percent less money. That will force me to cut my personal budget. Of course, my wife will be somewhat unhappy,” but that’s the way it was working.
And then you give a cut, you give a cut to a bureaucrat, and you say you’re going to cut 10 percent right off—10 percent. What do you think the bureaucrat will cut? Some of them are very responsible. They’ll do the best they can to trim out. But if it’s a draconian cut, they will cut the most efficient and helpful program that you’ve got. They’ll cut that first to inflict pain back on you for giving them such a wonderful choice.
If you want to cut the budget, then cut the stinking budget. And if you can get 63 votes for it, more power to you. But don’t go round robin’s barn and expect the people in the state of Kansas to tolerate it. Years later, after I left the Legislature, Brownback actually did it.
CC: We’re going to talk about those years in a few minutes. You mentioned you were placed on the Insurance Committee as its Vice Chair in 1997 and then become its Chair in 1999 for the final four sessions of your legislative career. This of course is where you became so knowledgeable about all facets of the industry, as well as battling with Insurance Commissioner Sebelius. But you acquired a level of expertise that made you an excellent choice to become Assistant Commissioner yourself starting in 2003. Before you were kicked off the Education Committee, if you will, and placed on the Insurance Committee, had you had any kind of background or experience at all in the industry before 1997?
BT: None.
CC: My recollection is that one of the hot issues in state insurance law was whether specific health-condition mandates should be required to be part of certain policies offered by employers to employees. Basically whether everything ranging from mental health coverage to treatment of temporomandibular disorders should be part of all health insurance plans not otherwise exempted from state regulation through federal law. I know that you have consistently throughout your career come down very decisively on one particular side of this issue. Could you walk us through your logic?
BT: Sure. When I was not in leadership on the committee, we had a bill that required insurance companies to have symmetrical breast surgeries for woman who have had breast cancer. It seemed like a really good idea to me, that a woman who had had their life saved by removal of a breast should not be scarred or—
CC: Disfigured, yes.
BT: Disfigured. I thought it was a good idea. So I voted for it. It passed and so forth. Not too longer later, I got my first shock, which was I was telling a constituent, “Yes, this is what we did,” and she just had breast cancer and said, “No, my insurance didn’t cover it.” “Well, it’s a state law.” “I don’t care if it’s on the tablets coming down from Mt. Olympus, they’re not going to cover it.”
And I realized that the majority of state policies or policies within the state for one reason or another are not regulated by the Insurance Department. As a matter of fact, the Insurance Department regulates about a third and that’s all. So that’s the first thing. You’re lying to people when you say, “This mandate will change the way everyone lives.”
So what happens then in insurance is we take a little bit from you and a little bit from the other guy and a little bit more over here, and we put them together in the pool, and the pool is supposed to cover the payouts. So if you put another mandate on the pool, which now I know is only a third. It’s very small. I’m going to ultimately price everybody out of the insurance company as it is.
What I learned down the road is that probably what we should have in this country is a single- payee system run by the federal government, better care for all. But that wasn’t true at the time. That wasn’t the way it should work, and what we were doing was just painting over problems that the system was incapable of covering.
So we fought both sides. I didn’t make anybody happy. I did not allow passage of insurance mandates through the committee, and in this regard, the caucus loved me. But I also did not allow single individual policies to come through, one person, which would have seriously limited the size of the pools. I’m not going to do that either. We only had seven-tenths of 1 percent of the insurance in this state—seven-tenths of 1 percent of the insurance of the United States. We weren’t large enough to have any kind of pool.
CC: Any impact, yes. I also want to note that we recently did one of these interviews with one of your Democratic colleagues, former Representative Eber Phelps.
BT: I love Eber Phelps.
CC: He was absolutely effusive in his praise of you as Chair of the Insurance Committee.
BT: That’s kind of him.
CC: He was the Ranking Democrat on Insurance for at least part of your time as Chair, and he said that you two had a very collaborative relationship working across the aisle in terms of planning schedules and working bills and whatnot. Was keeping Democrats in the loop always part of the way you operated? Maybe one of these things where you wanted them inside the tent looking out instead of outside looking in if you catch my euphemism?
BT: Yes, well, Democrats on the whole were nicer to me than my own party. But the reality was, periodically, I needed their votes. A lot of committee Chairs will go through, and they will engineer a committee. What they’ll do is they’ll go to the Speaker, and they’ll say, “So and So isn’t going to help me.” Can you move him to another committee and give me somebody else?” And they’ll try to get enough votes in their committee so they can get anything they want out. That’s poor policy, as far as I’m concerned.
So I took whoever the Speaker gave me, which in some cases, I got some dandies, but I took whoever the Speaker gave me. As a result, I would lose an occasional bill in committee that I wanted, but I would never lose one on the floor. I did not lose them on the floor because I had a mixture of people on the committee. It’s just wise practice.
So you keep your Democrats informed, and you keep your first-timers. You try to keep them busy and engaged. Early in the session, you have a lot of little bills that are not—
CC: Rats and cats.
BT: Yes. Sometimes they need to be carried on the floor because you put a little amendment into it, clean up the language, something. So I would make a—rather than carry those bills or have the Vice Chair carry them, I would make a member of the committee that was new—
CC: A freshman.
BT: Carry the bills, and I would say, “I’m going to go down to the well with you, and I’m going to stand right behind you. If you get in any kind of trouble, I’ll be right there. I’ll hit the white button, and I’ll come to your rescue. But I want you to have the experience of doing this.” And I would do that for my Republicans, and I would also do that for a rookie on the Democrat side.
