Gov. Andy Beshear, flanked by opponents of Amendment 2, spoke at a news conference Tuesday at Consolidated Baptist Church in Lexington. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

LEXINGTON —? Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear joined teachers union president Randi Weingarten Tuesday to rally opponents of a constitutional amendment that they warned would defund Kentucky’s public schools.

Beshear took issue with what he called “misinformation” being spread by supporters of Amendment 2. “You don’t have to read very far to know that those trying to get you to vote ‘yes’ on Amendment 2 aren’t telling you the truth,” Beshear said — a criticism later disputed by Jim Waters of the conservative Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, which supports the amendment.

If voters approve the measure’s changes to the state Constitution, Kentucky’s legislature would for the first time be free to put public money into private schools. Kentucky is one of three states with similar questions on the ballot this fall.

Weingarten, president of the 1.8 million-member AFT which represents teachers, nurses and other professions, stopped for a news conference at Consolidated Baptist Church as part of a pre-election bus tour through multiple states where AFT is supporting political allies including the Democratic presidential ticket.

Weingarten, an attorney and former history teacher, praised the protections for public schools in Kentucky’s Constitution. “I’m here to say to Kentucky, if we want to have that Kentucky culture of public schooling being the equalizer for all? kids, we need to vote ‘no’ on Amendment 2.”

She said that in states that have funded vouchers to help pay private school tuition, most of the parents using them were already sending their kids to private schools. “And, in fact, many private schools in the country have raised their tuition.”

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia fund some? form of vouchers that provide a set amount of money for private? school tuition, according to the Education Commission of the? States. Thirty-three states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have some form of “school choice” program, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for the programs.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, told the gathering that voucher programs are failing students. He said 20 years of research led him to “call vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending” because kids who leave public schools to attend the non-elite private schools that will accept them suffer declines in academic performance.

Cowen, formerly a professor at the University of Kentucky, is the author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers” published recently by Harvard Education Press.

“When it comes to vouchers, it isn’t the school choice at all. It’s the school’s choice. The schools are doing the choosing,” Cowan said, adding that “30% of kids who do come to a voucher school from a public school end up leaving within the first couple of years … because they’re pushed out, asked to leave or they just can’t make it work.”

The movement toward school vouchers has been fueled by a network of super wealthy individuals and their nonprofit advocacy groups, most prominently Americans for Prosperity linked to Charles and David Koch. Another champion of school choice, Jeff Yass, a billionaire options? trader who lives near Philadelphia, has also put millions into a political action committee associated with Republican Kentucky U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who is featured in television ads supporting Amendment? 2.

Saying he wanted to address “three pieces of misinformation,” Beshear ?said a pro-Amendment 2 flier had implied that he supported the measure because it would give him more options. “Let me be clear, I’m fully opposed to Amendment 2.”

Beshear also disputed assertions in advertising for Amendment 2 that its passage would raise teachers’ pay, saying “that? fails math.” Beshear also said that even though supporters ?argue that Amendment 2 in itself makes no policy changes, Republican lawmakers through their past votes for charter schools and a tax credit to support private schools have made their intentions clear, even as their commitment to further cuts in the state income tax will reduce revenue available for education.

“Amendment 2 would allow Frankfort politicians to take taxpayer money away from public schools and send it to unaccountable? private schools,” Besher said. “Let me tell you the people of Kentucky do not want that and when they are educated on what this amendment will actually do, they will vote against it as many? times as you’ll let them.”

Waters? of the Bluegrass Institute disputed Beshear’s assertion that Amendment 2 supporters are spreading misinformation.

“Voters are not voting on vouchers or any type of policy. The amendment removes barriers so legislators can create school choice policies without being struck down by the courts.”

Waters also said data show that teacher pay is “positively affected by choice policy.” The Bluegrass Institute in August published a brief by John Garren, a University of Kentucky emeritus professor of? economics, that found “increased school choice raises the demand for teachers’ services” and that “this increased? demand pushes up pay for teachers generally in public, private, and charter schools.”

Then Republican candidate for governor and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron waves to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. Behind him are U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell; Elaine Chao, former U.S. Transportation and Labor secretary; U.S. Rep. James Comer (partially blocked by Cameron's arm) and Cameron's wife, Makenze Cameron. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

FRANKFORT — The word “privacy” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. But the right to privacy — to be free from baseless government intrusions into our “persons, houses, papers and effects” — is woven all through the Constitution and our laws.

Despite having sworn an oath to support the Constitution and the law, former Attorney General Daniel Cameron misused his power in order to harass physicians who had performed abortions in Kentucky when the procedure was still legal here.

We know this only because a court case that had been kept secret for more than a year was recently unsealed. The Lantern joined with Louisville Public Media to hire lawyers to ask that the records be opened because the public needs to know — and we want to report — what happens in the courts.

The public also needs to know when government officials abuse their power, as they have long been wont to do.?

How Kentucky’s former top prosecutor used his powers to go after abortion providers in secret

Our nation’s founders understood the risk of unencumbered government power. They took pains in the Constitution to keep Americans secure from the kind of harassment inflicted by England’s monarch, whose men could search anyone’s belongings “without any cause other than the perceived suspicion that they were political enemies.” ?

In the summer of 2022, in the days after Americans lost the federally-protected right to end a pregnancy, EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood filed a legal challenge to Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion. The ban had been triggered into effect by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.?

Two physicians on the University of Louisville medical faculty provided abortions and trained future doctors at EMW — ?training required to maintain the medical school’s accreditation. At a hearing asking a judge in Louisville to block the abortion ban, one of the physicians testified, “Abortion is essential health care. … People have the right to determine whether they wish to have children.”

Cameron, who had made opposition to abortion a cornerstone of his political platform, was defending the state’s abortion ban and also gearing up for his successful campaign to become the Republican nominee for governor.

Kentucky appeals court rejects AG’s efforts to get employment records in abortion case

He decided to go after the physicians’ employment records and sought the information through the discovery process. When that didn’t work, Cameron opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed their W2s, 1099s, insurance info, time sheets and job descriptions under the pretense that a Franklin County grand jury wanted them.

Two Kentucky courts concluded that Cameron had no evidence to justify his demands for the physicians’ records, that he was conducting an illegal “fishing expedition,” much like the king’s henchmen.

Significantly, Cameron’s successor, Attorney General Russell Coleman, also a Republican, ended the fishing expedition by opting not to seek a review by the Supreme Court.

All along the way, political considerations appear to have steered Cameron. He pleased conservative interests like the Family Foundation by going after the physicians’ info in the first place. But by the fall of 2023, in the heat of the gubernatorial race and with Democrat Andy Beshear attacking him on abortion, Cameron wanted to keep his actions secret. He quickly obtained a Court of Appeals order to keep the case sealed when Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd signaled his intent to open it.

Cameron misused his considerable powers as attorney general against Kentuckians whose offense was taking the opposite side of a divisive public issue. If, as the physicians argued, Cameron had succeeded in obtaining their private information, he might well have used it to publicly harass them or as fodder for his campaign.

Cameron’s fig leaf of a rationale was a suspicion that public money was somehow supporting abortion because the U of L professors also worked at EMW, at one time Kentucky’s only abortion provider. Longstanding state and federal laws ban the public funding of abortions.?

But, as his own legal team admitted, even that flimsy fig leaf had evaporated by the time Cameron issued the criminal subpoena because the one-year statute of limitations on that? law had expired.

To give Cameron the benefit of the doubt, to protect any genuine investigation of any genuine possible wrongdoing, Judge Shepherd had allowed the attorney general’s team to present its evidence privately or “in camera.”?

We can conclude from the record that Cameron had no justification for probing the physicians’ private records. Mitch McConnell’s protege, endorsed in his quest for the governorship by Donald Trump, had put ambition and politics above the law he had sworn to uphold.?

Kentuckians needed to know that, no matter how they feel about abortion or politics.?

If you support the Lantern through your donations, you helped them find out. Thank you.

Daniel Cameron looks over the crowd after conceding defeat on election night, Nov 7, 2023, in Louisville. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

FRANKFORT — Kentucky’s attorney general and two University of Louisville physicians waged a legal battle for more than a year that almost no one knew about —? even though it involved the Republican candidate for governor and an issue of intense public interest.

The secrecy around the case – from its outset in June of 2023 – is highly unusual. It ended Monday when the file was unsealed under a Franklin Circuit judge’s order. The Lantern first revealed the case’s existence and reported many of its details in August based on a Court of Appeals ruling and sources with knowledge of the situation.?

The newly unsealed file provides further insights into what happened when the powers of Kentucky’s top prosecutor intersected with abortion politics in an election year.

The dispute involved then-Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s efforts to pursue a criminal investigation against the two U of L physicians who, when it was still legal to do so, performed abortions and trained medical students and residents at EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville. Cameron also was Kentucky Republicans’ nominee for governor last year.

Kentucky appeals court rejects AG’s efforts to get employment records in abortion case

After the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in the summer of 2022, the physicians testified in court against the near-total abortion ban that immediately took effect in Kentucky.

Cameron, whose office was defending the abortion ban, then sought the physicians’ pay, tax and other records from U of L through the civil discovery process. When that didn’t work he used a grand jury to subpoena the records as part of a criminal investigation that he said would discover whether public dollars had been misused.

In the end, the case turned on what two courts determined were Cameron’s misuse of the grand jury process and his lack of evidence of any crime.

Politics alleged

Lawyers for the physicians argued that Cameron’s actions were motivated by politics, that he was using abortion litigation “for political gain in his gubernatorial campaign” — a claim that Cameron’s office branded “offensive” and “slander.”?

The doctors’ lawyers said Cameron “apparently believes that depicting abortion providers as greedy profiteers advances his arguments that abortions should be outlawed.”?

It’s impossible to know how public knowledge of the case might have affected the 2023 race for governor. By September 2023 — less than two months before the gubernatorial election — the politics of abortion had changed in Kentucky.?

That month Democratic incumbent Gov. Andy Beshear began airing powerful commercials featuring a rape victim and a prosecutor criticizing Cameron for opposing exceptions for rape and incest in the abortion ban. And Cameron quickly modified his position, saying he would sign legislation creating exceptions for rape and incest if the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved it.

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd tried to unseal the case at that time, but was thwarted by Cameron who immediately appealed the ruling to quash the subpoena and successfully pleaded to keep the case secret at least until the appeals court ruled on its merits.

Beshear defeated Cameron in the governor’s race by about 5 percentage points, and Cameron has since taken a job as executive director of a non-profit group called 1792 Exchange. (That group’s website says it works to? protect small businesses, other non-profits and philanthropic organizations from “woke” corporations.)

AG Coleman ends appeals

Cameron did not respond to an email from the Lantern sent to 1792 Exchange seeking comment on the outcome of his ill-fated investigation.

Current Attorney General Russell Coleman did not ask the Kentucky Supreme Court to review the August Court of Appeals ruling that upheld Shepherd’s decision to quash the subpoena. Rewa Zakharia, chief of the criminal division in Coleman’s office, declined comment on Friday after a court hearing when Shepherd ordered the case finally unsealed. Zakharia referred questions to the office spokesman Kevin Grout, who did not return phone messages from Kentucky Lantern.

One of the attorneys for the doctors, William Brammell, released a statement that said, “We appreciate the judge’s thoughtful handling of this case and ultimate decision to unseal it, making it available to the public.? In a functioning democracy, it’s critical that citizens know what their government is doing and the judge’s decision in this case balances that right to access with our client’s understandable personal privacy interests.”

On Aug. 9 a three-judge panel of the Kentucky Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed Shepherd’s quashing of the subpoena. Its order said the subpoena amounted to a “fishing expedition” and that Cameron’s premise that tax dollars may have been illegally spent on abortions was not supported by the facts of the case.

The appeals court sent the question of whether the case should be unsealed back to Shepherd. On Friday Shepherd unsealed the case with the exception of one document, and he released 177 pages of records Monday with the names of the physicians redacted.

The U of L physicians and another physician who practiced at EMW Women’s Surgical Center initiated the case on July 21, 2023, asking Franklin Circuit Court to quash a subpoena seeking payroll, personnel and other records

They argued that Cameron unsuccessfully sought the same records in the civil case challenging the constitutionality of Kentucky’s abortion ban and that the material sought was not relevant to any possible criminal charges. They suggested a political motive which Cameron hotly disputed.

“It has become clear that Mr. Cameron will use abortion litigation, against providers and others, for political gain in his gubernatorial campaign.”

Cameron said the subpoena was issued as part of his office’s responsibility to investigate “crimes involving the use of public funds.”

The plaintiffs filed the case under the pseudonyms Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2 and John Row, and asked that the case be sealed to protect their privacy. Cameron offered no objection and Shepherd let the case initially proceed under seal.

As the case proceeded, Shepherd, over the objections of the doctors’ lawyers, gave Cameron the opportunity to present a confidential (“in camera”) written explanation “that will set forth the subject matter of the Attorney General’s investigation.”

Cameron did so. That record remains the only part of the file still sealed. But whatever is in it, it did not convince Shepherd.

Grand jury never asked for or asked for subpoena

The judge wrote a 16-page order quashing the subpoena. Shepherd agreed with nearly all points made by the physicians’ attorneys. He said even the confidential submission from the attorney general “provides no information which grants its office jurisdiction.”

Shepherd said the investigation was brought in the wrong county because the doctors work in Jefferson County. “There is no indication that any of the conduct under investigation took place in Franklin County. Nor is there any allegation that state funds were used directly in any manner that would violate the penal code,” he ruled.

Shepherd noted that while Cameron obtained the subpoena from the clerk of the Franklin Circuit Court, the grand jury never asked for the subpoena or voted to authorize it.

And because the subpoena sought the same records Cameron was unsuccessfully trying to get in the separate civil case, the judge concluded, “this subpoena appears to be a classic ‘fishing expedition.’”

He said the doctors had a right to be concerned the information might be used in a way that would “subject them to vilification or harassment by opponents of abortion.”

The judge also said he was inclined to open the case because the public should know what goes on in court. Shepherd issued a lengthy order in which he attempted to unseal the records. “The Court believes that the public has a right to know, and to decide for themselves, whether the Attorney General is wielding the authority granted to him appropriately and in accordance with the requirements of law.”

But Cameron filed an emergency request to keep the entire file sealed, which the appeals court granted.

In August, the Court of Appeals ruling against Cameron sent the case back to Shepherd to decide whether to unseal the case.

The Kentucky Lantern and Louisville Public Media filed briefs asking that the case be opened.?

Abortion politics: A Kentucky timeline

2019 – Kentucky’s legislature votes along party lines to enact two anti-abortion laws: A ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. A ban on all abortions that would take effect only if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the so-called “trigger law.” Federal courts blocked the six-week ban.

Feb. 26, 2020 – The Family Foundation calls on Attorney General Daniel Cameron to investigate whether medical school faculty at the University of Louisville are violating state law through ties to what was then the state’s only abortion clinic, EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville.

U of L President Neeli Bendapudi firmly rejects the allegations, saying U of L and EMW are separate entities. Residents in obstetrics and gynecology, as part of their training, must learn all aspects of reproductive health care, and abortion provider EMW is the only place they can learn the procedure.

March 30, 2021 – General Assembly approves putting an anti-abortion amendment on the 2022 ballot. It would add a new section stating Kentucky’s Constitution does not secure or protect a right to or funding of abortion.

June 24, 2022 – U.S. Supreme Court ends the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe.

EMW and Planned Parenthood, both in Louisville and Kentucky’s only abortion providers, stop performing abortions “out of an abundance of caution.”

