Rep. Tracey Mann told a Great Bend crowd Thursday that Republicans on the 2022 GOP Bus Tour knew they were preaching to the choir when they talked about electing members of their party on Nov. 8. But it’s a choir that needs to get bigger and sing louder, Mann said.
The Kansas Republic bus tour kicked off Wednesday in Topeka and is scheduled to make 27 stops in six days. Thursday’s schedule began in Dodge City and included Garden City, Liberal, Colby and Great Bend. Candidates who visited Great Bend were Mann, seeking re-elction to the U.S. House of Representatives 1st Congressional District; Attorney General Derek Schmidt, running for governor; Kris Kobach, running for attorney general; and Steven Johnson, running for state treasurer.
Senator Roger Marshall, MD, is not up for re-election this year but served as the program emcee.
A late start
Senator Marshall arrived ahead of the tour bus, which was about an hour late for its stop in Great Bend. The growing audience dined on free hot dogs while they waited for the candidates to arrive. With everyone assembled, Marshall let the audience know that the theme for the tour – written on the side of the bus – is Fire Kelly, Fire Pelosi.
“We’re stuck with Joe Biden ... for two more years,” Marshall said. “Kansas cannot have a governor who races to be the first one to rubber-stamp his policies.
“Let’s think about what this President Joe Biden and his governor have done to wreck our economy, to hurt our schools, to hurt our jobs. President Biden has declared war on American energy, on American agriculture, and our governor’s right there pushing those policies and that’s driving up the price of gas and groceries. We have an open border. People in communities like my home Great Bend feel like we’re not safe anymore and our governor won’t support our law and order officers. And lastly, something near and dear to all of us is education. We need a governor who’s going to support locally controlled education, not education controlled in Washington or Topeka. And lastly, we need a governor that’s going to make sure that biological boys aren’t going to be competing in the state cross-country tournament this weekend. So that’s why I’m very proud to support Derek Schmidt and very proud to support these candidates that are here tonight with us.”
Here are some of the candidates’ comments:
Steven Johnson, candidate for treasurer
Johnson said he worked in financial services for 24 years and then went to work in the Legislature where he looked at pension issues with then Rep. John Edmonds, R-Great Bend, who attended Thursday’s rally. At the treasurer’s office, he said, “one of the jobs is to manage the investment and cash flows of the state. I spent my life’s work in identifying and managing financial risks; so the treasurer needs to manage those financial risks in the billions of dollars that the state has – some that’s in pensions but there are other funds as well. There are questions we need to be asking. We have half of our equities currently invested overseas. I think that’s too rich a mix in international and, in particular, I’m concerned about the amount that is set in China, which is just over half a billion dollars.”
Tracey Mann, U.S. Representative
“We’re 21 months into the Biden administration; if this is a baseball game, we’re at the very end of the third inning. So we have a long ways to go here but we need to flip the House so we can put a check on President Biden and take his checkbook away and begin to get this country back on track,” he said. “It’s incredibly important that people in Barton County get out and vote because we’ve got to run up the score and have a great turnout here.”
Kris Kobach, candidate for attorney general
Kobach said he would continue the work Attorney Schmidt has done to hold the Biden administration in check.
“Let’s talk about fossil fuels. When Biden took office he sign over a dozen executive orders that first day, Jan. 20 2021, and most of them have already been struck down as illegal or unconstitutional, but several of them had to do with fossil fuels. He wanted to immediately terminate the Keystone XL Pipeline. We used to be an energy-independent country and Kansas was an energy-independent state within this country. And now we are begging OPEC to please release more oil because our president won’t let us drill our own oil. It is outrageous. It is causing inflation. The gas pump price just went up again today because OPEC doesn’t want to do what Joe Biden asks them to do. Oh, surprise, surprise. And so we have to recognize that many of the things that the President is doing are illegal. They’re harmful to this country and the attorneys general of the states will continue to fight that.”
Kobach said Republicans will also oppose the “trans agenda.”
“The Biden administration has already gone all in on the trans agenda, and that agenda goes to some pretty irrational places, including the notion that biological boys should be competing with girls in girls’ sports. And the Biden administration announced the summer that federal school lunch subsidies, which is a huge pot of money, would be contingent upon whether public schools in America adopt trans-friendly policies. This is outrageous folks. This has nothing to do with nutrition.
“And when Derrick is governor, we will be able to take an important step in Kansas, several states have already done this, pass a law saying that biological males cannot compete in girls sports. Our Legislature already passed that bill twice, but Kelly vetoed it twice.”
Derek Schmidt, candidate for governor
“We’ve got to win these races up and down the ballot and elect Republican leadership in offices from the governor’s office to the U.S. Senate to our local legislative offices... . The Republican view of the world is what we so desperately need right now. Our values, our way of life, our pocketbooks are under attack. The way we make change is to change the folks who are in charge.”
“We’re going to fire (Nancy Pelosi and) Laura Kelly in 33 days with your help.”
Democratic control in Washington has led to “the highest increases in the cost of living in the last 40 years,” high gas prices, “a terrible withdrawal from Afghanistan, which showed an extraordinary disrespect from the leaders of that party for the men and women who had served for a generation defending the country and answering the call of duty. And we got terrible social policy,” he said.
“It’s already been mentioned, in part, an ideological crusade to adopt an agenda that is simply inconsistent with how most of us choose to live our lives and want to live our lives and freedom here in Kansas.”
Schmidt said Kelly “wants the Democrat party in charge in Washington,” but, “She doesn’t want to say it, because she knows that it doesn’t sell out in real America.”
“It matters that we have the wrong leadership in the governor’s office, because she associates and follows the lead of that team in Washington that keeps calling the shots. It matters that we have the wrong leadership in the governor’s office, because she vetoed 20 tax cuts, including vetoing the grocery tax cut that she’s now campaigning on. If she’d actually just signed the bill in 2019, when Republicans put it on her desk, the food tax would be half what it is today in the middle of this inflation, on its path to zero in January. But she vetoed it and decided to make it an election issue instead.”
He also said Kelly vetoed funding for mental health and shut down Kansas schools in the spring of 2020, “the first governor in the country to do it, but continuing the lockdown through the summer when other governors had started to figure it out. It makes me angry every time this governor calls herself the education governor, because there is no person in the history of this state who single-handedly has done more damage to more of our children than the current occupant of the governor’s office in Topeka.”
Schmidt also said that immigration problems at the southern border are a Kansas problem that the present governor ignores.
“Right here in Barton County, I’ll guarantee and you can ask the sheriff – he sees it every day – right here in Barton County our streets are flooded with methamphetamine and they have been for years. And our streets are now flooded with fentanyl, a new and deadly poison that is on the streets in the United States, in large part because it flows over the southern border of this country that is unsecured. It is trafficked in by the cartels. It is sold right here where it kills our children and our neighbors and our sons and daughters. It is a Kansas problem. The Biden administration looks the other way and so does the Kelly administration.”