And then there were people who wanted to sit in particular places, and I tried to accommodate them all. There was one guy, Bob Grant, in particular that wanted to sit—he wanted to sit at the end of the horseshoe. I always gave Bob Grant the end of the horseshoe, and it turned out to be fruitful because it was an afternoon committee. Sometimes, it was hot, and at the end of the horseshoe, he was out, and we couldn’t hear him snore.
I had another gal that—I’m not going to mention her name—but she came to me and she wanted to move the horseshoe where we had the committee two rows. I had her in the front row, and she wanted to move to the back row. I go, “Okay, I’ll see if I can get somebody to switch with you. No problem. We’ll do this.” She goes, “I’m tired of having people behind me that can look at my hair.”
CC: Okay.
BT: I said, “Okay, maybe we need to have somebody switch with you. I don’t want you to go berserk on me for your hair.”
CC: The headaches of a committee Chair.
BT: It was fun. It was just a group of people. Another thing I did that I enjoyed, we had a small room. Nowadays, they have a larger room. They had a small room, and we were beginning to run stuff. We had the Commissioner of Insurance running for office. We had these mandates. There were a couple of other—Washington was busy trying to get Obamacare together and insurance rates were just going spike –property, casualty, and health insurance—and we had a lot of work to do. We would draw the press from time to time. I wanted a bigger room.
Well, the Insurance Committee, they wouldn’t give me a bigger room. So I said, “Okay, guys, we have sign-in sheets every day, and I want everybody to sign in. If you come in here, you sign in because I want them to know how cramped we are.”
Well, the lobbyists, they signed in or they didn’t. They’d come in and they’d—so one day, I said, “I counted the number of signatures on that sheet, and there were ten. And I counted the number of people in the audience, and there were fifteen.” I said, “Now, I’ve been telling you people weeks now that I want you to sign in, and I have a good reason for it, and I don’t appreciate you not doing it,” and then I reached over to my secretary, and I said, “Hand me the sheet. I know everybody in the audience. I’m going to go and see who hasn’t signed in.” Oh, there was a horrible flurry, people charging up there. One gal, her pen wouldn’t work, and I thought she was going to have an attack, but you’ve got to do those kinds of things.
CC: Did it work? Were you able to go to get a bigger room?
BT: I didn’t get a bigger room, but I sure got people signing that sheet.
CC: Well, our paths crossed a little more directly when you served a stint on the Tax Panel in the late nineties. If memory serves, future Senate President Susan Wagle was Chair during one of those years back when she was still in the House.
BT: Yes.
CC: I seem to recall the Tax Committee took the somewhat unusual step of having hearings on the tobacco settlement that State Attorneys General were in the process of getting across the finish line with the cigarette manufacturers. And I also recall that Kansas Attorney General Carla Stovall may have been a little irritated when the Tax Panel Chair insisted that she be sworn in prior to giving testimony.
BT: A little irritated! Yes. You could have fried an egg on her forehead.
CC: What dynamics do you recall about the—
BT: Susan was trying to catch her at something, but the reality is, that stuff, it’s a big yawn. I mean, it made all the papers and stuff because it’s so unusual. It’s a big yawn if she hadn’t done anything, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was just doing her job.
So you don’t worry about it too much. Stovall was talking about running for Governor. So Susan was determined to do what I was doing to Sebelius in essence. I understood the point.
Susan eventually became President of the Senate, and I had to work with her some when I was Assistant Commissioner. She grew into that role. She put down a lot of the things that she used to try and actually became a stateswoman at times. I didn’t always agree with her, but she was much, much easier to work with when she became President of the Senate. She really grew to the job, and I always thought that of her.
She was quite a Chair of the House Tax. There was a time, I think I told you once, in the pre-meetings here, there was a time when she was Tax Committee Chair, and she brought a bill to the floor and then tried to amend it. The bill that she wanted to amend was a bingo bill. It gave tax credits to people selling bingo—
CC: Bingo operators.
BT: Yes. Now some way or another, she had connections. I think her husband actually sold that sort of stuff. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t necessarily what everyone wanted to get into. We didn’t want to play.
So when she brought this bill to the floor that had not come out of her committee, we shot it down, and she tried amending it. She tried to amend the title, which would have meant that any bill was amendable to any other bill. It was horrible.
So she was upset, and I guess she had a perfect right to be. So she stood at the well, and she said, “We’re going to have a Tax Committee meeting immediately after we adjourn. Do not stop for lunch. Come straight to the meeting. We’re going to have this Tax Committee meeting.”
So we get there, and she’s got four bills that she wants to marry together. She’s taken the favorites of a bunch of people—
CC: So she’s making a conference committee report in first committee.
BT: Right. She was just going to meld these bills together. And the Vice Chair, Clay Aurand, of Courtland up on the Nebraska line, he said, “Madam Chair, I think it would be better, if we want to pass these bills, I think it would be better if we consider them separately,” which would have doomed hers. And she, he was sitting right next to her, and she just screamed, “We are not going to consider these separately,” which sucked all of the air out of the room.
Now, the guy to my left was John Edmonds of Great Bend. One of the bills was an oil patch bill that he had. He also had that day the Great Bend Chamber of Commerce, which was there giving him a box lunch. He was the star attraction, he and his senator. So he violated the rule. He didn’t come right straightaway. He went, greeted his local Chamber of Commerce, grabbed their lunch, excused himself, and went up to the Tax Committee.