June 27, 2022 – EMW and Planned Parenthood file suit in Jefferson Circuit Court seeking to block enforcement of the abortion ban.?

July 6, 2022 – Jefferson Circuit Judge Mitch Perry hears arguments from both sides with Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office defending the abortion ban. Among those testifying are two University of Louisville OB/GYNs who provide abortions at EMW and say abortion is essential to health care.

July 7, 2022 – Republican lawmakers in Frankfort grill U of L medical dean Toni Ganzel about whether public funds have been used to provide abortions. He tells them U of L does not pay physicians to perform abortions. Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, tells Ganzel,? “If university funds are used for abortion, the taxpayers ought to know, and the legislature should take that into account when we’re talking about funding the university and other things.”

July 30, 2022 – Judge Perry issues a temporary order allowing abortions to resume in Kentucky.?

Aug. 2, 2022 – Legal abortions stop after the Court of Appeals grants Cameron’s emergency request to reinstate the two laws banning almost all abortions in the state.?

Aug. 3, 2022 – Two U of L professors suspend their work at EMW. U of L pauses its residency training affiliation with EMW until “we can determine the future of the relationship.”

Nov. 8, 2022 – Kentucky voters defeat the anti-abortion constitutional amendment by almost 5 percentage points, 52.3%? to 47.7% or 742,232 votes to 675,634 votes.

Nov. 15, 2022 – Kentucky Supreme Court hears arguments in abortion providers’ challenge of abortion ban.

Feb. 16, 2023 – Kentucky Supreme Court leaves abortion ban in place, saying abortion providers lack standing to challenge the law on behalf of their patients, leaving unanswered questions about the ban’s constitutionality. Calling it a “significant victory,” Cameron says, “We will continue to stand up for the unborn by defending these laws.”

May 16, 2023 – Cameron wins primary, becomes Republican candidate for Kentucky governor, challenging incumbent Andy Beshear, who opposes Kentucky’s no-exceptions abortion ban, calling it “extreme.”

June 2023 – Cameron issues a Franklin County grand jury subpoena for payroll and personnel information for two unnamed U of L employees, seeking evidence that state funds may have been misused. All parties agree to seal the case.

July 2023 – Jane Does and Roe ask Franklin circuit judge to quash the subpoena.

Sept. 1, 2023 – Democrat Beshear’s campaign airs an ad featuring Jefferson County prosecutor Erin White attacking Cameron for opposing abortion ban exceptions, even for rape and incest victims. ?“Cameron believes rapists deserve more rights than their victims. That’s extreme. And it’s dangerous,” she says.

Sept. 18, 2023 – Cameron changes his position on abortion, saying he would sign legislation creating exceptions for rape and incest if the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved it. He later appears to soften that statement to reassure abortion opponents.

Sept. 20, 2023 – Beshear campaign airs ad in which Hadley Duvall says, “This is to you, Daniel Cameron. To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable.”??

?September 2023 –? Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd quashes the subpoena and tries to unseal the case records. Cameron appeals. Court of Appeals grants his emergency request to keep the case sealed, pending a final outcome.

Oct. 4, 2023 – Russell Coleman, the Republican nominee for attorney general says he supports exceptions for rape and incest and will “call on the General Assembly to take a hard look at that issue.”

Nov. 5, 2023 – Beshear and Coleman win their races by comfortable margins.

Aug. 9, 2024 – Kentucky Court of Appeals rejects the attorney general’s subpoena as an improper “fishing expedition” and outside the scope of the Franklin County grand jury because the records sought by the attorney general are from another county. Returns case to Franklin Circuit Court to consider unsealing the file.

Sept. 20, 2024 – Kentucky Lantern and Louisville Public Media file motion asking that records of the case be unsealed.

Sept. 27, 2024 – Shepherd orders the case unsealed with redactions and excluding an “in camera” filing.

Almost 8,000 holders of H2-A visas worked on Kentucky farms in fiscal 2023, including harvesting burley tobacco. (Getty Images)

Seven Kentucky farmers last week sued the U.S. Department of Labor to block new federal protections for foreign farmworkers who enter the country on H2-A temporary visas.

On Monday Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman joined them, saying the new rule would clear the way for farmworkers in Kentucky to unionize.

Also moving to intervene to block the new rule are Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Ohio and West Virginia, according to a release from Coleman’s office.

A federal judge in Georgia earlier this year blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the rule in 17 other states.

Announced in April, the rule expands protections to seasonal workers, including against employer retaliation, unsafe working conditions and illegal recruitment practices. It requires that vans used to transport workers have seat belts.

Coleman, a Republican, said the new regulation “would force Kentucky farmers to allow temporary foreign-migrant workers to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. It would add excessive new bureaucratic burdens to Kentucky agricultural employers, who are already struggling to make ends meet.”

The Labor Department issued H2-A visas to 378,000 temporary workers, most from Mexico, in fiscal year 2023, according to Rural Migration News. Almost 8,000 of the temporary workers were employed in Kentucky.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Kentucky’s Eastern District, also include organizations that help growers navigate the H2-A process, including the Lexington-based Agriculture Workforce Management Association, which says it is “owned and managed by agricultural employers.”

They argue that without authorization from Congress, the Labor Department lacks the authority to confer “certain new ‘rights’ on foreign agricultural workers who are employed temporarily in the United States on H-2A visas, as well as on American agricultural workers deemed to be engaged in ‘corresponding employment’ with the H-2A workers.”?

Federal law requires the Labor Department to determine U.S. workers won’t lose work or wages to foreign workers admitted under the temporary visas.

Unveiling the rule in a California vineyard, U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su said it “is meant to give H2-A workers more ability to advocate for themselves, to speak up when they experience labor law abuses.”?

Coleman said the rule “will force new burdens on our growers, making it harder to get their products to market and raising costs on families at the grocery store.”

The attorney who filed the suit, Joe Bilby, is a former general counsel in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.

Senseless gun violence is as American as apple pie. (Getty Images)

One of the everyday pleasures of living on the edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest in London or my hometown of Morehead is being surrounded by woods and hills.

Unless a sniper is loose in them.?

I’m writing this as schools have been closed for two days and law enforcement continues to search part of the national forest for Joseph Couch, 32, an ex-Army Reserve private. Couch is charged with taking a position on a ledge overlooking Interstate 75 a few hours before dusk Saturday and opening fire on vehicles below.

Thankfully, miraculously, no one was killed but five people were injured and 12 vehicles struck by gunfire. A major north-south corridor was shut down for hours.

During the nail-biting uncertainty as we awaited — dreaded — a body count, Republican state lawmakers from the southern Kentucky area issued a statement. The “senseless act of violence,” they said, “does not reflect the values of this community, our Commonwealth, or its people.”

I think what they meant is that a place full of bighearted people shouldn’t be judged by the actions of one heavily armed whacked-out individual.

But let’s be real: The ease with which Couch bought a weapon of war that he turned on innocent people clearly reflects the political values of those lawmakers and others in Frankfort and Washington who steadfastly put protecting easy access to firearms above protecting people.

Republicans in Kentucky’s legislative supermajority don’t just value guns over people, they’ve sanctified their devotion. Two of the lawmakers who issued the statement, Rep. Josh Bray of Mount Vernon and Sen. Brandon Storm of London, sponsored legislation to make Kentucky a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” which it became during last year’s session.

(One of their goals was to hamstring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose agents, nonetheless, responded to the I-75 emergency.)?

I probably don’t need to point out that this is not the kind of sanctuary you want when bullets shatter the windows of your moving car.?

It’s not the kind of sanctuary that shields you when a shooter starts taking out shoppers at a supermarket or at a country music concert or a Monday morning staff meeting at a Louisville bank. There’s no sanctuary for children and teachers even in our fortified schools.?

Senseless gun violence is as American as apple pie. Nowhere else outside of war zones are people randomly mowed down by semi-automatic weapons or caught in crossfire.

It does not have to be this way.

We know it doesn’t have to be this way because Congress with bipartisan support in 1994 banned the sale of some semi-automatic weapons including AR-15s. Congress acted in response to mass shootings, including one in 1989 at a Louisville printing plant that killed eight people and injured 12.

The ban did nothing to decrease the number of semi-automatic weapons already in private hands and lasted only 10 years because Congress refused to renew it.?A decade wasn’t long enough to definitively measure the ban’s long-term effects, according to researchers.

But data does show an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired. (Congress did ban something: federal funding for firearms-related research in 1996, anticipating, perhaps, that more knowledge would produce more demand for sane gun laws.)?

We can definitively say that if an assault-weapons ban had been in place Saturday Joseph Couch could not have legally purchased an AR-15 rifle. Couch, who was charged with threatening a neighbor with an AR-type weapon earlier this year and has a DUI on his record, also purchased 1,000 rounds of ammunition.?

He texted his ex-wife shortly before the shooting began. “I’m going to kill a lot of people” and “myself afterwards.”

Thankfully, Couch failed in the first part of his self-avowed mission. If he succeeds in the second part, we may not know for sure until some poor hunter or hiker stumbles across the remains. That uncertainty gives Couch a sickening kind of power over people who can’t help but be nagged by the possibility that he could still take a position and open fire again.

They won’t really be alone, though. In Kentucky where the Republican supermajority only ever loosens gun laws and in a nation where even the Supreme Court is in thrall to the firearms lobby, all of us might as well be living at the foot of a hill with someone wandering around up top, armed and wanting to randomly kill a lot of people.

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, left, greets Stewart Perry of Lexington after speaking to a Commerce Lexington public policy luncheon, Aug. 21, 2024. McConnell posed for photos with luncheon attendees but did not take questions from the news media. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

LEXINGTON — Republican Mitch McConnell said it’s important for his party to retake the U.S. Senate in November to protect the filibuster.

Speaking to a Commerce Lexington luncheon, McConnell said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “just this week is talking about getting rid of the filibuster. What that does is to say to any given majority, my issue, what I care about, is more important than the structure of the Senate, which has served us well for many, many years,” McConnell said. “That bothers me a lot.”

Earlier this week, Schumer told reporters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that he will push to circumvent the 60-vote requirement in order to move voting rights legislation if Democrats this year win the presidency and both congressional chambers, according to media outlets.?

Senate rules require a supermajority of 60 votes from the 100 members to advance most legislation. Most?filibusters have occurred since 2007-08, as use of the 60-vote bar to block a simple majority of the Senate from passing laws has soared in this century.

McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, warned that without the filibuster a Democratic majority could grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which, McConnell said, would ensure “four new Democratic senators in perpetuity, which significantly disables our side, my side.”

McConnell said, “I worry about today’s Democratic Party becoming so far left that what they want to do is so important they break the rules to get the outcome. So it won’t surprise you to know that I’d like to be turning my job over to the majority leader rather than the minority leader.”

McConnell, who is stepping down as Republican leader at the end of this session of Congress, told the gathering that the “single biggest decision” he made when he was the majority leader was refusing to fill a Supreme Court vacancy during then-President Barack Obama’s final year in office, paving the way for Republican President Donald Trump to appoint Justice Neil Gorsuch. At the end of Trump’s term, with less than two months before the presidential election, McConnell pushed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump also named Justice Brett Kavanuagh, ensuring a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court.

McConell, who referred to the Trump administration once but did not say the words “Donald Trump” during his 30-minute speech, said, “I’ll say this about that administration’s president (he) took good advice from two White House counsels in a row about who to appoint to the federal courts.”

McConnell praised the Federalist Society, which recommended most of Trump’s judges, saying decades of work by the legal organization paved the way for a recent 6-3 Supreme Court decision that overturned an earlier ruling known as the Chevron deference and weakens the power of the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies.

“I think it’s a great check against runaway government no matter who’s trying to run away,” McConnell said. “So as I look back over my career, I think the thing that I chose when I was majority leader to put first was the thing that will last for the longest.”?

McConnell will continue to serve as Kentucky’s senior senator after stepping down as Republican leader. He has not said whether he will seek reelection in 2026 but is widely expected to retire.

Commerce Lexington President and CEO Bob Quick said the luncheon was attended by more than 350 business and community leaders from Lexington and the surrounding region, the largest turnout since the pandemic — a tribute, Quick said, to McConnell, Kentucky’s longest-serving U.S. senator.

McConnell did not take questions from the news media.

Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers, left, and House Speaker David Osborne are among the Republicans who declined to answer the Right to Life candidate survey this year. They conferred during the State of the Commonwealth address in the House chambers on Jan. 3, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

FRANKFORT — Picture this: You pull an item off a store shelf that has no price tag.

Do you assume it’s free?

If you said yes, you might have a future in the Kentucky General Assembly, where some members seem astonished ?— offended, even —that actual money is needed to pay for new programs they shepherded into law earlier this year.

Kentuckians fostering young relatives are among the losers; some of them would have gained much needed help from a newly enacted law. Unfortunately, it’s one of 24 new laws or resolutions that Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration says it cannot implement because the legislature failed to appropriate money to pay for them.

Some new Kentucky laws are in limbo as governor says lawmakers failed to fund them

How lawmakers can be oblivious to the cost of bills they are moving just became less puzzling, thanks to reporting by Joe Sonka of Kentucky Public Radio: The price tags on legislation? — known as fiscal notes — have largely been removed from public view.

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, explained to Sonka that waiting to find out how much a bill would cost can be “quicksand” for measures that leadership wants to move, “especially late in the session.” Also, fiscal notes can be inaccurate and vague, says Stivers.

“I don’t want to create such a bureaucracy and to slow something down when we really need to get something moved,” Stivers said in an explanation that will never be mistaken for fiscal conservatism.??

Stiver’s rationale is also a far cry from the kitchen table economics that politicians are always praising. “Come on, baby, we need to buy that truck now. You can read the mumbo jumbo in the loan agreement after we get back from four-wheeling.”

Lawmakers can and often do request legislative staff to research the cost of a bill and its impact on the state budget. These estimates are put into a fiscal note. I spent a good bit of time during this year’s session looking for fiscal notes attached to bills on the legislature’s website. I found hardly any. Now I know why.

Sonka discovered that some — perhaps many? — fiscal notes are labeled with a red “confidential” and never attached to bills.?

The absence of a fiscal note keeps the cost unknown to most lawmakers and also to the taxpaying public that foots the bill.

Only three of the 30-plus lawmakers interviewed by Sonka were aware that confidential fiscal notes are a thing.

It’s hard to know how many fiscal notes have been withheld from the public because the legislature says the documents — prepared and printed at taxpayer expense — are not public records and therefore cannot be obtained under Kentucky’s open records law.

What is observable to the naked eye is that the Republican supermajority makes a habit of moving high-cost legislation amid lots of rhetorical virtue-signaling but with little or no regard for paying for it.

The legislature has yet to fund the school resource officers or counselors promised in a 2019 school safety law. In 2022, it enacted a formula for gradually reducing the state income tax without an estimate of its impact on the state budget, at least not one known to the public.?

Our self-described conservatives are disregarding the most basic conservative rule, one they accused Democrats of breaking for decades: Don’t buy something if you don’t know the cost (especially if it’s likely to be expensive).

This way lawmakers please some constituents and get positive media by moving legislation, then, when the bill comes due, they say we’ll try to fund it next time or blame Beshear for not scrounging the needed funds from state government’s couch cushions.

Beshear estimates the bills at issue would cost $153 million; that’s a big number but the legislature is sitting on a record surplus.?

Study: Kentuckians increasingly excluded from lawmaking process by fast-track maneuvers

Public radio’s Sonka discovered that Kentucky is in a minority of states where the legislature does not require a fiscal note on bills that would impact the budget. In recent years, he reports, the Republican supermajority has changed the rules in both chambers to make it even easier to keep a bill’s cost under wraps.

Enacting laws without considering or even knowing the costs is terrible policy for obvious reasons. It’s also totally consistent with the secretive, top-down way the Kentucky legislature does business, using procedural maneuvers to rush through controversial legislation with little warning to lawmakers or the public.

Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge, told Sonka she plans to file a bill in the 2025 session to require public fiscal notes on legislation.

While the mighty GOP majority has proven it can do about anything it wants, with Beshear and Maddox attacking this bad practice from different directions, maybe the public will have a fighting chance.??

The family cemetery in Breathitt County where J.D. Vance's grandparents and other ancestors were laid to rest, a place he evoked in a recent speech. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Kevin Nance)

JACKSON — In the 24 hours after J.D. Vance became Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, Stephen Bowling, director of the Breathitt County Public Library, fielded more than a dozen calls from news media outlets large and small.

The place that Vance in his best-selling memoir wrote “would always have my heart” is back in the spotlight, as the freshman U.S. senator from Ohio prepares to address a national television audience and the Republican National Convention Wednesday night.

Searching for traces of Vance in his ancestral home takes you down winding blacktop through the deep shade of creeksides, past bright fields of Queen Anne’s lace and bottomland plots of corn. It takes you onto people’s porches to ask directions, where, contrary to popular stereotype, an approaching stranger is no big deal. It takes you into a place that is steeped in political violence.

Bloody Breathitt, as it came to be known, was the scene of one of Appalachia’s deadliest feuds.

The violence unfolded in the late 19th century at a time of economic upheaval that sometimes inflamed lingering Civil War animosities. The arrival of the railroad and the coal industry set off a boom that created winners and losers and an “explosion of wealth” that Bowling says communities struggled to manage.

“We still shoot at each other today,” he adds. “We just do it on Facebook. We still shoot a warning shot over people’s heads. We snipe at people. We do it from a keyboard.”?

Still a place of conflicting political loyalties, Breathitt County votes Republican in national elections while most of the voters and local elected officials remain registered Democrats. Breathitt sent a Democrat to the Kentucky House until Republicans redrew the district. In both his runs for president, Republican Donald Trump carried Breathitt. So did Democrat Andy Beshear in both his runs for governor.

Breathitt County’s 13,500 residents have not escaped the bitter polarization dividing the country, says Mark Wireman, who was giving a tour to a reporter from a national news outlet.

Wireman, who was Gatewood Galbraith’s running mate in the 2007 Kentucky Democratic primary for governor, describes himself now as a “Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Mike Lee Republican.” Wireman worries the nation’s debt is unsustainable and blames President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for “kicking that can down the road.”

A longtime family friend who knows Vance, Wireman says the former Marine, Yale Law School graduate and recent venture capitalist is “intelligent, conscientious, God-fearing.”

“I guess I’m happy for him. Some people, his family are scared for him due to what is going on in the country,” a reference to last weekend’s assassination attempt on Trump. “It’s a crazy time. I’ll be praying for him and the country.”

Vance’s grandparents migrated to Middletown, Ohio, where his grandfather worked in an Armco steel mill and where Vance was born in 1984. The family often returned to Breathitt County, where Vance also spent time during summer vacations.

Vance evoked his Kentucky roots in a speech July 10 at ?a conference organized by the New Right group National Conservatism in which he criticized U.S military aid to Ukraine, free trade policies and immigration. Building to a conclusion, he spoke of driving down Kentucky Route 15 to Jackson “where all my relatives came from, the deep heart of Central Appalachia” and recalled proposing to his wife. “I said, honey, I come along with $120,000 worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky.”

He said he hopes he, his wife and children will be laid to rest “in that small mountain cemetery,” bringing its inhabitants to “seven generations of people who have built this country, who have made things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Whitney Haddix said a friend sent her a clip from Vance’s speech and his words touched her. Haddix, her husband, Brandon, and their three children live just a few hundred yards down the hill from Vance’s family cemetery, one of countless small cemeteries dotting the mountains.

“I feel like he remembered where he came from, that he has appreciation for where he came from and that he hasn’t forgotten, and that means more than words,” she said. “We are not Eastern Kentucky hillbillies. We are not just barefoot and pregnant. We are human beings who actually work hard and who do our best and who are the type of people who will take their shirt off their back to help people. That’s what we do. That’s what’s ingrained in us.”

The Haddix family’s home is near Frozen Creek in a three-acre clearing on the edge of a steep old forest; they also own her grandparents’ nearby farm. Vance has bought more than 100 acres in the area, a buffer that protects the cemetery and tombstone of Bonnie Blanton Vance, the beloved “mamaw” who brought stability to a childhood roiled by Vance’s mother’s addiction.

Sitting on her porch, under which a litter of kittens played, Whitney Haddix said, “I feel like J.D. Vance would do what is right. I feel like he would fight for our country. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I go with what I feel, but I feel as though we need somebody who will stand up for us, for the people they are elected to protect and take care of.”

A registered nurse, Haddix also praises Democrat Beshear, especially for his leadership during the pandemic.

“We are Trump supporters,” she said, adding, intriguingly, that she also is waiting to see who the Democrats nominate for president.

Breathitt residents are aware that the book that put a 31-year-old Vance on the national stage in 2016 to explain the working-class white backlash that helped elect Trump also spurred a backlash among Appalachians. “Hillbilly Elegy” has been criticized for perpetuating the worst stereotypes about the region and its people. The memoir was made into a Netflix movie by producer Ron Howard.

“J.D. Vance is not representative of the Appalachia I know and love,” says Mandi Fugate Sheffel, a Breathitt County resident and founder and owner of a bookstore in nearby Hazard. “He’s not for working people.”

She says she guides customers browsing the Read Spotted Newt’s Appalachian section to books that provide a more complete, nuanced view than “Hillbilly Elegy” of the region’s ethnic and racial diversity and its complexity, including the systemic forces and extractive industries that have saddled it with widespread poverty.?

She recommends Elizabeth’s Catte’s “What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia” and “Appalachian Reckoning” published by the West Virginia University Press; memoirs “Another Appalachia” by Neema Avashia and “No Son of Mine” by Jonathan Corcoran (University Press of Kentucky), and fiction by Silas House and Robert Gipe.

“It’s so frustrating that people who live away from here think ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is the narrative of Appalachia. … It gives them permission to believe everything they believed about Appalachia” and to write off the region as unredeemable and unworthy of attention and assistance. She said Vance leaned into his Appalachian roots so he could brag about overcoming them and that he has flip-flopped from his earlier opposition to Trump.

Bowling, the library director, says Vance “accurately portrayed his family over the years. The book became a bigger symbol of Appalachia than he intended.” If any place has a right to be aggrieved by Vance’s portrayal, says Bowling, it’s his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

Vance returns to Breathitt County fairly often to pay respects with family at the cemetery and to visit the public library, where he and his sister sometimes research family history, though less frequently, says Bowling, since winning the 2022 Senate race.

Behind the cash register at Indian Hollow Liquors in Jackson, Aaron Combs said he’s familiar with Vance’s story and local connections. But Vance’s joining the GOP ticket does not seem to have swayed his view of the presidential choices awaiting voters. “I don’t like either one of them, to be honest.”

Auditor of Public Accounts Allison Ball sent a "demand letter" to the Beshear administration Tuesday. In this photo, she congratulates her campaign team after speaking at an election night celebration, Nov 7, 2023, in Louisville. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

FRANKFORT — The legislature last year moved responsibility for a watchdog office and child support enforcement from the Beshear administration to Republican officeholders.?

Barely out of the gate, one of the transitions is stumbling over a disagreement about access to a child abuse database.?

Republican Auditor of Public Accounts Allison Ball on Tuesday sent what she labeled a “demand letter” to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Cabinet for Health and Family Services Secretary Eric Friedlander. In it she says the cabinet’s refusal to allow access to some electronic records is endangering vulnerable children and federal funding. She demands access to the iTWIST database “as clearly mandated by state and federal law.”

The letter also is signed by Jonathan Grate, the new ombudsman.

In 2023, the legislature created the Commonwealth Office of the Ombudsman, an independent office attached to the auditor’s office, effective July 1 of this year. It replaced the Office of the Ombudsman and Administrative Review, previously part of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS).

The ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints about the cabinet and evaluating its performance and compliance with federal and state laws. The cabinet oversees a wide range of health, welfare and child protection programs.

A spokesperson for the cabinet told the Lantern that an older state law precludes the new ombudsman from receiving access to the records in dispute. That law specifies exceptions to confidentiality requirements for reports of child abuse and neglect; the new ombudsman is not one of the exceptions listed in the law.

“The cabinet supports the auditor’s office desire to have full access to the system, but the current statutes passed by the General Assembly prohibit it. The cabinet supports changing the applicable laws in the next session to provide full access.?

“In the meantime, we have been working with the auditor’s office to provide them with the maximum access allowed under the current law, but they have refused,” said Stephanie French, a CHFS spokesperson.?

Joy Pidgorodetska Markland, communications director in the auditor’s office, responded that the cabinet’s proposal is unacceptable because it would allow the cabinet to dictate what the ombudsman is “allowed and not allowed to see” and reveal identities of internal whistleblowers.

“In no world is the subject of an investigation allowed to dictate what the investigator can and cannot see,” Markland said in an email. “What is the Cabinet hiding?

In her letter, Ball says the cabinet did not raise objections to the new ombudsman’s access to the records until after the 2024 legislative session ended.?

The shifts in responsibilities from CHFS to the auditor and attorney general were enacted in 2023 in Senate Bill 48 which became law with bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled legislature but without Beshear’s signature.

The transfer of child support enforcement and services to the attorney general’s office does not take effect until this time next year but the AG this month assumed responsibility for administrative hearings previously conducted by CHFS.

In a July 1 release, Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman says: “With over $1 billion in arrears, spearheading the Commonwealth’s child support services is a daunting task. Even though the transition is one year away, we are working with our partners around the clock to make sure we get this right. It’s a no-fail mission where vulnerable children and families are counting on us.”

The sponsor of the bill that made the changes, Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, issued a statement of support for Ball on Tuesday. He said SB 48 grew out of a 2022 task force that examined ways to improve CHFS operations, including by creating an independent ombudsman.

In his statement Meredith said, “This common-sense reform ends the practice of the cabinet investigating itself. The language of this bill is clear and undeniable. It’s worth noting that CHFS did not testify in opposition to the bill. The Governor chose not to veto the legislation. Additionally, CHFS did not contact me to discuss any concerns about transferring this database to this new office during the 2024 Legislative Session.”

U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama showed their support for former U.S. President Donald Trump by attending his his trial in New York City and standing behind him as he spoke to media. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Donald Trump was an extraordinary politician even before becoming the only former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime.

Trump’s crime, however, is not extraordinary. It’s basically the same thing that landed former Kentucky Democratic Party chair Jerry Lundergan in prison.

Both Lundergan and Trump concealed political spending that by law should have been disclosed in campaign finance reports.?

Lundergan falsified documents to hide that his company had bankrolled services, including a bus, for his daughter’s 2014 campaign. Alison Lundergan Grimes, then Kentucky’s secretary of state, was challenging Republican Mitch McConnell for his seat in the U.S. Senate.?

Trump falsified documents to conceal that his company bankrolled payments to keep his tawdry trysts hidden from voters. If Stormy Daniels had gone public, his campaign likely would have tanked and the United States would have elected a woman president before Mexico did.?

Here’s where the similarities end: You did not hear Lundergan or other Democrats protest that the justice system had been “weaponized” or “rigged” against the family of a McConnell challenger, or that anyone was “conflicted,” even though the prosecutor and judge had connections to McConnell.

Nor did Democrats complain that the prosecution was “partisan,” a “witch hunt” or “election interference” — in sharp contrast to the outpourings of outrage from Republicans after Trump’s conviction.

The U.S. attorney who won the guilty verdict against Lundergan, Robert M. “Rob” Duncan Jr., is the son of a prominent Republican fundraiser, Robert M. “Mike” Duncan, who has served on the Republican National Committee, including as its chairman. The elder Duncan is close to McConnell and has served as a director of McConnell’s super PAC. Rob Duncan is now deputy to Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman.

U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove, who sentenced Lundergan to 21 months in prison and two years of supervised release, is a former McConnell staffer. While Lundergan was awaiting sentencing, it was reported that Van Tatenhove’s wife had given $250,000 to the McConnell Center, cofounded by McConnell, at the University of Louisville.?

At the time of the sentencing, Rob Duncan said, “This case should underscore the fundamental principle that breaking the law has consequences.”

Also, “These are important laws that regulate the integrity of our elections.”

The judge received 89 letters on behalf of Lundergan, including one from former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Van Tatenhove said he was convinced that Lundergan had done good in his life, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported, but said a loss of liberty was required to hold Lundergan accountable under the jury’s verdict.

Lundergan appealed, as Trump will, but his appeals failed, and he served time in federal prison and a halfway house.

We don’t know what sentence awaits Trump, but his conviction won’t shake his MAGA supporters’ loyalty; they’ve excused a mountain of sleaze to stand by their Trump.

Still, the zeal with which elected Republicans rushed to his defense, marching in rhetorical goose-step, er, I mean, lockstep is dismaying. They could have just remained silent like Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams. It seemed as if they felt they had to make a display of loyalty to Trump. (And some are auditioning to be his running mate.)

Especially rich are the cries of “election interference” from people — like Appalachian imposter and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio — who defend the Trump followers who interfered big time in an election by violently attacking the U.S. Capitol and Congress.

Even Kentucky’s top law enforcement official, Rob Duncan’s boss, Attorney General Coleman, tweeted: “It’s politics — not the law — behind New York’s prosecution of President Trump. The American people want to focus on the issues that matter and will render their own verdict on November 5th.”????

I’m not a lawyer, but Coleman’s statement strikes me as odd coming from someone who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution.

I do have a feeling Coleman is correct when it comes to Nov. 5. The American people will have to be the ones who, in the words of Jerry Lundergan’s prosecutor, “underscore the fundamental principle that breaking the law has consequences” and uphold “the integrity of our elections.”

The “party of law and order” sure isn’t doing it.

U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell speaks Thursday to members of the Kentucky National Guard. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

FRANKFORT — U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that President Joe Biden should allow Ukraine to use U.S. weapons to launch attacks inside Russia.

McConnell said he’s “consistently argued” with the administration that its restriction against Ukraine launching U.S. weapons across the border into Russia “doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I think they should be allowed to hit the Russians in Russia.”?

Later in the day, Politico reported that Biden has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with U.S. weapons but only in the area around Kharkiv.

McConnell was speaking to media at a Kentucky National Guard hangar after an event in which Gov. Andy Beshear and General Haldane Lamberton, Kentucky’s adjutant general, thanked the state’s longest-serving U.S. senator for his role in bringing federal funds to military projects in Kentucky.

During his remarks to a crowd that included about 40 uniformed Guard members, McConnell renewed his warnings that Russia, China and Iran pose dangers to democracy. He likened today’s international challenges to the period before World War II.?

“We thought it would all go away if we just ignored it. That’s clearly not going to happen again this time, at least not without me making the contrary argument.”

McConnell called for increased defense spending as a deterrent to aggression and thanked the National Guard members for their service.

McConnell is stepping down at the end of the year as his party’s leader in the U.S. Senate but will continue to serve as a senator from Kentucky. He hasn’t said if he will seek reelection in 2026.