He got there, and he’s got his box lunch. He’s eating his box lunch, and he asked me, “What are we doing?”
CC: So he got there a little late.
BT: He got there late. He didn’t hear the outburst. He said, “What are we doing?” And I said, “Well, we’re marrying this bill, this bill, this bill, and this bill.” I gave him the numbers, and he got his little bill book out. He’s writing them down. He’s being a good rep. He’s writing them down. And he gets to his, and he’s going rock and roll. Then he listens to the conversation a little bit and realizes this thing ain’t going anywhere. So he raises his hand and he’s called on and he said, “Madam Chair, I think we would do better if we considered each of these bills separately.”
Oh, my lord. People started staring at him. I rolled away from him. And he looked at me quizzically, and he said, “What?” I go, “I’m going to be killed by shrapnel.” Then, boom! The Chair went off. “We are NOT considering these separately!”
Later on, Edmonds goes, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I go, “How would I know that you were going to do the most stupid thing possible? How would I know?” We had a good time.
CC: It sounds like it. Moving into the 2000s, I suppose in some ways the most interesting legislative years for you ended up being your final two years during the 2001-02 biennium. Your longtime ally Kent Glasscock is elected House Speaker, and he relied on you as one of his top lieutenants for any number of things, not the least of which included being his vote counter. So we definitely want to hear about all of the behind-the-scenes efforts you had to undertake to count votes not just within the still-fractured GOP caucus, but also see which way the wind was blowing with the Democrats.
But in addition to still chairing the Insurance Committee and now being even more plugged in to the larger legislative process in a quasi-leadership sense out here on the floor, as one of the Speaker’s top lieutenants, I gather that Speaker Glasscock also put you in charge of office and seating assignments for many of your fellow legislators.
BT: Yes.
CC: The story I heard was that former Speaker Robin Jennison was all but accosted a couple of years earlier by disgruntled members of his caucus over such assignments, so Kent had decided when he came in that someone else was going to be the “bad cop” this time around and you apparently were his pigeon. Is that correct?
BT: I’m an excellent bad cop, yes.
CC: How did that go for you? How did you sort out the competing egos for parking places and office assignments and all the rest of it?
BT: Well, the easiest thing to do, the thing to do is to take the office space you have and the seats that you have and assign criteria for getting the best spots. So if you’re a committee Chair, you get x amount of space. If you’re a Vice Chair, you get x amount of space, and so on down the line. So you have this criteria before you.
And then you assign spaces and inevitably, people come in and go, [angry noise], and you look through your paper and you say, “But you’re not a committee Chair, and these are the criteria.” And if they think you have not just randomly assigned things, if you think that you’ve actually put some work into it, which we had, then they’re good to go, and it worked perfectly.
I had a couple of people—I had one person in particular, “Well, I’m going to go talk to Kent and get this changed.” And she bopped into his office and what he said to her was, “Okay, what did Bob say? Because that’s what we’re going to do.” And she comes back out on the floor where I’m doing this and she sits down and I go, “How did that go for you?” which didn’t encourage her at all.
But that’s what you do. Set up some criteria.
CC: Set up a point system.
BT: Yes. That’s almost exactly what it was. That makes sense, and then you can sell it. And that’s what we did, how we assigned them.
CC: I stumbled across an interesting set of newspaper clippings outlining an incident I had forgotten about from 2001. Evidently, you had to leave the Statehouse in a great deal of pain one day on a semi-emergency basis to have a kidney stone removed.
BT: Yes.
CC: But the funniest part of the story is when Speaker Glasscock announced to the full body you were going to be fine, he was quoted as saying, “And we thought the grimace was just part of his personality.”
Moreover, it was reported that once you were back, you seemed to take great pleasure in showing the stone off at least to some of your non-squeamish colleagues in some kind of mason jar.
BT: Yes.
CC: So did the press accurately cover the great kidney stone drama of 2001? Is that pretty much how it went down?
BT: That’s pretty much how it went down. It turned out I’m fertile. I passed over forty kidney stones.
CC: Oh, my goodness.
BT: And I’m on medicine for them now, and I’ve altered my diet some so I don’t get them. It’s worse in the summer, worse when it’s warm when I get dehydrated, and I used to have problems with it when I was Assistant Commissioner and doing all the travel around the state to the point where they had to assign a driver who was supposed to also keep me hydrated, and they did that for me, which I appreciated.
But the chamber of commerce gave me a stone in a ceremony, proud of me for passing. They gave me a big one, and I was passing a kidney stone when they gave it to me. I got to the point where I could do it, get through it. That was one of the first that I had.
But, yes, it’s been a problem. If you’re prone to it, you just do it. I have gotten a lot of —
I do show them off. Not everybody can pass them like that. I passed three in one night. My son said I was extraordinary. He said that was quite something. But they hurt.
CC: I can imagine. You’ve also told me that during this time you were seriously thinking throughout 2001 and maybe into 2002 about running for the GOP nomination for Insurance Commissioner.
BT: Yes.
CC: Given that everyone knew that Kathleen Sebelius, the incumbent Democratic Commissioner who was first elected in 1994, was going to be running for Governor in 2002. But you ultimately opted to again run for reelection to your House seat, an election which you won for the sixth consecutive time in November of 2002.
BT: Because I had no opponent in either the primary or the general. That helps win.
CC: I can imagine, yes. So, State Senator Sandy Praeger, with whom you had worked on many an insurance conference committee, does take back the Insurance Commissioner’s office for the GOP that November.
BT: She did.