Speaking briefly to media after the event, McConnell noted that the Biden administration was considering lifting its restriction to allow Ukraine to use U.S. weapons to launch counterattacks on installations and military personnel inside Russia. The restriction was intended to reduce the risk of the war escalating into other countries.?

McConnell said the Ukranians should be free to defend themselves with U.S. weapons, calling Ukraine’s self-defense “a way to stand up to the Russians without losing American personnel.”

Hours later, Politico, citing unnamed officials and others familiar with the situation, reported that Biden has eased — but not lifted — the restriction. “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

In response to questions, McConnell said the rising isolationism among Republicans in Congress also is similar to before World War II and even after the war when Republicans opposed NATO and the Marshall Plan. The election of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a general and leader of Allied forces in World War II, changed that, McConnell said.?

“What China, North Korea, Russia and Iran have in common is they are authoritarian dictators. It’s sort of a potential war between the authoritarians and the democracies. All of us who are threatened elect our leadership and so authoritarians are the people that we’re standing up to and we have to convince them the price of taking us on is too big a price for them to pay.”

McConnell said the U.S. and its many democratic allies from Europe to the Indo-Pacific are “all in this together.”

“The whole democratic world needs to stand up and they look to us for leadership.”

McConnell also said, “The cheapest way to be ready is to have your defense budget high enough and industrial base built enough that you never have the conflict in the first place.”

This story has been updated with information about action by the Biden administration.

The demolition of the Thomas Hart house in 1955 to make way for a parking lot galvanized the historic preservation movement in Lexington. Many feared Hopemont, also known as the Hunt Morgan House, across the street would be the next to fall. Hart, a veteran of the American Revolution, was an early Lexington settler. (Library of Congress, 1940)

Bettye Lee Mastin, a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and champion of historic preservation in the Bluegrass, died May 8. She was 97.

Mastin said her mother encouraged her to write every day and that when she graduated from high school in Jessamine County she wanted to be a poet. A professor at the University of Kentucky steered her toward journalism, saying “Betty Lee, poetry doesn’t pay.”

Mastin worked as a proofreader at the Lexington Herald during college, graduated from UK Phi Beta Kappa and began a 50-year career at the Lexington newspaper as a reporter and feature writer.

Respected as an architectural historian, Mastin taught university classes and seminars. She was the author of “Lexington 1779: Pioneer Kentucky as Described by Early Settlers” and “A Walking Tour of Shakertown.”

In an oral history interview in 1980, she said she became interested in “old things and old buildings as a child.”

“I think anyone living in Lexington, growing up around here would become acquainted with a lot of old buildings —? until the age of the bulldozer — because we had so many of them.”?

In the 1960s, the newspaper assigned her to write about preservation and urban renewal after Ed Wilder, the executive secretary of the Lexington chamber of commerce, returned from a conference in Washington, D.C. with about 100 color slides of the posh Georgetown neighborhood, where President John F. Kennedy had lived when he was in the U.S. Senate, Mastin told the oral history interviewer.

Wilder had been struck by the similarities in Georgetown’s and Lexington’s historic architecture. He convinced the Herald’s general manager, Fred Wachs, that Lexington’s old buildings and neighborhoods were “a resource that Lexington was stupid not to use,” Mastin said.

The newspaper made Mastin available to local groups to talk about preservation and to present a slide show highlighting the similarities of D.C.’s Georgetown section and the areas around downtown Lexington.

Mastin also visited other cities — Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia — to report on their preservation and urban renewal efforts and worked briefly in Lexington’s urban renewal agency. She said her stories for Kentucky readers about other cities’ preservation successes were “geared to profit, dollars and cents,” emphasizing the higher real estate values in historic areas.

In 1965, she became a member of the board of the Bluegrass Trust for Historic Preservation.

She lived in a home that was built in 1795.?

She was friends with the late Clay Lancaster, an architectural historian, artist and author. She? alerted Lancaster when the Moses Jones house, built in the early 1800s, in Salvisa on the Kentucky River in Mercer County went on the market. He bought the property now managed by the Warwick Foundation. Mastin served on the foundation’s board and was an emeritus member when she died.

Mastin said she was disappointed that Lexington allowed so much of its built history to be destroyed and replaced with nondescript architecture and parking lots, even as awareness and interest in preservation bloomed.

When asked whether growth and preservation can coexist, Mastin in 1980 said, “When you look at the type of community we inherited and the situation now I wouldn’t say they’re coexisting very well.”??

Long-time Herald-Leader readers will remember her Sunday Home spreads; many were detailed descriptions of historic residences, interviews with their occupants and multiple photographs.

In 2017, Tom Eblen, former Herald-Leader managing editor and columnist, wrote that he nominated Mastin for the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame “because no journalist did so much for so long to inform Central Kentuckians about the unique built environment that surrounded them.”

Her legacy will likely live on in future scholarship. Mastin’s papers, covering the period from 1823 to 2013, are archived at the University of Kentucky in more than 100 boxes, including research files, urban renewal records, maps and architectural drawings.

Bettye Lee Mastin was born April 9, 1927 in Midway to the late Winfield and Ruby Glass Mastin, one of six sisters. Her obituary says she loved plants and wildflowers and knew their Latin names. She was a long-time member of Nicholasville Baptist Church where she had been a Sunday school teacher. Her family will have a private scattering of ashes at Indian Falls in Jessamine County at a future date.??

Alyssa Rigney speaks to a rally in solidarity with Gaza on May 1, 2024, on the lawn of the William T. Young Library at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

LEXINGTON — History has a way of vindicating student protests — civil rights, Vietnam, apartheid — but it can take a while.

I was thinking about this while trudging up Woodland Avenue on a sunny afternoon last week to a pro-Palestinian rally at the University of Kentucky.?

Along the way I passed a group of college women setting up lounge chairs in a front yard and hoisting a sign that said “You Honk We Drink.” (Youth is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’ve just finished your last exam of the semester.)

In the shade of the parking lot, I asked if I could take a photo of Mousa and Mags Samaan of Lexington as the father helped his teen daughter don her keffiyeh. The Samaans explained that the black and white scarf is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.?

Lexington has large, vibrant Arab and Jewish communities that enrich the city in many ways and who share similar histories of both discrimination and success in Kentucky. How painful it must be to see ancient homelands torn by ethnic violence and to again feel the threat of uninformed bias and ugly stereotypes.

At the rally, sponsored by a group called Lex4Palestine, I was surprised by how many students declined to be interviewed or even give their names. Many wore masks of the type made common by the pandemic. One young woman explained she was trying to protect her identity while also respecting others’ health.

(“Aha,” I thought the next morning when the New York Times published “In an Online World, a New Generation of Protesters Chooses Anonymity.” Fear of online harassment — doxing — and, specifically, fear of being branded antisemitic, is prompting many protesters on campuses to hide their identities, the Times reported.)

I was directed to the organizing coalition’s media liaison, Ben Bandy, who wore a yarmulke and a Star of David on a thin chain. Bandy, a 2022 UK grad from Atlanta now working in Lexington, told me it’s “very, very frustrating” when people equate opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza with antisemitism. “When I think about my Jewish values, I think of treating each other with kindness, not of a genocide that’s killed tens of thousands.”

Later, Bandy got the biggest cheer of any speaker and told the crowd, “I’m a Jew and I’m against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

I spoke to Joanne and Charlie Martha of Lexington who are in their 60s and Palestinians. Joanne, who came to this country when she was 6, still has family in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Charlie’s father’s family lost its home as did most of the Palestinians who lived in what’s now Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in a forced displacement known as the Nakba or “catastrophe.”?

After doing little or nothing to prevent the Holocaust, Britain and the United States supported a Jewish homeland, heedless of the people who already lived there.

“The world thinks it started on Oct. 7, which was terrible,” said Charlie. “It started in 1948.” He adds, “The elephant in the room is the occupation.”

Since Hamas’ surprise attack of Oct. 7, in which 1,200 people in Israel were killed, some in sickeningly sadistic ways, and 252 were taken hostage, it has seemed to me that particularly malevolent forces —? brutality, cynicism, political self-interest, the arms industry — are swirling around this small beautiful slice of the globe.?

Now Joanne worries that most Americans think all Palestinians are terrorists instead of “family-oriented people who want to live in peace.” When she visits family, she is struck by the lack of freedom and opportunity and by the apartheid-like system under which Palestinians must live. She’s sad that her adopted country is funding an unparalleled military assault on her childhood home.

“Palestinians have lost their past, their future, their present in this war,” she told me. “What’s going on is a one-sided genocide.”

More than 34,600 Palestinians have been killed and 77,000 wounded, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Joanne Martha does not blame the Israeli people but the country’s government for what even ally Joe Biden has called Israel’s “over the top” war in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who needs to stay in power to avoid prison on corruption charges, may see political advantage for himself in prolonging the war and Israelis’ sense of existential crisis. Netanyahu backed a plan to prop up Hamas, which in 2006 won a parliamentary election with 44% support in what was widely viewed as a protest vote against corruption, then the next year took Gaza by force. By supporting Hamas in Gaza, Netanyahu and his team had hoped to divide Palestians thus thwarting any move toward a Palestinian state. Netanyahu also miscalculated Hamas’ strength and intent. As recently as September, a month before the Hamas attack, Netanyahu signaled that the government of Qatar, which with Israel’s tacit approval has put billions of dollars into the terrorist organization, should continue the payments to Hamas.

I asked the Marthas about one of the slogans the students were chanting. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has become a lightning rod, admittedly used by Hamas, and interpreted by many as a call to destroy Israel.?

Almost 20% of Israel’s population — or 2 million people — are Palestinians, who live as second-class citizens. Jews and Palestinians lived in peace in the past, the Marthas said. The slogan, they said, is a call for freedom not annihilation.

Kareem Hassan, a recent UK graduate agreed. “Wanting to be free does not insinuate violence.”

Taylor Slone of Georgetown was carrying a sign that said “Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism.” He turned out for the rally because “I felt like I needed to do more” and also because he thought “more bodies” offered more protection.

No one needed protection from anything harsher than sunburn, however. UK Police stood at a polite distance and appeared more concerned about protecting the William T. Young Library than any possibility of violence, in contrast to some campuses where students and faculty were forcibly arrested.

The protesters called for a ceasefire, which would be a blessing, though I have a hard time seeing any good way out of this misery, bloodshed and hatred.

Even if Israel Defense Forces force every last Hamas fighter from underground, Israel is creating more than enough new enemies for itself — young people who have nothing to lose or hope for — to replace the terrorist organization many times over.

I’m confounded that the Holocaust, the 20th century’s most horrific mass atrocity, is somehow begetting a mass atrocity in this century.

The United Nations, the U.S. and the rest of the West have been ineffective, apathetic even, toward the Palestinians’ plight and other human rights abuses in the Mideast, ready to turn a blind eye as long as the oil was flowing. But wounds left to fester will inevitably burst, spewing poison everywhere.?

History probably will vindicate opposition to what’s happening in Gaza and also the West Bank. It will vindicate the many Jews who are courageously advocating for a peaceful solution and pushing for release of the hostages. I pray a peaceful solution comes soon; the alternative is unbearable to imagine.

A bill that emerged from a House committee would allow officials to hide public business on their personal devices.

FRANKFORT — Long before there were text messages, email, cell phones or computers small enough to slip into a purse? — back in the Neolithic when public records were created on IBM Selectric typewriters — the Kentucky Open Records Act protected personal privacy.

The Kentucky Open Records Act still protects personal privacy.

No one is at risk of having their shopping list, porn search or marital discord plucked from their cell phone and spread in public view because of the Open Records Act. (I’m not saying something personal you type into a device won’t come back to publicly haunt you. I’m saying it won’t be because of the Open Records Act.)

No one’s phone, computer or the box stashed in their basement has ever been seized or searched because of the Open Records Act. Or ever will be.

Layers of review built into the law prevent disclosure of private information. (Sometimes they delay disclosure of what’s finally determined to be public information.)

It’s possible that Rep. John Hodgson, sponsor of House Bill 509, sincerely worries that the sunshine law has a “dark side.”

Other lawmakers know better. Concerns about personal privacy are a smokescreen.

And, where there’s a smokescreen, there’s usually something that some people hope to conceal and other people need to see, something they need to know about their government, their community, their future.

HB 509 is a wink and a nod —? tacit permission for public officials to use their personal devices when they want to keep public business on the down low, just among themselves, the insiders. They’ll use their officially issued email accounts the rest of the time.?

You can argue, like Gov. Andy Beshear, that “bad actors” will not hand over information they want hidden even if the open records law, a quasi honor system, says they must. Maybe so, but HB 509 would hand them an engraved invitation to flout the law. The current law provides penalties for intentionally concealing public records. HB 509 does not.

As Republican Sen. Gex Williams said, even if privacy concerns are real, HB 509 fails to accommodate “the necessity for open records — government records — to be available to citizens.”

Open government laws are for everyone, not just the news media. Here’s hoping the Kentucky Senate and Gov. Andy Beshear will see the light of public accountability and reject this attack on a law that has served Kentucky well for 50 years.?

In hopes of reassuring and informing, I ran a few questions by two of the state’s top authorities on open government laws and the First Amendment — Amye Bensenhaver of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition and Michael Abate, an attorney for the Kentucky Press Association.?

I’m combining, condensing and paraphrasing their responses, so advance apologies if I over abbreviate anything.

Question: How does the Kentucky Open Records Act protect personal communications and private information?

Answer: The law provides exceptions for “public records containing information of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and “[c]ommunications of a purely personal nature unrelated to any governmental function.” The last exception was added just a few years ago, the last time legislators tried to exempt all “private” emails or texts from disclosure. This shows that HB 509 is not really about protecting “personal” information — it’s about shielding records from public view.

Also, the law exempts “correspondence with private individuals, other than correspondence which is intended to give notice of final action of a public agency.”

Q: What happens under current law when a requester seeks public records that might be in personal accounts or on personal devices?

A: Government agencies have records custodians. The custodian asks the relevant employee or official to search for and turn over the requested records. The employee or official checks their desk, file cabinet, public and personal devices. Public servers are searched for responsive records. The law has never required or envisioned the records custodian searching through desk drawers or devices or conducting “fishing expeditions.”

Q: What have Kentucky courts said about public records on personal devices?

A: Courts have consistently held over decades that it is the content and purpose of a record — and not the place it’s stored — that determines whether the public can see it.

Q: Would elected officials or public employees be required under the current law to hand over their personal devices for examination?

A: No. They would be expected to share copies of requested public records from their devices, but the devices would remain in their possession. Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge J. Christopher McNeill asked about that in a recent challenge to the open records law by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. In that case, citizens who thought that commissioners were engaging in official communications on personal accounts filed an open records request for those records. The appeals court ruled that messages among commissioners that pertain to public business are public records even if they’re on personal devices. In his concurrence, McNeill wrote he wanted “to assuage any concerns the Kentucky Open Records Act requires public agencies to turn over private cell phones or that today’s holding will impose an extreme burden on agencies to identify and produce all public records generated on private cell phones or private email accounts. Our Opinion merely holds that ‘text messages [or emails] related to Commission business and stored on personal cell phones [or personal email accounts] of its members are public records generally subject to disclosure under the Open Records Act absent an applicable exception.'” KDFRW has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which has not decided whether to hear the case.

Q: Are messages sent by constituents to lawmakers on the General Assembly’s 800 number or through its email account subject to disclosure under the Open Records Act?

A: No.

Q: How could HB 509 be amended to better protect the public’s right to know?

A: At least two easy fixes have been proposed to this bill. First, if it is going to limit an agency’s obligation to search for records to public devices and email accounts, it should prohibit public officials and employees from discussing the public’s business via any other channels. Nothing in HB 509 would prevent officials or employees from using texts, messaging apps, collaboration software, etc. to communicate. The bill says only that if they have a government email they should not use private email.

Second, the bill should be clear that an individual who violates this requirement must themselves respond to an open records request, even if the agency need not do so.

Q: Anything else?
A: The loopholes created by HB 509 will be easily seen and exploited. And the problem will only get worse over time, as email becomes a less and less important form of communication. That some of HB 509’s supporters continue to deny these realities shows that they must be more concerned about hiding records than making them available to the public.

What if it’s a rising tide of equality that would give Kentucky the lift it needs? (Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — As I sort through the remains of this session, I keep returning to something I’ve heard said, only half-jokingly, about Kentucky: We waited until after the Civil War to join the Confederacy.

It feels like the legislature is doing it again.

White grievance and white supremacy animated this session. Republicans were out to put Black people in their place. No one said it like that, of course. But the subtext came through clear enough.

The biggest example was not the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion — painful as it was to watch — which, thankfully, fizzled with no anti-DEI legislation enacted. It was the roaring revival of “tough on crime.”?

Policing and criminal punishments fall disproportionately hard on Black Americans. Our carceral state is a remnant of chattel slavery. None other than U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has called mass incarceration the “new Jim Crow.” A lifetime of severely reduced earnings await people who have been in prison. That hardship compounds through communities and generations as poverty and inequality are perpetuated and human potential goes to waste.

And, yet, Kentucky’s Republicans passionately — gleefully — recommitted themselves to mass incarceration — in proud defiance of all the last 40 years has taught.

When confronted with facts or challenged by data, they got huffy.?

The very lawmakers who do nothing to stem the flood of firearms into our communities voted to hold teenagers accountable for gun violence. Carry a gun and you’ll be an adult in the eyes of the law even if you’re 15 and your neighborhood is an arsenal, according to Senate Bill 20, which is becoming law without Gov. Andy Beshear’s signature.

Beshear has vetoed the sweeping House Bill 5, which does away with any pretense that the penitentiary is for penance and rehabilitation — at least for the more than 1 in 5 prisoners who will be in for violent crimes under the bill’s expanded definition. We can pray that the enhanced legal protections for defenders of property won’t invite another tragedy like the shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, armed with a pack of Skittles and dead for wearing a hoodie in the wrong place.

I’ve always thought of Rep. Jason Nemes as a wonkish, open-minded, Libertarian-ish conservative. But there he was taking his place in the pantheon of red-faced Southern pols, thundering on the House floor: “How many times can you burn down a house? How many people do you get to rape? How many people do you get to assault with deadly weapons? How many people do you get to kill before we put you away forever?”???

What is going on??

Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, I admit that people are unsettled — scared, even — by the uptick in crime during the pandemic, a surge that is subsiding.?

The push for the self-defeating overhaul of Kentucky’s criminal code comes from white Republicans from Louisville. As the world was shutting down for COVID-19 in 2020, downtown Louisville saw weeks of protests of the police slaughter of Breonna Taylor. Louisville is where homelessness is most visible in Kentucky, though there are plenty of homeless Kentuckians across the state.

Donald Trump sets the tone, while conservative think tanks feed Republican lawmakers cut and paste solutions that they regurgitate, no questions asked.?

This session’s malign spirit was captured for me on a Friday in mid-March: On one end of the Capitol, Republican Rep. Jennifer Decker was explaining how “intellectual diversity” would be achieved through a state-imposed system for policing campus discussions of race, sex, colonialism, power and privilege, while also quickly dismantling diversity offices and staffs.

On the Capitol’s other end, two Republican Senate leaders provided a real time demonstration of the GOP-approved marketplace of ideas by getting in the face of a Democratic colleague who had dared challenge the empirical basis for the push to imprison more Kentuckians.?

Senate President Robert Stivers and Republican Floor Leader Damon Thayer rushed across the floor to chastise Sen. Karen Berg. What set them off seems to have been Berg’s assertion that research citations backing the anti-crime law had been plagiarized. The citations were, indeed, copied and pasted from a Georgia think tank’s proposal for Atlanta, as Sylvia Goodman reported for Kentucky Public Radio and LPM News.?

Also, many of the citations have little or nothing to do with the bill, while some — from “renowned criminal justice reformers who spent their careers arguing for alternative methods to deterring crime or exposing the racial biases of the American justice system” — provide evidence against the measure.

This would constitute intellectual fraud in some circles, as Berg noted, to Stivers’ consternation.

Stivers provided another memorable moment when he stood before the Senate on Feb. 8 and wondered aloud why Kentucky can’t be more like Boston or have a Research Triangle like North Carolina. “Tell me why the state of Kentucky cannot emulate that type of dynamic?”

Seriously?

The man who’s enshrining denial of climate science in state law by yoking Kentucky to coal-fired energy wonders why we’re not a hotbed of scientific inquiry.

Stivers presides over a body that has usurped medical decisions for pregnant women and transgender kids and passed an anti-vaccination conspiracist bill. Talk about a formula for repelling the highly educated and young.

Stivers’ caucus sees a record budget surplus not as an opportunity to invest in education or housing or to ease child poverty through a state earned income tax credit. They see a chance to keep cutting the income tax, benefiting most those already on the economy’s high end.

I get that tackling poverty is slow, complicated work, especially in Kentucky where the economic deck has been stacked against whole regions.

Zero sum thinking is always tempting: One person or one group’s gain must inevitably come at another’s loss. Such logic has kept white Southerners in political line for a long time.

But what if it’s not catering to the already well-off that lifts all boats? What if a rising tide of equality would give Kentucky the lift it needs? What if Kentucky made a fraction of the commitment to education that has put Massachusetts (or, as some say, Taxachussetts) in the economic cat bird’s seat. What if there were fewer guns and more decent housing? Fewer inmates and more breadwinners??

Beshear has given the supermajority a chance to redeem itself by upholding his veto of tough-on-crime HB 5. He rightly called it an “unwieldy bill that would criminalize homelessness and significantly increase incarceration costs without any additional appropriation.”?

Lawmakers can come back next year and enact the parts of HB 5 that make sense.?

Meanwhile, this legislature has demonstrated nothing so much as the need to teach young Kentuckians how to think critically — about race, equality, inclusion and who they trust to lead them into the future, not the past.

Kentucky Senate at work. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

A nearly unanimous Senate on Wednesday night approved a state budget for the next two years before the document was publicly available on the legislature’s web site.

The compromise budget, which by Thursday morning was posted on the legislature’s site, emerged from a House-Senate free conference committee on Tuesday. It increases funding for the basic public school funding formula beyond what either the House or Senate had originally proposed.

The budget increases state employee pay by 3% each year but does not specifically dedicate money to raise pay for educators. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear had sought an 11% increase for school employees. Republicans said the increase in the SEEK (Support Education Excellence in Kentucky) formula of 3% in the first year and 6% in the second year should allow most school districts to increase pay.

Senate President Robert Stivers and other Republicans said that funding teacher raises outside the SEEK formula would widen funding disparities among districts and put the legislature out of compliance with a 1989 state Supreme Court order requiring funding equalization.

Under questioning from Democratic Floor Leader Gerald Neal, Sen. Chris McDaniel, chairman of the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee, said the budget capped the amount of money the governor could draw from the Budget Reserve Trust Fund to respond to natural disasters. Neal noted the provision could force the governor to call the legislature into special session during an emergency.

McDaniel also said the budget does not provide funding to build two juvenile detention facilities for females, as requested by Beshear.

A news release from the Senate Republican Caucus said McDaniel and GOP leaders had “prioritized” putting the state in a position to continue reducing the income tax rate in future years. The legislature has reduced the income tax rate from 5% to 4% since 2022, which the GOP release said has “left $1.8 billion in the pockets of working Kentuckians.”

House Bill 6 — which lays out the? two-year $102 billion executive branch budget — includes general, restricted and federal funds. The Senate approved it 36-1 with only Republican Sen. Adrienne? Southworth voting no.?

The House now must approve the compromise budget before it goes to the governor who has line-item veto power.

Still to emerge from conference committee is House Bill 1, which funds numerous projects from the state’s record high Budget Reserve Trust Fund.

This article has been updated to correct an inaccurate description of the the juvenile justice law enacted by the legislature last year.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy analyzed what effect voucher programs in other states would have if adopted in Kentucky. (Getty Images)

A constitutional amendment that could pave the way for charter schools and publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools in Kentucky is one step closer to going on the November ballot.

The Senate Education Committee voted 11-2 in favor of House Bill 2 during a special meeting Thursday afternoon.

Kentucky Education Association President Eddie Campbell testified against the measure, calling it “a dangerous bill that is bad education policy, bad fiscal policy and bad public policy.” Campbell said it “does nothing to ensure that all students in Kentucky will receive a high quality public education.”

Testifying in favor of the amendment was Jim Waters, president of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, who said, “We know from other states that the more choice parents have, the better their K-through-12 system performs.” Waters said charter schools have narrowed education gaps among minority students in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and that Kentucky will be able to avoid “pitfalls” by looking at other states’ experiences.

The amendment would lift the state Constitution’s prohibition against spending tax dollars for elementary and secondary education outside the “system of common schools.” It also suspends other constitutional provisions that could trip up future legislation sending public dollars to nonpublic schools.?

Senate President Robert Stivers noted that the proposed amendment would allow the legislature to authorize a charter school in an impoverished or underserved area, such as Louisville’s West End, something it cannot do now because of a constitutional prohibition on special legislation, which the amendment would change.

Republican Sens. Shelley Funke Frommeyer and Lindsey Tichenor pointed to public schools’ increases in student absenteeism and disappointing student performance in literacy and math as reasons to consider giving Kentuckians new education options.

Sen. Reggie Thomas, one of the two Democrats who voted no, raised concerns about potential effects on public school funding. He also objected to the way the bill has been moved through the legislature by committees meeting not at their regular times but late in the day on short notice. As a result, he said there has been “less attention, less notice, less input from the public.”

Education Committee Chair Republican Stephen West defended the process, saying the bill was introduced in January and that “stakeholders have had ample opportunity to make their case.”??

Cindy Heine, representing the League of Women Voters of Kentucky, said the league “supports public education for all and the use of public funds for public schools” and opposes the amendment.

She said the organization had worked on a written statement of opposition but “with this last minute meeting” did not have it ready. “We will send it to you so it’s on the record.”

“The good thing about this bill is the people will get to decide,” Heine said. “Your decision to put it on the ballot allows the public to make this decision.”

House Majority Caucus Chair Suzanne Miles, R-Owensboro, is primary sponsor of a constitutional amendment that would clear the way for public money to be spent on private and for-profit K-12 schools in Kentucky. (LRC Public Information)

FRANKFORT — Kentuckians could decide in November to let public money be spent on private schools — although the language put to voters wouldn’t be quite that straightforward — under a bill approved by a House committee Tuesday.

The House Committee on Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs voted 11-4 to send House Bill 2 to the full House for a vote.

Kentucky Education Association President Eddie Campbell testified against the proposed constitutional amendment, saying other states’ experiences show that educational vouchers and charter schools would drain money from the public school system.?

Campbell also pointed out that the proposed amendment “notwithstands” or suspends seven sections of Kentucky’s Constitution.

Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, zeroed in on the measure’s “notwithstanding” the constitutional prohibition against special legislation, saying it would free the legislature to “target one particular city or school district” such as Louisville. Republican lawmakers have long complained about what they say are shortcomings in the Jefferson County Public Schools.

In explaining her “no” vote, Raymond said, “This is leading us toward welfare for the wealthy. And this public school mom does not want my tax dollars going to private schools.”

The amendment that would appear on the ballot says: “The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools. The General Assembly may exercise this authority by law, Sections 59, 60, 171, 183, 184, 186, and 189 of this Constitution notwithstanding.”

Kentucky courts have consistently ruled that the 1891 Constitution prohibits state tax dollars going to educational institutions outside the “system of common schools,” which is why Republican supporters of what they call school “choice” are seeking a constitutional amendment.?

House Republican Caucus Chair Suzanne Miles of Owensboro, the bill’s primary sponsor, said questions about how public school funding could be affected is “for another time, another place” and would depend on enabling legislation enacted by the General Assembly if voters approved the amendment.

?“I would like every child in the commonwealth to have the best options for them to succeed,” Miles said.

Republican supporters of the amendment said it would enhance educational choices available to parents for their children and catch Kentucky up with other states that offer more “choice” in K-12 education.

“We’re like a lone island in a lot of ways that we don’t explore different ways to educate the children of Kentucky,” said committee chair Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville, explaining his support for the measure.

Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, said he was voting for the bill “because I support kids and every parent should be empowered to give their child the best education possible no matter what zip code they live in in the state of Kentucky.” Calloway is sponsoring House Bill 208, which also would put an amendment on the ballot that would allow public money to be spent in private schools.

Lexington Democrat Rep. Adrielle Camuel said the amendment’s language is “a little obfuscated and propagandistic” and fails to “let people know what they’ll be voting on.”

Asked by Raymond, if she would change the amendment’s wording to “do you want your tax dollars to go to private schools?” Miles said she supported no changes in the amendment.

House Bill 2

House Appropriations and Revenue Chairman Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, presents House Bill 6, the proposed executive branch budget, on the House floor, Feb. 1, 2024. (Photo by LRC Public Information)

FRANKFORT — Remember when Republican lawmakers —? spurred on by the Chamber of Commerce — put Kentucky on the sober, responsible path to ending the state income tax?

We were assured this route would protect Kentucky from becoming another Kansas. Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s “pro-growth” tax cuts had put the Sunflower State into an economic tailspin. Things got so desperate the Republican legislature repealed the tax overhaul and Kansas became a cautionary tale.

But not to fear. Kentucky would avoid becoming another Kansas by gradually reducing the income tax and, very importantly, only when education and other state services could sustain the cuts, as measured by two metrics laid out in state law two years ago.

That 2022 law also reduced the income tax from 5%? to 4.5%, partially offset by an expansion of the sales tax. And it dictated that, before the legislature could slice the income tax rate by another half percentage point, state finances in the prior fiscal year must clear two hurdles involving (1) the size of the Budget Reserve Trust Fund ( “rainy day” fund) in comparison to General Fund revenue and (2) tax revenue in comparison to the cost of a full percentage point lowering of the income tax rate.?

Both hurdles were surpassed in fiscal 2022 as the “rainy day” fund reached a record $2.7 billion, allowing the legislature to again lower the income tax rate, taking it to 4%, effective January 2024.

The surplus has kept growing, plumping up the “rainy day” fund to a record $3.7 billion. Nonetheless, last fiscal year, the state failed to clear one of the two hurdles, tripping up plans for another income tax cut in this legislative session.

What to do when you can’t clear a hurdle??Well, if you’re the Kentucky House you sneak around it.?

The spending plans approved by the House last month employ at least three questionable means for circumventing the fiscal requirements that Republican lawmakers put in place to protect us from becoming another Kansas.

For starters, the House voted to suspend its own sober, responsible law in order to approve $1.7 billion in one-time spending outside the budget altogether.

House Bill 1 begins: “Notwithstanding KRS 141.020(2)(a)2., the appropriations contained in this Act are supported solely by funds from the Budget Reserve Trust Fund Account established by KRS 48.705 and shall not be identified as GF appropriations when certifying the reduction conditions pursuant to KRS 141.020(2)(a)5. and (d)2. to 5.”