CC: Shortly after she wins, she quickly names you as Assistant Commissioner. Did you sort of know during the 2002 election year that if she won, you would be leaving your seat to move across the street with Sandy?
BT: Yes. I did. She was tired of me running against her. I was not too sure that I could beat her. She was pretty sure that my talents would be better off with her than against her.
One of the best examples, I served on the Reapportionment Committee. So I drew a map that was absolutely within the guidelines, the percentage guidelines that you have to have. I drew a Congressional map, and it was so within those guidelines that we would keep ten maps, and it kept staying on the ten, even though it wasn’t being considered. And every time we published a new group of map, the people would look at it, and they’d go crazy.
Well, this map that I drew drew the Third Congressional District and the Second Congressional District right down Massachusetts Street in Lawrence. Every day for a solid two months every week, somebody would pick up the phone and call Sandy and say, “What’s going on?” and she’d have to go back and make sure it wasn’t being heard and so forth and so on. She got enough of that and decided that she’d like to work with me instead of us being opposed to one another, and it worked out pretty well. I had some talents. I could count. She was a policy wonk. It worked beautifully.
CC: It fit well together. Doubling back for just a moment to your last year here in the House in 2002, we will recall that the crippling impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent recession were becoming apparent for the state’s economy and tax collections. The relatively prosperous days of the late nineties just a few years earlier must have seemed a distant memory. Lawmakers in 2002 had to enact both painful budget cuts as well as a tax increase just to keep the State General Fund out of the red ink for Fiscal 2003.
As for the tax portion, I know that about halfway through the session, Speaker Glasscock announced that he was going to have “salad bar week” out here on the House floor to start taking the temperature of members as to which kinds of revenue enhancements might be most palatable. There was an income tax day, a sales tax day, an excise tax day—and on each of these occasions, members would offer amendments to tax bills that would seek to raise rates or repeal exemptions.
I do have to point out here that throughout that entire week, none of these amendments were successful due primarily to the fact—
BT: Nor did we think any of them would be.
CC: We were still in mid-March, right?
BT: Yes.
CC: And of course we know that when policymakers do enact tax hikes, it almost never happens until the very tail end of the veto session. But you were enlisted by Speaker Glasscock and leadership to offer an amendment that would have raised the state sales tax rate from 4.9 to 5.55 that would have sunset after three years.
I might note here that several months later, the final tax package did raise the rate to 5.3 percent and included a similar sunset provision that ultimately would be repealed in subsequent years. But can you tell us what all you recall about salad bar week and the amount of stress that being placed on the state budget in 2002 relative to both the tax and expenditure sides of the equation?
BT: Sure. I can tell you a lot about it. Let’s go back to the Speaker’s election for Glasscock. We target races in the Republican primary that we want to win, and the idea is, we would prefer somebody that’s going to vote for us for Speaker. We had nine targeted races that year. Do you know how many we won? None. We were 0-9.
Now that took every bit of margin that we had, and the Speaker’s election went four ballots, tied, before somebody came across the line and made Glasscock Speaker. He was up against Doug Mays who eventually became Speaker. Doug’s a good counter, too. Now, both of us had been lied, too, both myself and Doug, but that’s the way the ball bounces. But we had no margin for error. None.
So if we know we’re going to have a tax bill, we have to figure out what’s going to be in it. The only way to get people to come to a consensus at all is to give them an opportunity to run their idea. Do you know what a good tax is?
CC: A tax somebody else pays.
BT: Right. Exactly. That’s the definition of it. A good tax is somebody else in the next county pays, not me. So we had to give everybody the opportunity. It told us where the fault lines were. It told us what was even remotely doable. We can’t get 63, but we might be able to get to 40.
I had a President of the Senate one time who was rushing a bill through. He had to put all kinds of stuff on it to get his bill through. When it was finished—this was Dick Bond—he sat down and he said, “Well, Bob, we sure had to put a lot of lipstick on that pig to get it through.”
Well, that’s what we were doing with tax. Nobody wants a tax increase. Sometimes it’s the responsible thing to do. So that’s ultimately what we had.
We played other games before, too. Salad Day was actually an unfortunate game, but it had to be done because you had to figure out how many votes you could possibly get for a proposal. Why come together with a proposal that has no chance late in the game?
We had a couple of other things, one I remember with the budget in particular. The conservatives wouldn’t vote for a budget. So the Democrats and the moderates got together for several years, and we’d pass a budget. And then the conservatives would walk out on the campaign trail, and they’d say, “We’re spending too much.” Well, maybe so, but you guys didn’t help. You just voted no.
So Glasscock and Wilk and I got together, and we said, “Okay, we’re going to make this budget a Republican budget, and the way we’re going to do it is we’re going to assign a moderate to a conservative. And when we’re doing the budget at the end of the day, the moderate’s going to vote no until the conservative will vote yes, and they’ll pick up the moderate vote.” So every conservative that votes for it gets two votes, and it worked. We had a majority of Republicans that voted for that budget.
CC: Interesting.
BT: I didn’t vote for it because I didn’t want to. It hurt my county. I matched myself up with a conservative, Edmonds, who wasn’t going to vote for it, come hell or high water. And they would call me and they’d say, “Oh, Bob, can’t we push this over line? We just need a couple more votes. How about you?” I’d put the phone down, turn around and say, “John, are we voting for this?” Then he goes, “Nope.” I’d go, “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
CC: It sounds like that strategy was successful at the end of the day.