Translation: Because our responsible path isn’t taking us where we (and the Chamber) want fast enough, we’re exercising our prerogative to ignore our own law and hereby decreeing that $1.7 billion in spending doesn’t count.

Second, the House budget curiously includes a lot of borrowing, the second-most ever. Curious because the state is sitting on a mountain of cash and interest rates are high. Prudence — both the kitchen-table and classic-Republican varieties — would say spend the cash, avoid the high interest rates. However, the debt has one big advantage if you’re looking to game your own law by painting a rosy picture: The legislature has to budget only for annual payments on the borrowing rather than for the full cost of the projects.?

For comparison purposes, the House budget contains $2.7 billion in General Fund bonding while Gov. Andy Beshear recommends $1.8 billion. Beshear recommends using $433 million in cash to pay for capital projects. The House budget would use only $9 million in cash for capital projects.?

Now there are some (most prominently Republican lawmakers and the Chamber) who argue that the key to future prosperity is eliminating the income tax. Instead of Kansas, we’d be Tennessee, which, in the eyes of Kentucky Republicans, is economic heaven.

House plan would create ‘a hole’ in Kentucky Medicaid budget, Senate committee told

I could argue against making our tax system even more regressive, but will save that for another day because I understand that if you believe that continuing to cut the income tax would be the best thing ever for Kentucky, you’d stomach the above-described budgetary sleights-of-hand, even the borrowing, to eventually achieve zero income tax. Sure, it’s hypocritical and disingenuous of Republicans to not be more upfront about ignoring their own law. They could change the law rather than “notwithstanding it” but, hey, it’s the Kentucky legislature where hypocrisy and disingenuousness are on brand.

However, a third way the budget games the “we’re not going to be Kansas” law is inexcusable no matter how much you want to cut the income tax. The House knowingly underfunds Medicaid by almost a billion dollars in the first year of the two-year budget. If approved by the Senate, the underfunding will force a reduction in payments to providers, services to patients or both. While the House budget cuts Medicaid on one hand, it also mandates expansions of much-needed Medicaid services on the other hand, making the underfunding even more difficult to manage. The House fully funds Medicaid in the budget’s second year when it’s already known that there will be no way to meet the fiscal triggers.

Another major difference between the House and Beshear budgets is General Fund spending for education. Beshear recommends $1.1 billion more than the House in the first year of the budget and $673 million more the second year.

Chris McDaniel, chairman of the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee, strikes me as a genuinely responsible lawmaker. It will be interesting to see if he goes along with the House plan for evading the legislature’s own safeguards for keeping us from becoming another Kansas.

Or, if we will just be Kansas in slow motion.?

"This is a sad bill," writes Tyesha Gordon. "The commonwealth has $1 billion to spend on this, but not to better fund public schools? To expand housing and SNAP benefits? To provide better economic opportunities to struggling communities?"???(Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — A couple of demented provisions in House Republicans’ sweeping rewrite of Kentucky’s criminal code — jailing the homeless and unleashing vigilante justice on suspected shoplifters — are bad enough in themselves.

They also seem to be the shiny new objects distracting from other, far-reaching questions about House Bill 5.

Kentuckians deserve answers, but the Republicans who control the legislature haven’t even started asking the questions, at least not publicly.?

How many new prison beds would be needed for the inmate surge set off by HB 5? How many new prisons? Would the private prison industry be employed to relieve the strain?

Would prisons have to operate nursing homes due to the increase in geriatric inmates? How about the impacts on county governments? Would they have more pretrial defendants to house at the county’s expense while the new harsher penalties move convicted felons, paid for by the state, out of local jails into state prisons?

And what will all this cost taxpayers??

What is the price tag for locking up more Kentuckians and for many more years? What would be sacrificed to pay for HB 5? Would it be worth it?

None of these questions were even seriously debated in the House.

In fact, the House approved HB 5 before the estimates of its fiscal impact were complete and published. The legislature began requiring corrections impact statements years ago to get a handle on the snowballing price of piecemeal criminal code changes that, over time, had saddled Kentucky with a huge increase in incarceration costs.?

Since 1985, Kentucky’s population has grown by 22% while its incarcerated population has grown by 214%. The rate of violent crime is about what it was when many fewer Kentuckians were behind bars; we remain one of the safest states.?

The Department of Corrections is still working on an impact statement for HB 5 as it stands after Republican amendments approved by the House worsened its fiscal impacts. Thankfully, the House did drop the original bill’s death penalty for distributing fentanyl that causes a fatal overdose.

I’ve been reading the impact statements that are available. They don’t attempt? to estimate the total increase in inmates over time. Nor do they put any bottom-line numbers on the eventual costs to taxpayers.?

They do provide some useful — and concerning — information.

If HB 5 becomes law, early release would be greatly limited for those convicted of violent crimes; also the definition of violent crime would be expanded to include more offenses. Instead of becoming eligible for parole after serving 20% of their sentences, violent offenders would have to serve 85% of their sentences. About 1 in 5 state prison inmates were classified as violent offenders in 2022.?

On average this higher bar for parole correlates with these additional costs per offender:?

• $554,833 or an additional 4,745 days for a Class A felon sentenced to 20 years or more.
• $416,154 or an additional 3,559 days for a Class B felon sentenced to 10-20 years.
• $277,475 or an additional 2,373 days for a Class C felon sentenced to 5-10 years.?
• $138,679 or an additional 1,186 days for a Class D felon sentenced to 1-5 years.

Remember, six-figure spending is PER OFFENDER. Incarceration is breathtakingly expensive.

And then there’s this: “With longer incarceration times, the challenge of reentry back into the community will become more difficult.” HB 5 will accelerate the revolving door of recidivism. It will sideline more Kentuckians from ever participating in the economy.

And, yet, champions of HB 5 voice some of the loudest complaints about Kentucky’s low workforce participation rate.?

But, then again, maybe I’m looking at this all wrong.

Maybe elected officials see increased incarceration as an economic opportunity. A new extractive industry: Lock up more Kentuckians, and more Kentuckians get jobs tending the incarcerated.?

I realize that’s deeply cynical but it’s also been a reality for decades as Appalachian communities welcomed federal and state prisons as an economic boon only to remain about as poor as ever.?

Which is not to say there’s not money to be made off mass incarceration.?

CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison company, didn’t pump $440,000 into the governor’s race and isn’t employing seven registered legislative lobbyists in Kentucky for altruistic reasons.

The House included $29 million in its budget (money not requested by Gov. Andy Beshear) to study building a new prison, which makes you wonder, if it costs $29 million to study, how much would it cost to build??

It could take years for HB 5’s costs to be fully felt. So, sure, politicians, thinking no further than their next election, find it easy to exploit fears of crime while saddling future generations with unknown but, we can assume, substantial costs.?

Here’s hoping cooler, more sensible heads prevail in the Senate.?

Lawmakers surely will drop the odious criminalization of homelessness and shopkeeper vigilantism. Even so, HB 5 should not slip into statute without a full accounting of its costs.

The percentage increases in Kentucky population and incarceration have been updated to correct errors in the original version.

Reps. Richard Heath, R-Mayfield, and Rebecca Raymer, R-Morgantown, prepare to present a resolution in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to the House State Government Committee. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

FRANKFORT — Responding to Republican calls for him to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s immigration crackdown, Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday praised the 850 Kentucky National Guard members who have served at the southern border, saying they?“answered the call of our country, not the clamor of the latest political outrage.”?

Declaring Kentuckians “exhausted with this constant ‘us-versus-them,’” Beshear also raised concerns that GOP resolutions supporting Abbott “are based on a legal theory that was previously used to support secession.”

Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions in both Kentucky chambers calling on Beshear to voice support for his Republican counterpart in Texas who has blocked the U.S. Border Patrol from entering an area in Eagle Pass, Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Biden administration has the authority to remove razor wire that was installed under Abbott’s orders.

Kentucky Republicans lining up with Texas governor in border fight with Biden

Around the country, Republican governors, attorneys general and lawmakers are intensifying their criticism of Democratic President Joe Biden’s handling of the border at the same time former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, is trying to kill a bipartisan agreement being negotiated in the U.S. Senate that would link tougher immigration laws and aid to Ukraine.?

Abbott and his supporters assert ?the federal government under Biden “has broken the compact with the states,” the so-called “nullification” doctrine that states used to justify seceding from the United States and starting the Civil War.

A surge of immigrants traveling through Mexico from around the world and seeking asylum in the U.S. has strained the Border Patrol, the capacities of cities to shelter migrants and an immigration system that has gone decades without reform by Congress.

A House committee on Tuesday voted 15-3 to advance a resolution urging Beshear to support Abbott in his efforts to stop what Republicans called an “invasion” of migrants and a threat to Kentucky.

A few hours later, the House approved Rep. Richard Heath’s House Resolution 57, by a 77-17 vote.

In committee, Rep. Rebecca Raymer, R-Morgantown, one of HR 57’s sponsors, said “this is not political theater, this is a true sincere urging” of Beshear to “state support” for Texas.?

Rep. David Hale, chairman of the State Government Committee, said Kentuckians are contacting lawmakers urging them to “do something to support the state of Texas.” Hale also stressed the resolution would not have the force of law.

Hale said Abbott “has the backbone to stand up and say I want to do something about this. And the Biden administration does nothing about it” while Beshear, Hale said, sits “on the sidelines.”

Beshear issued this statement: “Throughout my time as Attorney General and Governor, I have always avoided pick-a-side politics, and in the last election, the people of Kentucky showed they are exhausted with this constant ‘us-versus-them.’?

“I answered the call under both Presidents Trump and Biden, and Kentucky has sent nearly 850 National Guard members to the southern border. In doing so, we answered the call of our country, not the clamor of the latest political outrage.

“Last year, I thanked our soldiers for their service at the border and awarded them the Governor’s Outstanding Unit Citation. Finally, I have concerns that today’s resolutions are based on a legal theory that was previously used to support secession. I am a proud American who will always support our one nation under God.”?

This story has been updated with the House vote.

Rep. Daniel Fister, R-Versailles, is sponsoring a bill requiring a "moment of silence or reflection" at the beginning of each school day. (LRC Public Information)

Kentucky public schools would be required to begin each day with a moment of silence or reflection under a bill that was advanced Tuesday by the House Education Committee.

Rep. Tina Bojanowski, a Louisville Democrat and public school teacher, opposed House Bill 96, saying it “reads as a bill that requires prayer during the school day” in violation of the U.S. Constitution.?

Bojanowski, D-Louisville, said students already are free to pray at school but that teacher-led prayer crosses the constitutional line.?

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Daniel Fister, R-Versailles, responded that his bill is “parent driven” and that school personnel would be prohibited from instructing children on how to use the time other than “to sit quietly for a moment.”?

“The child is just allowed a time to focus on whatever’s important to them, whether it be the dog ate my homework speech or whatever they want to work on,” said Fister, who also said “most schools are doing this anyway.”

Kentucky law already specifies that teachers may lead students in a moment of silence or reflection. HB 96 requires local school boards to create policies ensuring that “pupils remain seated and silent and make no distracting display so that each pupil may, in the exercise of his or her individual choice, meditate, pray, or engage in any other silent activity which does not interfere with, distract from, or impede other pupils’ exercise of individual choice.”?

The bill says parents and guardians are to be notified of the policy and encouraged “to provide guidance” to their children on the moment of silence or reflection.

Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, asked Fister if it’s unreasonable to expect all students to remain seated and silent.?

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, how do you teach a child that you can’t get to sit still anyway?”

The committee approved the bill 14-3 with three Democrats voting against it. Raymond called the measure “unnecessary Christian posturing.”

This intellectual waterboarding is enough to make a person scream. With apologies to Edvard Munch. (Getty Images)

Listen up, people.

It’s time to get woke to the real victims.

Untold Kentuckians are suffering from exposure to “concepts.”

Not just any concepts. DIVISIVE concepts. Ideas that cause discomfort, guilt, anguish, psychological distress, deep dark depression, excessive misery and possibly premature hair loss in white males.

What’s inflicting these horrors? DEI.?

No, not do rei me, that would be in band practice.?

Kentuckians are at risk of being totally bummed out by this insidious three-headed devil that goes by the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Let me give you an example. Think about chattel slavery. Now think about how chattel slavery still shapes our institutions and lives. Is that a downer, or what? ?

Oh, I can hear you whiners already. “It’s reality. It’s history. Blah, blah, blah.”

For your information, history can be very triggering.

Historical reality is especially triggering in individuals who have developed a CONSCIENCE.

Thinking about systemic injustice puts impressionable young people at risk. They’ll be sitting there morosely examining their belief systems when they could be cheerfully striving for workforce readiness.

Becoming aware of institutional racism — or sexism, ableism, all the ’isms — can make people feel angry and sad. It can make them want CHANGE.?

We can’t have people seduced into welcoming — I shudder to use the word — “diverse” perspectives to the very rooms where decisions are made about business, medicine, government, education. No telling what that could churn up.

DEI indoctrination threatens the underpinnings of our well-known meritocracy, in which almost all power has traditionally been vested in the hands of white men — where it will be safe, because they know how to guard it.

Thank God, Republican lawmakers are riding to the rescue to liberate Kentuckians from this intellectual waterboarding.

Kentucky Senate leader files bill to curb ‘divisive concepts’ in public higher education

After dedicating themselves last year to freeing Kentucky parents from the right to make medical decisions concerning their transgender children, the GOP has a new bogeyman for a new year.

Senate Bill 6 invites aggrieved victims to sue Kentucky’s public universities and colleges for inflicting “divisive concepts” on unsuspecting students and employees. The penalty for violations would be up to $100,000.

That ought to shut up — maybe even shut down — these so-called diversity, equity and? inclusion programs and spare students and employees the cruelty of DEI training.?

Bravo, also, to Sen. Stephen Meredith for protecting children in public schools through his Senate Bill 93 which adds “belonging” to the ban on the evil triptych.

Let bygones be bygones, for pity’s sake. It’s not like racism or sexism play any part in today’s society, certainly not in the Kentucky legislature.

And it’s not like Republicans are out to stifle free expression or academic freedom; it says so right there in SB 6. Everyone remains free to say whatever they want just so long as they don’t say anything that makes anyone else have a thought that makes them uncomfortable.?

Now that’s what I call education.

Who can argue with Senate Republican Whip Mike Wilson, sponsor of SB 6, when he says: “I respect diversity and inclusion, including everybody. And as far as that is concerned, I think that we’ve done a really good job with all of our laws, federal and state, to combat racism and those kinds of events. And I think we have enough on the books to be able to do that, to include everyone and make sure that we’re reaching out to all students, as far as their intellectual diversity, and that’s one of the things that I think it was hindering, rights of free speech and stuff like that.”

C’mon, Kentuckians, don’t be sheeple. Throw off the chains of DEI and stuff like that.

You have nothing to lose except … your bigotry?

A holiday wish is displayed at the iKids Childhood Enrichment Center, a child care facility in Benton, Nov. 28, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

Kentucky’s new Attorney General Russell Coleman is right when he says prevention is the weak link in the long-running war on drugs.

Turning the tide will take a lot more than retreading D.A.R.E. or Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, though.

If we’re serious about prevention, we’ll work to help more Kentuckians grow up in secure homes.

Affluence is no protection against addiction or overdose; we’ve proof enough of that. At the same time, economic insecurity is a common thread among those who develop drug use disorders. Multiple studies document this link. A pair of economists coined “deaths of despair” to describe the rising overdoses and suicides that had eroded Americans’ life expectancy even before COVID-19 struck.