BT: Yes. It was the only thing we could do. You can’t have people constantly arguing, and you can’t have people staying by their position until the end of the day. You come around in May, and you’ve got to get something passed, and they say, “I want x amount of property tax,” and you go, “On this date, we tried that bill and failed. You don’t have the votes for it. Come up with something realistic.”
CC: Jumping ahead to your days at the Insurance Department, can you give us at least some kind of executive summary of all the regulatory issues and things you worked on during your decade as Assistant Commissioner that started in early 2003? I know that you were often back over here at the Statehouse as one of the most visible faces of the Insurance Department as a valuable resource for your former colleagues, as well as weighing in when necessary when your agency explicitly supported or opposed specific pieces of legislation. Do you remember coming across the street a lot to testify?
BT: Yes. We had people that did that for me. They’d call me in if they were having a problem because I knew folks. There were four when I was Chair and probably five more when I was Commissioner—years that no insurance bill that I did not like became law. So you had to be—if you have that kind of influence, you have to be responsible with it, and we tried to be. You can’t regulate the insurance company out of business, and you can’t regulate the profit out of them because if somebody is going to be unprofitable, they’ll just stay home and won’t offer you any insurance at all and people need it. So you have to do what you can.
We had issues at times with companies that would be lazy in their filings. They’d give us a thousand pages, and we would go, “All right. We’re going to do 100 pages at a time to approve this filing.” We would correct all the errors, things in violation of Kansas law in the first 100 pages, and then we’d go to the second 100 pages, correct those. Then we’d get a copy back with the corrections of the second 100 pages, and the first 100 pages had reverted back to what they were. I called a couple of those companies and said, “Fine, until you can negotiate correctly and make the changes and make them stick, we’re just going to refuse your filing.” Boom, you’re done.
And you had to because what they would do was get maybe from New York, they’d get this template, and they would just plop it down, and they would try to get us to go through it and make it Kansas ready. No, we’re not going to do that.
CC: Not your job, no.
BT: It’s not our job, and we’re not going to play. And we didn’t. But the things that we did that I found were most fun was when we got into individual people’s issues—somewhere in the Department of Revenue, and I went through a couple of secretaries, there was someone that said “What we ought to do is we ought to tax captive insurance companies.”
A captive insurance company is a company that only offers insurance to the parent. So, for instance, Burger King over here has a captive insurance company. They self-insure to this company. And we let them exist in Kansas. We don’t collect a premium tax on them. And if we did, with all the captives, we could make a lot of money for the budget.
The problem is, if we did, we would have retaliatory taxes from the other state.
CC: Yes.
BT: And it would cost us. So we did a little survey. How many captive companies existed in Kansas that were Kansas domiciled? How many did we have? We had two. One of them was Raytheon, and they were winding theirs down. The other was this little Mom and Pop operation, and the guy was based in Dallas. He had a little manufacturing deal, and he had an insurance company that sold to him that was based in Wichita, and we regulated it.
So what are we going to do to this poor guy, and why does he, of all this thing, it’s a moderate-sized business. Why is he doing this? So we pick up the phone and call him. He says, “Well, I really shouldn’t have it, but it’s run by my brother-in-law, and I like the fact that I live in Dallas, and he lives in Wichita.” “Okay, we’re going to leave you alone. You’ve got problems of your own.” I love those kinds of situations.
CC: Given that you had presided administratively over any number of thorny proceedings during your time as Assistant Insurance Commissioner, you must have seemed like a logical candidate for Governor Brownback to appoint as Director of the Kansas Office of Administrative Hearings in late 2012 or early 2013. Was this change of scenery for you something that you had sought out on your own ticket, or is this something that the administration approached you about? Specifically, was there any kind upcoming electoral consideration, given that most people assumed by that point in time that Sandy was not going to be running for reelection again in 2014?
BT: And the answer is yes. The Governor did not want me running for Insurance Commissioner. He had somebody else in mind. He had proven their power in the Senate elections. They had wiped out the moderates in the Senate primaries. I would have no base. I was too young to retire, and the Governor offered me a position which I was qualified for, and I accepted, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
I like doing the administrative hearings. I did an administrative hearing for a guy one time who sold fire insurance on a building, and we were after his license for doing it. The only problem was the building was on fire at the time. So I asked him, “What made you think that you could do this?” He said, “Oh, I didn’t think the company would care.” They cared a lot. They really did care.
And those were the kind of things, when I went over the administrative hearings, I was the head. So I did the budget. But I took some of the load off of the attorneys and did some of the hearings. I chose to do the ones where people’s wages—we come from the Department of Labor, and people’s wages had been unfairly withheld or fairly withheld as their last check when they were discharged. So you had to hear about all the—normally, generally, and usually both parties had some fault in it. So I could assess punitive damage, and I found out both of them were at fault. I wouldn’t do that, but we try to get things just and straight, and it was a lot of fun. They were people of Kansas, and they’re just trying to do the best they can.
I had one lady that said, “Well, I didn’t give it to him. I did not give him his final wage because I found out he stole from me. But he claims he worked the next week.” I said, “Did he work the next week after you claim he stole from you?” And she said, “I don’t remember.” I said, “You know, if somebody stole from me, I would know whether they worked the next week or not. I would fire them immediately.” So I found her story to be less than believable.
CC: I think I know the answer to this next question, given how you mentioned earlier your thinking has evolved to the point that now you support a single-payer national health insurance system.
BT: I do now as I said here, yes.