Coleman is right on another point. The term “opioid epidemic” is too narrow.

The drug trade is nothing if not fungible; supply and demand have an uncanny ability to align.

Consider the last 25 years: The manufacturer of highly-addictive OxyContin targeted an economically depressed region already dependent on “nerve pills” and prescription painkillers. In response, Kentucky regulated the over-prescribing of opioids, drying up the supply. Enter heroin, followed by fentanyl, which is cheaper than heroin to produce and transport. It’s also extra deadly and hard to recognize when masquerading as a prescription pill or mixed with other drugs.?

Kentucky also tightened the sale of over-the-counter medicines used to make methamphetamine, which is why you sometimes hear grousing that it’s easier to buy firearms than Sudafed. As toxic makeshift meth labs disappeared, Mexican cartels filled the void, as Coleman observed in an interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Politicians and law enforcement will keep pushing policing and prison. They’ll talk about tightening the southern border through which almost a trillion dollars of legal trade passes each year.

But there’s no reason these approaches will work any better now than they have in the past. If they do succeed in constricting the flow of drugs, supply will just morph again to meet demand.

Reducing demand — prevention, as Coleman says — is the way to make a long-term dent in Kentuckians’ yen for illicit drugs.?

Naloxone, buprenorphine and methadone are part of the solution now.

What’s also needed is a dose of hope.

While the pharmaceutical industry and Mexican cartels cannot supply hope, there are some things Kentucky’s legislature could do.

I keep thinking of tiny Warfield on the West Virginia border in Martin County. The Mountain Citizen reported last fall that the elected commissioners were trying to figure out how to respond to homeless people living in tents on a creek behind the IGA. One idea was to ban encampments in the city limits. Columnist Bugs Dixon subsequently called for more comprehensive solutions and noted that many of the tent-dwellers were former patients of a nearby addiction treatment center.

Can you imagine trying to stay sober holed up in a tent under suspicious eyes? Who wouldn’t want a numbing hit of something??

Kentucky, rural and urban, has a shortage of housing for all kinds of people. It was a crisis for low-income working families even before disasters destroyed thousands of homes.

The legislature put a dab of money towards affordable housing last year. Gov. Andy Beshear is proposing another dab in the upcoming two-year budget. But the need is so much greater. And the benefits are so broad, not least of which are construction jobs.

After a long budgetary drought, Kentucky, like other states, is sitting on a big surplus — $3.7? billion in the “rainy day fund” — dollars that can make a difference.?

Republican lawmakers often speak of putting money into Kentuckians’ pockets via tax policy. The Republican supermajority has enacted two income tax cuts in the last two years. People who need help the least benefit the most from income tax cuts.?

This would be a good time for tax policy that puts money in the pockets of Kentuckians who need it the most — tax policy that will help prevent costly future problems like addiction and crime.

And we have a recent example of it working: Congress’ temporary expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic cut child poverty by a third nationwide and lifted 69,000 Kentucky children out of poverty.

Kentucky could join the 14 states that have some form of child tax credit.

Poverty puts children through traumas that manifest in ways that society later punishes at a high cost to itself. A few hundred dollars a month — to cover rent, keep the fridge stocked and the heat on — could protect a lot of kids from a lot of trauma.

Kids and their families also are at risk if the legislature or Congress fail to shore up child care. Parents can’t work without it.?

And, as you can read elsewhere in today’s Lantern, grandparents and other kin caring for kids whose parents are lost to the drug epidemic need help.

Coleman, a former FBI agent, and Christopher Evans, the former DEA agent he’s appointed to head the state’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, will play key roles in distributing hundreds of millions of dollars from legal settlements with drug companies. As they search for ways to strengthen prevention, they should think about housing for people who are trying to recover.?

There’s plenty of need and, for once, plenty of money. What’s unknown is if our elected leaders have the vision and courage to change the things they can.

Outgoing Kentucky AFL-CIO president Bill Londrigan, left, greets United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. (Photo by Berry Craig)

LEXINGTON —? United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain told Kentucky union members Monday night that the working class is fed up with “being left behind” and called on labor to challenge massive income disparity and “the billionaire class.”

“The one equalizer in all this is organized labor, and we have an obligation to humanity to lead this fight.”?

Fresh off a strike that ended in record contracts with the Detroit Three automakers, Fain spoke to the Kentucky State AFL-CIO’s 35th biennial convention, held at a Lexington hotel about 15 minutes from the world’s largest Toyota manufacturing facility in Georgetown.

Fain told a packed banquet hall that after hearing United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts’ afternoon speech, “I had to cut out of here because I drove up the road” to “visit with some of our workers at Toyota Kentucky. And, you know, they want their fair share.”?

The UAW under Fain is stepping up efforts to organize nearly 150,000 workers at the Japanese automaker and other nonunion? plants, especially in the South. A number of foreign car companies, including Toyota, raised pay for their U.S. workers after the UAW contract was announced. The UAW deal included wage increases of at least 25%, the return of cost-of-living adjustments, an end to tiered salaries, annual bonuses for retirees and a role for the union in the rollout of electric vehicle manufacturing.

Fain said he told the workers in Georgetown that Toyota has raised its CEO’s pay by 125% in two years and made $90 billion in profits the last three years “on the backs of the workers.”

“That UAW bump you just received, they can take it away tomorrow” without a union contract, Fain said he told them.

Fain, who narrowly unseated the incumbent UAW president in March in the first election in which members directly chose their leader, spoke to the Kentucky audience in personal and historic terms.?

He said his? grandparents moved from a farm near Nicholasville in 1937 during the Great Depression to seek automaking jobs in Indiana, where they joined the UAW. His great grandfather was a coal miner in East Tennessee, who was blackballed from work for supporting the union, Fain said.?

“I always feel at home in Kentucky.”?

Fain called on the Democratic Party to “get focused on issues that matter to working class people,” including health care and retirement insecurity, especially among workers whose retirement depends on investing in 401(k) plans.

He said the UAW initially withheld its endorsement of Democratic President Joe Biden, who ended up supporting striking autoworkers. Fain drew laughter when he said that while Biden “was out there on our picket line supporting UAW members, the other guy was in a nonunion plant having a union rally,” a reference to former president Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner for president next year.

“It’s not a coincidence, you know, in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s as labor unions increased, that gap stayed small between the rich and poor. Since that time, as union numbers have dwindled, we’ve seen that gap grow massively. And that’s not a coincidence to me. It is done by design. I mean, the wealthy people know what they’re doing … and they divide the hell out of us on every issue they can, and they walk away with the loot while we’re fighting over guns or whatever the hell other issue we got to fight about.”

Fain ended by quoting scripture from the book of Ecclesiastes about the power of solidarity.

Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, also spoke, saying her union is in the process of organizing 50,000 Delta Airlines workers.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Kentucky AFL-CIO is expected to elect Dustin T. Reinstedler its president, succeeding longtime labor leader Bill Londrigan, who announced in September that he would not seek reelection. Reinstedler is an officer and field representative of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 4 in Kentucky and Indiana.?

The AFL-CIO is a federation of 60 national and international labor unions. ?

Kentucky Capitol (Getty Images)

A million thanks to the League of Women Voters of Kentucky for running the numbers on the opaque and, oh, so arrogant way the General Assembly conducts what we still quaintly call the “people’s business.”

“None of the people’s business” is more like it, considering how frequently the legislature chooses to shut out the public.

The League’s study, appropriately entitled “How Can They Do That?,” charts the increasing frequency of legislative maneuvers that hide and short-circuit the lawmaking process. Remember what you learned about “how a bill becomes law”? Well, forget it for a sizable portion of bills and laws in Kentucky. As a result, citizens find it almost impossible to participate in the process.

The situation is not unlike an abusive relationship. One partner dreads but can never predict what the other will do.?

There’s even gaslighting. “It’s always been that way” is a common defense for this trampling of long-established constitutional procedure. The League demolished that excuse. Consider: In 1998, fewer than 5% of bills that became law in Kentucky were passed using four surreptitious methods explained in the League’s report. Fast forward to 2022 and 32% of enacted House bills and 24% of enacted Senate bills were fast-tracked in ways that shut out the public.?

None of that is to say the legislature has ever been free of shenanigans, especially in a session’s waning hours when unsavory surprises tend to appear in the budget or emerge from closed conference committees. (My standout memory is from the closing hours in 2000 when without notice lawmakers plumped up their pensions. The state Supreme Court overturned the action after its Republican sponsor, Sen. Albert Robinson of London, admitted his goal was to sneak the “unintelligible” provision, as the Supreme Court called it, into law without being noticed.)

Back then lawmakers at least tried to hide their shenanigans. Now they brazenly keep concerned citizens and groups in the dark until they’re ready to slip controversial proposals into law, allowing no opportunity for public input or time for comment. Sadly, that opaque way of doing business is becoming normalized. Routine even.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of what would induce the supermajority to change.

Voters are the obvious answer.

But incumbent lawmakers have so many advantages. They’ve set the candidate filing deadline ridiculously early — Jan. 5 — to insulate themselves from challenges. And they have drawn districts that favor the incumbent and the party in power.

There’s also the phenomenon of voters’ liking their lawmaker even if they disapprove of the body as a whole.?

A rebellion within the supermajority is more likely. Rank and file Republican lawmakers are kept almost as much in the dark as the public. In the 1980s Kentucky lawmakers broke free from dominance by the governor. That same kind of small “D” democratic impulse could compel Republican lawmakers to seek more transparency from their leaders.

But I don’t see that happening, either.

Most Republicans seem happy to follow their leaders who seem happy to follow national GOP agenda-setters such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity (AFP).

Taking cues from outside agenda-setters hasn’t exactly boosted the Republican brand in Kentucky this year.

The American Principles Project pushed an anti-transgender agenda in legislatures around the country, including ours. And its PAC aired a series of intelligence-insulting ads against Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear aimed at ginning up fear and contempt toward the small minority of transgender kids, their parents and physicians.

I’ve seen several Republicans say the anti-trans messaging, which also came from the Republican Party of Kentucky, did nothing to help, and might have hurt, Republican gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron.

The anti-trans legislation also is a prime example of high-handed tactics by legislative leadership.

After an unexpected outbreak of human decency among Republicans in the Senate threatened to derail restrictions on transgender kids’ medical care, leadership responded the next day by combining two pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation into one jumbo bill and jetting it through both chambers in a matter of hours. Everyone, including lawmakers, was taken by surprise and caught flat-footed.

Some Republicans insisted they were protecting kids from decisions they would later regret. But, whether they’re enacting laws to protect or pick on Kentuckians, lawmakers should have the guts to look them in the eye while they’re doing it. That’s not too much to ask.

Kentucky Capitol (Getty Images)

Kentucky’s legislature acted unconstitutionally in 2022 by prohibiting Gov. Andy Beshear from spending public funds to challenge its actions, the state Court of Appeals ruled Friday in a unanimous decision.

The appeals judges upheld an earlier ruling by Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate that had struck down the legislature’s attempt to block the governor from taking it to court.

Defending the law, Attorney General Daniel Cameron had argued that the General Assembly has the “plenary power” to make public policy by restricting executive spending without violating the constitutional separation of powers.

The appeals court disagreed.

Kentucky’s Constitution commands the governor to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” the ruling says. The governor has a duty to challenge laws he deems unconstitutional and the “comprehensive authority” to decide how funds appropriated to his office are spent, says the ruling written by Judge Sara Walter Combs. Judges J. Christopher McNeil and Allison Jones concurred.?

The law in question, House Bill 248, “violates the doctrine of separation of powers by attempting to give the General Assembly excessive power to impede the Governor in performing his constitutionally mandated duties,” the ruling says.?

Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed the measure, along with House Bill 388, which shifted some power from his office to Republican Treasurer Allison Ball’s office. The Republican legislature overrode the vetoes. Beshear then challenged the measures in court.

The appeals court did not rule on the constitutionality of? the law which shifted some authority over state contracts from the finance secretary to the treasurer, saying subsequent actions by the legislature had rendered the challenge moot.?

In 2023, the legislature passed House Bill 329 aimed at remedying the “constitutional defects” in the earlier law identified by the lower court. Beshear argues the new law is essentially the same as the one that the lower court struck down. But the appeals court said the new law is significantly different. The judges vacated the circuit court ruling and dismissed that portion of the appeal.

Cameron’s office did not say whether it will appeal the unfavorable ruling on the legislature’s power to curtail the governor’s spending on lawsuits against the legislature. The AG’s office issued this statement: “The Court of Appeals agreed with Attorney General Cameron in substantial part. We are carefully evaluating next steps as to the part of the decision invalidating a law duly enacted by the General Assembly.”

House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said in a statement: “We are reviewing the court’s ruling and do not comment on pending litigation. However, the legislature is the only branch of government granted the constitutional authority to determine how taxpayer resources are spent. This House Majority has a record of being very intentional in how we approach this stewardship and we will continue to honor that commitment. Future budgets will take into consideration whether or not the conditions on an appropriation are met.”

Congressman James Comer speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Without naming names, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear on Thursday appeared to criticize Republican U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky for getting into a shouting match earlier this week with a Democratic congressman from Florida.

Beshear was responding to a reporter’s question about whether he had met with state legislators since his reelection last week. The governor said he had taken off a few days to rest, recuperate from an illness and spend time with his family and added that he looked forward to sitting down soon with lawmakers for some “really frank conversations.” The legislature convenes in regular session Jan. 2.

Republican state lawmakers — before and after the election — have criticized Beshear for not communicating with them about his plans. In response, Beshear points to bipartisan legislative accomplishments and on Thursday said “watch for the results.”?

During his weekly media briefing, Beshear also said, “I’m not going to take the bait. I’m going to continue to try to operate in a way that makes people proud.”?

He then pointed to “some of the stuff that we’ve seen in D.C. the last couple of days” as an example of the need to “calm down some of the rhetoric.”

“I mean, we saw a U.S. senator challenge somebody to a fight in a committee meeting. We saw another exchange — shouting between two folks in Congress. That’s the type of stuff that gets most Kentuckians fired at work. And so we ought to be doing better. We ought to be acting better. And while we can’t control what’s going on in D.C. we can certainly control ourselves and what’s going on in Frankfort to not get personal, to not get nasty.”

During a U.S. House committee meeting Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., criticized Comer, chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, for his impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings overseas.?

Moskowitz said those hearings have yet to find evidence and slammed Comer for his own business dealings with his brother.

Comer said that when their father died, his brother could not afford to buy the family farm, so Comer bought the land for him.

The conversation became heated, with Comer saying the allegations were “bulls- – -” multiple times, and then drawing attention to Moskowitz’s blue suit.

“You look like a Smurf here just goin’ around with all this stuff,” Comer said.

Eventually, Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland quelled the heated exchange and the hearing — airing a controversy over siting the new FBI headquarters in Maryland not Virginia — continued.

Also on Tuesday in Washington, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, challenged the head of the Teamsters union to a physical fight at a Senate hearing.

At one point, Mullin told Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, “Well, stand your butt up, then.”

“You stand your butt up,” O’Brien said.

Both men rose to their feet. Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, an 82-year-old Vermont independent, intervened, and called for them to sit down.

Russell Coleman walks to the stage in Louisville to give his acceptance speech after wining the office of attorney general on Nov 7, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

FRANKFORT — Kentucky’s next attorney general, Republican Russell Coleman, said Tuesday that combating public corruption will be one of his priorities but declined to speak specifically about London Mayor Randall Weddle’s use of “straw donors” to make excessive contributions to Gov. Andy Beshear’s campaign and the Kentucky Democratic Party.