CC: But I was going to ask, given your extensive background, where you stand on Medicaid Expansion and whether Kansas should have done so many years ago; and whether we should continue trying to prod lawmakers to take yet another look at it, as Governor Kelly advocates for on pretty much a daily basis.
BT: She should advocate on a daily basis. It is the right thing to do. We should do it. The cost which they are talking about is nominal compared to the damage it has done by people that are not adequately served. It’s just terrible. That we would sit here, and we would talk about being, serving the people of the state of Kansas and yet in life or death situations, we would throw that opportunity away because the people that are receiving the help are the working poor. It’s disgusting.
Furthermore, anybody that right now, anybody, that is in a rural area within the state that does not vote for Medicaid Expansion should be horsewhipped because the rural hospitals need those patients. That’s where working poor live, and it helps bolster the work of, the safety of everybody within that area in the health care delivery—yeah, I’m for it. It makes no sense. I’m not the only Republican that’s for it, by the way.
CC: I’ve heard that mentioned.
BT: You know, and I’m not the only Republican nationwide that’s for it. There are a number of red states that have voted for it. Ohio is a dandy example. I don’t understand. Their arguments against it are nefarious. I don’t understand.
CC: As we have discussed, you served in several different capacities during the Brownback administration from 2013 to 2018, including at OAH, then with the State Employee Health Plan, and finally as a legislative liaison of sorts with the Department on Aging.
BT: Yes.
CC: And all of these years were of course characterized by a tremendous amount of fiscal stress on the state brought about by his self-described tax experiment.
BT: Yes.
CC: Several questions here. Did you ever get a chance to advise Governor Brownback or those in his inner circle about what they maybe should have done differently during the five or six years of that wild roller coaster ride? You still had a number of former colleagues and friends dealing with backfilling tax hikes, painful budget cuts, and various smoke-and-mirrors budget gimmicks that seemed to be on the table every session during these years when the fiscal crisis seemed to have become ongoing and institutionalized. Prior to repeal of most major pieces of the experiment when Brownback’s veto was overridden in 2017, did you have any conversations with legislators again between the 2013 and 2017 period? And then I guess, more generally, can you tell us what kind of budgetary stress the different state agencies you were serving in felt during some of these years?
BT: I can. One, I never had any conversations with Governor Brownback, other than to thank him for taking care of my family and giving me employment. I very much was grateful for it, and he acknowledged me in that regard. I would occasionally see my friends, most notably Duane Goossen, who had a great deal to say about it, and I would listen patiently, but I was in no position to advise anybody about anything.
The agencies that I worked for, we had—the Office of Administrative Hearings really needed another attorney because we were going to get KanCare hearings, and we didn’t know how in-depth they were going to be. So I asked for another attorney and wound up in a different agency. They were tight.
The State Employee Health Plan was not encumbered by the problems of the general budget because we were accepting money—ours were moneys that we were bringing in from employee salaries to pay for their—so our outflow was different. The Department of Aging when I was there was—if they were stressed, it was the least of their problems they had. They were having problems. The reason I was there was they were having problems communicating much of anything across the—in the Legislature. We were able to work—I showed them a few things that—we were kind of able to work some of that out for them.
The biggest problem was they wanted to privatize some of the state mental health institutions like Osawatomie and Larned and K&I. That just wasn’t going to sell in the Legislature. Once we got that out of our system, then the Legislature became willing to work with us.
But the committee in the Senate that we had to work with, the Ranking Member was Senator Kelly, and the Chair was Senator Schmidt who became—my word, we either had our act together, or we took it in the snout. It didn’t have much to do with the budget. We just had other fish that weren’t frying properly. To the Secretary’s credit, he was able to right the ship in pretty short order.
CC: Given that the tax experiment was repealed in 2017; the US Supreme Court has allowed states to collect use taxes on goods shipped in from out of state; the federal government’s various COVID relief packages contained a good deal of aid for states and local units; and I think that Governor Kelly has generally been a good steward of the state’s resources, we have concluded Fiscal ’24 here a month or so ago with more available resources in both the State General Fund and the so-called Rainy Day Fund than at any time in our history. And tax cuts, of course, have again been a major priority, with a package of tax relief having just been enacted recently during the Special Session.
But I know that a number of legislators who share your passion about the importance of special education funding have expressed a great deal of frustration about its lack of full funding. In other words, even while more money is being phased in, it is still far short of the level that was previously contemplated and set, by the way, in state law. Many of them have been asking if we are not fully funding special ed now, when will it ever realistically happen? Do you share their concerns on that front?
BT: I do. I’m going to add to it. If we don’t expand Medicaid now, when is it going to happen? I mean, look, it’s sort of like special ed funding, every parent ought to be able to figure this out. If you have multiple children, you ought to be able to figure this out. When I was a kid, my brother has 20/20 eyesight. He still to this day does not wear glasses. Boy, my parents had to buy me glasses because I couldn’t see. So they had to spend a little more on me to get the opportunities to even out.
You have somebody that has special needs. You have to spend a little more to get the opportunities to work their way out, and do you know what? Those kids are entitled to the best education we can provide them because they are Kansans than for no other reason. None. I don’t understand it. You know, I just don’t understand it. And it worked for me.
They have problems with inclusion. They have problems with special needs. When I was a kid, I couldn’t do certain things because I have a deformity with my arms as well. So I couldn’t bounce a basketball correctly, and I couldn’t do pull-ups. I can’t do those at all. So they took the gym teacher, and they set aside and they got in his closet, and they gave me all manner of balls and things to see what I could do. I could throw a baseball and snap off a curve, and it doesn’t hurt my deformed elbow at all. As a matter of fact, it enhances it. That is special education. When I was standing 60 feet 6 inches away from professional batters and throwing curve balls at them, that’s inclusion. How hard is this to figure out? How right is it? I just don’t understand them.
CC: Turning our attention back to a few final questions involving your ten-year career in the Legislature and given that we have already talked a lot about some of the dynamics within the GOP caucus, and you’ve mentioned some Democrats, Eber Phelps and some others. Are there any other Democrats who you worked with most often? Which ones did you think were the ones that were the most effective? You mentioned leaders Sawyer and Jim Garner. Any other Democrats?
BT: Wagnon, sitting right here. I thought she was effective. A number of them. Henry Helgerson. That guy knows more about the budget than the budget knows about itself. A poor hearts player, but he knows a lot. There are a bunch.
You know what you do? I’m going to turn your question slightly because it’s all about people. You’re asking me did I know smart people that were Democrats. Yeah, I know smart people that are Republicans and I know some that were pretty good people and weren’t as smart maybe here and there, but you could work with them. It’s all about people.
So when you’re counting, when you’re counting votes, you go to somebody, “How are you going to vote?” Well, yes is yes, no is no, and maybe is no. You can teach that to people. My son is a lobbyist. He’s currently looking for some clients, but he’s a lobbyist. He knows how to count. You’d be surprised how difficult that is, to express to people.
Did I know quality Democrats? I sure did. Did I know Democrats who would help me at some point in time? Yeah. Did I know Democrats that entertained me? I had three in particular. My first year in the Legislature, they were on the floor here, and they were yapping about where they were last night. They were in this little huddle. They were yapping about where they were last night. I said, “What are you guys doing?” They said, “Leave me alone. Leave us alone.” I said, “Well, you can’t have this great strategy. It’s early in the session. You’re not”—“Leave us alone.” “Okay, but I think you’re being kind of rude.”
And then one of them said, “If you must know, we started out last night with three cars, and we’re down to one, and we’re trying to figure out where we were.” And I go, “Oh, I’m out of their league. These guys are—I am not in their league at all.” They’re wonderful people, wonderful people. I enjoyed every bit of them.
CC: I guess I have a similar ask about lobbyists. Which ones did you respect the most, and maybe which ones did you dread the most seeing coming into your office, regardless of how effective they may have been?
BT: A lobbyist had better not ever lie to you. That’s the core—if they come in and talk to me, we need them because they tell us things that I don’t have time to research. But they had better not lie. They can state their point of view. They can advocate for their client. These are things I expect of them. But they had better not lie. The lobbying corps in Kansas generally are excellent. They do not lie to you because if they do, we’ll eliminate them.
One gal in particular that I loved was an elderly lady, a former state representative, a former person that served in Hayden’s administration, Denise Apt. Denise was a Type A personality that I remember coming off the floor one night. It was 2:00 in the morning, and we still couldn’t pass a budget and go home, and she was hot. She’d had some people that she worked with. She was a lobbyist for school districts down southeast. She had some people who she worked with to get something passed, and she was mad.
She knew I was a teacher and a counselor. So I go down and I said, “Denny, what are you going to do here the next couple of hours?” We had two more hours before we could vote again, between 2:00 and 4:00 AM. “What are we going to do?” She said, “I’m so mad now. I can’t do anything.” I said, “Well, you have the right to be angry.” She turns to me and she says, “Don’t you try any of your psychological crap on me. If I want to be angry, I’m going to be angry.” I go, “Denny, all I want to do is play bridge for a couple of hours.” “Well, why didn’t you say that?” Now that’s a lobbyist after my heart.
CC: I guess the same ask for state officials, especially cabinet level. You worked with quite a number of different Secretaries of Commerce, Revenue, Transportation and SRS over the years. Any particular memories regarding those relationships or of working with their staffs? And then starting in 2003, when you are suddenly the one standing on the other side of the podium and now maybe getting grilled by some of your former colleagues, did you gain a new appreciation for some of the finesse and skills that agency personnel had been bringing to the Statehouse during your days as a legislator?
BT: Yes. Governor Graves had a guy that I saw frequently. His name was Joe de la Torre. He always used to call me “Commander.” I would do anything for Joe de la Torre. Joe told me straight out, “It’s not going to work, Commander. He’s not going to do it,” or he would say, “We would like you to help us with this.” I liked that more than anything.
The best thing about agency heads, the ones that I appreciated over time were the ones that listened to what I was telling them, particularly when I got over to the Department of Insurance. An agency head said something stupid. I’d go over there, and I was always assigned. You don’t send an underling to do—to [inaudible] the Commissioner.
So you go over there and you say “Do you have a moment? I’d like to explain this to you.” And the agency heads that would sit down and let me explain it to them—sometimes they didn’t agree. Those were the best, and they turned out to be the best.
The ones that I disliked, you could almost tell it immediately. The ones I disliked were the ones that spent a gazillion dollars on their new offices. That’s a big key to the fact that you are more impressed with your office, the title, than you are with getting your work done.
CC: A bit of a red flag. As someone with a passion for education, do you have any good Dale Dennis stories?
BT: I love that man. Dale Dennis, yes, I have several good stories. Dale Dennis would tell you about education funding, and he has this aw shucks, good ole boy presentation. I had a son that was in—I saw him a lot in a lot of different ways, and he would every once in a while, you’d pop off a good speech in committee, and he would come to you and say, “You know, that was a real ring-tailed tooter. That was a good one.” He was just that way. And he would compliment you in front of others, which were very helpful.
But I had a son that was in journalism in high school. Dale Dennis, he was assigned by his teacher to come up with a story on school finance.
CC: Okay. Somewhat byzantine for high school journalism, I would think.
BT: Right. So I said, this is my kid, you know? I said, “I can do you.” I had him interview Goossen, and I had him interview Dennis. This will be fine. This will work.
Dennis was outstanding. He knew how to talk to the kid, and he was talking about teachers who had just been employed. He said, “We’re getting a good deal out of them. This is what we’re paying them. We’re getting these young kids right out of school, the ones you like, we’re getting a good deal. And the school finance, if we crush it down, they were the last hired. They’ll be the first fired. We’re going to get rid of the very best.” And he explained it and my son and his crew, they got it. They understood. They could advocate. That’s a gift that Dale had, to communicate.
Now the teacher was kind of unimpressed. She thought they would interview a few parents and maybe the principal and so forth. They came back with the Secretary of Administration and the boss at the Board of Ed. So she didn’t think much of it, gave him a B. They sent it on to enter a state competition and won the state championship with it for hard news. Dale Dennis is a great guy.
CC: Yes, he is. It does seem to me that your strong suit has always been working with others, regardless of policy differences, to get things accomplished.
BT: Yes.
CC: The “people person” skills we’ve been discussing. But now that I’ve complimented you on this comes the trickier question to think about. Given that you have been around the policymaking whirlwind in one form or another since the early nineties, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today, especially the Legislature, with the way things were three decades ago? What are the biggest differences, and are those differences generally positive or negative in your mind? And please feel free here to talk about anything you want to from changes in technology, to increased political polarization, to changing perceptions about the role of the public sector, the accelerating influence of powerful special interest groups. Anything and everything is on the table here.
BT: Okay. The traditional answer is it’s a lot less friendly than it used to be. I’m not sure I buy that. I think there seems to be more animosity, but that sort of thing has gone through American politics since George Washington’s time. Now we worry about, “What source of information do you have? What do you watch on TV? Where do you get your news?” We used to have newspapers, which was all the news people had, that were run by political parties. They would be Andrew Jackson’s newspaper. They would be Henry Clay’s newspaper. It’s always been that way.
What you alluded to that made it somewhat different is the speed with which people can get their information. What bothers me the most is getting your information on social media where the person that is receiving the information is ignorant of what’s really going on, and the person that’s sending the information is equally ignorant of what’s going on. I didn’t say they’re stupid. They’re just ignorant.
But I ran into that also when I was serving because people would call you up and say, “I want you to vote for Senate Bill 226.” And you knew already, weeks ago, that Senate Bill 226 wasn’t coming out of committee and was already dead. That used to grate on my nerves a little bit because the people were telling them to call your rep should have known better. They get so myopic in their focus.
You have to be responsible when you’re in office, and you have to be responsible for the truth, and you cannot consistently lie. Eventually people will come get you. Abraham Lincoln is the favorite quote when he said, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” They will come get you.
CC: Anything else, Bob, you might want to add about what the future holds for you? I’m assuming you may still be engaged in an informal advisory role here and there in the policymaking process? Will you be closely monitoring the results up and down the ballot this fall?
BT: I do that. I assist some in campaigns, but I’m not called upon often. Two statewide campaigns or three for Sandy and beating two incumbents doesn’t get you very far. Never losing doesn’t get you very far because when you’re a campaign consultant, you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear like “You’re going to have to get out and work.”
That first race against Thompson that I ran, I worked so hard and went door to door so often that I collapsed at the end of the race and was in bed for six days. That’s quite a bit for a thirty-five year old. I had an ulcerated strep throat that went through my nose and out my ears. You have to be willing to do that, and that’s just not common.
So, no, I don’t do much. My wife and I bought a little property out in Kenny Wilk’s district, which I haven’t warned him about up near Leavenworth, and my wife is retired now. She’s digging in the earth. I’m trying to make a little money here and there.
But I follow it. I guess if somebody asked me to help, I probably would get engaged. But I have a little trouble getting around now. So I’m not pressing the issue. I’m very interested in what my son does. I have two sons, both of them work for the state. One of them is a lobbyist, and the other one is a detective for the state prison system. His birth was announced on this very floor.
C: Really? Okay.
BT: He was born while I was in the Legislature. So I’m content. I’ll stay with the old stories. I love those people.
CC: Well, thank you so much for your time today.
BT: Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me. I’m supposed to look over here? Okay, very well.
[End of File]
May 6, 1957
February 11, 2025
Republican
Member, Roeland Park city council 1989-1993
Member, Legislative Educational Planning (jt. comm) 1993-1994
Member, House Local Government 1993-1996
Member, House Education 1993-1996
State Representative, Kansas House of Representatives 1993-2002
Member, House Committee on Governmental Organization and Elections 1995-1998
Member, House Economic Development 1997-1998
Vice-Chair, House Insurance 1997-1998
Member, House Taxation 1999-2000
Member, Children's Issues (Joint) 1999-2002
Member, House Government Efficiency and Fiscal Oversight 1999-2002
Member, House Financial Institutions 1999-2002
Chair, House Insurance 1999-2002
Member, House 2001-2002
Member, House Redistricting 2002-2002
Assistant Insurance Commissioner, Kansas Insurance Department 2003-2012
24
Statehouse, Topeka, KS
Bob-Tomlinson-08-02-24 FINAL.pdf