Flanked by his transition team and speaking to media in the Capitol Rotunda, Coleman said that? prosecuting public corruption is? one of the attorney general’s “core responsibilities” and that “for too long” the state “has had to rely” on federal authorities to investigate corruption involving government officials.

Coleman said his other top priorities would be:?

• “Tackling the poison” flowing in from our “porous southwest border” that contributed to the drug overdose deaths of more than 2,100 Kentuckians last year.?
• Addressing violence, particularly in Louisville.
• Combating child exploitation and sex abuse.
• “Leaning in on how we support our county and commonwealth’s attorneys.”

Coleman, who served as U.S. attorney in Kentucky’s Western District under then President Donald Trump, said he reached out to newly elected Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Gerina D. Whethers the day after the Nov. 7 election. “We’re looking forward to sitting down and talking about how the attorney general will play a role in (violence) reduction in Louisville. I don’t know what that looks like yet.”?

Coleman called Kentucky’s largest city “a very dangerous place, particularly in some neighborhoods” and said that violent crime also is significantly up in rural Kentucky.

Asked by the Lantern for a response, Whethers’ office emailed a statement: “The Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office is focused on building a foundation that fosters trust, transparency, and the well-being of the citizens of Jefferson County, which has always been a primary focus of the Whethers administration. The Commonwealth’s Attorney Office collaborates with multiple agencies, including law enforcement. We aim to ensure safer communities and victims and their families receive justice.”

As attorney general, Coleman will oversee a commission that’s responsible for steering spending from Kentucky’s legal settlements with drug companies whose practices fueled the opioid epidemic.

The commission is considering putting $42 million into research on an illegal psychedelic plant, ibogaine, that is reputed to ease opioid withdrawal and help opioid users overcome addiction.?

Coleman said he found ibogaine’s possibilities “fascinating” and that he planned to “take a hard look” at whether it would be a smart use for $42 million, which he called “a lot of money.”

Praising Kentucky’s progress on expanding access to drug treatment, Coleman said he wants to strengthen prevention, which he said is now piecemeal.

?“We need a statewide standard data-based prevention effort,” Coleman said. Kentucky lost 2,135 lives to overdose in 2022.

Coleman said he has reached out to the newly reelected Beshear and members of his administration and looks forward to “pragmatic” cooperation. “There is no ‘R’ and ‘D’ when it comes to protecting our families” from crime.?

Coleman also said he plans to push back “on an agenda coming out of Washington, D.C., that just doesn’t comport with common sense or the views of our founders.”

Last week, the Lantern reported that the Registry of Election Finance has opened a civil investigation into $202,000 in political contributions made on a credit card belonging to Weddle and his wife. The contributions had been made in the names of Weddle family members, friends and associates who had never before been political donors. The Beshear campaign and Kentucky Democratic Party later returned the $202,000. State and federal laws limit how much an individual can give to a candidate or party and make it illegal to evade the limits by giving through “straw donors.”

Attorney General Daniel Cameron was precluded by an ethics commission ruling from investigating Weddle’s contributions to Beshear as long as he was Beshear’s opponent in the race for governor. Cameron’s office referred the matter to the FBI, which has not said if it is investigating.

Coleman said he was aware of the Weddle case “from afar” but had nothing to say about it specifically.

Coleman announced two hires. Rob Duncan, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, will serve as deputy attorney general.

Former state Sen. Wil Schroder will serve as the office’s senior counsel, including acting as a liaison to the legislature.

Coleman also recognized Andrew McNeill, an adviser to former Republican Govs. Matt Bevin and Ernie Fletcher, who is senior adviser to the transition but will not be serving in the Coleman administration.?

Coleman and other constitutional officers will take office Jan. 1.?

The governor and lieutenant governor will be inaugurated on Dec. 12.

This story has been updated with a statement from Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Gerina D. Whethers.

Newly unemployed Blackjewel coal miners blockaded railroad tracks leading to their old mine on August 23, 2019 in Cumberland in Harlan County. The paychecks of more than 300 miners bounced when the company declared bankruptcy. When miners learned the company was shipping out a final load of coal, they blocked the tracks for weeks. They were eventually paid. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The search for a worker missing in the collapse of an idle coal-preparation plant is moving into a new phase as rescuers who have been combing through the wreckage now plan to use heavy equipment to remove debris, emergency officials said Thursday.

One worker, pinned under a metal beam, died Wednesday after being found by rescuers. On Thursday, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Paula Daniels, the wife of Billy “Bo” Daniels, confirmed he was the man who died.

She told the newspaper that with his consent one of his legs had been surgically amputated in an attempt to free him.?

The company that owns the collapsed structure in Martin County ?is headed by Jeremy Hoops, whose father Jeffery Hoops gained notoriety in 2019 when bankrupt coal company, Blackjewel, withheld final paychecks from employees who then blocked a coal train for two months. The elder Hoops was Blackjewel’s CEO and president.

Records with the West Virginia secretary of state identify Jeremy Hoops as manager of Lexington Coal Co., LLC based in Milton, West Virginia.

The company was issued a mining permit by the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources on Dec. 4, 2018 for the 16.5-acre site that includes the Pontiki coal preparation plant, which collapsed Tuesday evening on two workers reportedly employed by a company that is dismantling it. Local officials have identified both of them as Pike County residents.

Demolition of the structure is part of the state-permitted reclamation plan for the site.

Earlier Thursday, Jeremy Slinker, Kentucky Emergency Management director, told media that the rescue operation is moving into a new phase by removing debris in hopes of finding the still missing worker. Emergency management officials and rescuers from all over Kentucky have searched the unstable debris, using cameras, listening devices and dogs.

Slinker said rescuers had searched all the spaces and voids in the rubble and now were making arrangements for moving in heavy equipment to remove the wreckage. The briefing was posted by The Mountain Citizen newspaper on its Facebook page.?

Martin County Sheriff John Kirk in an exclusive interview with The Mountain Citizen on Wednesday praised the rescuers for braving “a very dangerous situation.” He said search crews have “crawled beneath tons and tons of steel and concrete” that has been “snapping and popping.”

Kirk said the man who died was found alive. He died as workers tried to extricate him from beneath a beam, Kirk said. Because there’s no cell service at the site, the victim was unable to speak to his wife, Kirk said, but they were able to exchange some final words with each other.

The Lantern phoned a Lexington Coal Co. number in West Virginia Thursday afternoon; the voicemail box was full.?

Blackjewel’s Harlan County miners, who gained national fame, eventually were paid when the company agreed to pay about 1,100 workers some $5.1 million in unpaid wages.

The bankruptcy of Blackjewel and its parent company, Revelation Energy, was the subject of an investigation by Mountain State Spotlight and ProPublica into how bankruptcy laws allow coal companies to escape environmental and other obligations.

In the the late 19th century almost half the population lived on farms, like this one in Jessamine County, and needed a strong defender against the economic monopolies that bought and shipped their products. Now fewer than 2% of Americans live on farms but all Kentucky voters have a say in electing the “voice” of agriculture. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

Any “red meat” in campaigns for commissioner of agriculture has usually pertained to Kentucky’s large beef herd — until now.

Republican Jonathan Shell, a former state House floor leader, is dishing out political red meat in his quest for the office, vowing to fight “woke liberals,” serve as “guardian” to the “unborn” and “save” Kentucky from President Joe Biden.

And, for the first time ever, Planned Parenthood has endorsed a candidate — Democrat Sierra Enlow —? in the race to head Kentucky’s Department of Agriculture.

The race’s partisan tone strikes some as unfortunate, if not surprising given the current high degree of political polarization.

“Agriculture has always attempted to stay above the fray of politics and partisanship,” said Jeffery Hall, who has helped shape farm policy for more than 30 years, including as the state executive director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency in Kentucky under President George W. Bush. Hall now serves as one of three board members overseeing the U.S. Farm Credit Administration.

“The primary focus of the agriculture commissioner should be agriculture,” said Hall. “It seems like more of the partisan, political issues are taking away from the real issues in agriculture, and that’s a shame.”

Scott Smith, retired dean of agriculture at the University of Kentucky, agrees. “In recent history, the race for agriculture commissioner has been more about who can be the best voice for all farmers and for ag advancement in Kentucky, less so about partisan politics.

“We should all be concerned if selection of a commissioner is to be decided primarily by their positions on divisive Republican vs. Democrat national issues, which are beyond the work of the Department of Agriculture in Kentucky,” said Smith.

The job?

The Department of Agriculture has 237 employees, a budget of? $87 million and an array of duties, some not directly related to farming, such as regulating gasoline pumps and amusement rides and licensing pesticide operators.?

The winner of the race will earn $148,109 annually and succeed Ryan Quarles, who has served the maximum two terms and finished second in the Republican primary for governor. Quarles will become president of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System in January.

Quarles’ predecessor was Republican U.S. Rep. James Comer, who also fell short of winning the GOP nomination for governor but went on to win a seat in Congress in 2016. Comer now holds a high-profile position as chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which is conducting an investigation aimed at impeaching Biden.

The post has also served as a springboard to federal prison for two commissioners convicted of corruption, Democrat Ward “Butch” Burnette and Republican Richie Farmer.

The office itself is a vestige of the late 19th century when almost half the population lived on farms and needed a strong defender against the economic monopolies that bought and shipped their products. In 1891, the new state Constitution created the office of commissioner of agriculture, labor and statistics.

Now fewer than 2% of Americans live on farms but all Kentucky voters have a say in electing the “voice” of agriculture.

The candidates

The two candidates in the Nov. 7 election describe themselves as “fifth generation farmers” and were born within days of each other almost 36 years ago.

Enlow grew up in Larue County, working from an early age in tobacco with her family. She has a master’s degree in agricultural economics from the University of Kentucky and says she knew early on that she wanted to be ag commissioner.?

She has worked in economic development in government as well as the nonprofit and private sectors. She helped start a Kentucky chapter of the New Leaders Council which trains and promotes young progressive leaders. She has worked in Kentucky Democratic political campaigns. She’s now a self-employed consultant who helps companies with site selection and negotiations for tax incentives and advises local governments.

Shell and his father run cow-calf and greenhouse operations in Garrard County. Shell says in recent years pumpkins have become his favorite crop to grow. He earned a bachelor of science in agriculture from Eastern Kentucky University.?

Shell has refused invitations for joint appearances with Enlow, including on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight,” but both candidates participated in a Kentucky Farm Bureau “Meet the Candidate” forum on Oct. 10.

During the forum, Shell promised to be “a fighter” and touted the political friendships he has made since becoming the youngest ever House member at 24. Shell in 2012 won the seat vacated by Republican Lonnie Napier who retired after 27 years.

Shell quickly stood out as a rising star. Frustrated by the then-minority Republicans’ inability to push through conservative priorities such as right to work and anti-abortion laws, Shell recruited House candidates and headed the House GOP’s campaign committee. He was rewarded for the 70,000 miles he put on his vehicle when Republicans in 2016 took the House for the first time in 100 years, electing Shell their floor leader.?

“And we changed this state forever,” he told the Farm Bureau forum. “All the successes that we’re seeing now economically” resulted, he said, from actions by the legislature’s Republican supermajority.?

In a surprise upset, Shell was unseated in 2018 when he narrowly lost a Republican primary to R. Travis Brenda, a ?schoolteacher from Rockcastle County.

In 2020, Shell served as chairman of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign.?

Farm Bureau forum

When asked by Farm Bureau members how he would advocate for ag department funding and other priorities, Shell touted his friendships with lawmakers. “I can tell you that they’re going to take my phone calls. They’re going to take my meetings, and we’re going to have a great working relationship. I talked to the leaders of the House and the Senate almost on a daily basis, still today. Most of those members are friends of mine.”?

Enlow told the Farm Bureau forum that agriculture needs bipartisan support especially when the executive branch is under a Democratic governor to “build cross agency collaboration.”??

She said one of her top priorities would be increasing pay for ag department staff. “We’re in a space right now where we’re asking people to work for under $30,000 a year and to work for what is equivalently not a livable wage. … It’s not giving us a competitive advantage of attracting talent to the Department of Agriculture,” she said, nor will it help the department replace a coming “wave” of retirees.?

A concern on the minds of the Farm Bureau questioners was how to protect both private property rights and prime farmland, especially as industrial-scale solar energy developers are looking for sites in rural Kentucky.

Enlow recommended “good community conversations” years in advance of industry locating in an area, zoning that protects farmland and steering solar developments away from prime farmland onto more marginal land.

Shell said he wants to remove the pressure to sell or lease land by making farming more profitable. “Private property rights is one of the most American things that we have,” said Shell. “I mean, it’s one of the things that separates us from the rest of the world is that we are actually able to own things in America. And I think that it’s one of the inherent things that we need to make sure that we’re protecting on a daily basis.”?

Not surprisingly, the challenge of increasing farm profits by adding value to agricultural products was on the minds of Farm Bureau members.

Enlow said the “space from the farm gate into the corporate supply chain” is where her experience negotiating with corporate executives would serve farmers. She pointed to hemp as an example of public officials promoting a crop to farmers without having processors or retailers in place, and as a result farmers lost investments in hemp production.?

She also said she would work to bring employers to rural Kentucky to provide off-farm wages that help support family farms.

Shell said Kentucky’s cattle industry needs “a large-scale processor” and more regionalization of processors and that the Agricultural Development Fund should be modernized to work toward “getting cattle under roof” to be finished. He also advocated increasing grain storage facilities for row crops.

“We need to get closer from the farm gate to the food plate with our consumers.” He cautioned against “economic development for economic development’s sake,” saying new factories are making it harder for existing businesses to find workers. “Every business in America that I’ve talked to and in Kentucky says that they could nearly double their output if they could just get the employees to be able to show up to work, be clean on a drug test; most of them have stopped drug testing. And that’s the world that we’re living in today.”

Tobacco settlement dollars

The agriculture commissioner became more important to the future of Kentucky farming in 2021 when the Republican-controlled legislature moved oversight of tobacco master settlement dollars designated for agriculture from the governor’s office to the Department of Agriculture.?

The settlement with cigarette manufacturers has brought more than $2 billion to Kentucky in yearly installments since 1999; half of the settlement money goes to the Agricultural Development Fund which provides grants and loans for diversification and infrastructure.?

The funding decisions are made by two boards who are now appointed by the commissioner of agriculture.?

Asked what changes they envision for the fund, Shell said it’s time to develop another 20-year plan to “see in what direction that we may want to take Kentucky agriculture into the future.”?

Enlow said “investing in new technologies to help our farmers meet the next generation of agriculture” should be a priority, including “contained and controlled” environments for agriculture.?

She also said she wants to “help support diversity in agriculture in different ways”?by increasing transparency and helping new and young farmers understand the fund’s processes for gaining access to capital.

Money and media

Shell’s campaign has outraised Enlow’s. He reported raising and spending $500,000 in the Republican primary against state Rep. Richard Heath, chairman of the Kentucky House Agriculture Committee. For the general election, Shell reports receipts of $284,864.

Enlow raised $33,567 for the primary and $172,852 ?for the general election. In addition, Enlow reports in-kind contributions, most from the Kentucky Democratic Party, of $227,867. She points out that she has received financial support from many more individuals, making smaller donations, than Shell.

Shell’s campaign recently announced a “robust statewide media buy” including two television ads.?

Enlow said she’s relying on digital platforms to get out her message because the “saturation” will be higher, especially as the governor’s race takes up so much TV time.

Shell did not agree to an interview with the Lantern.

Enlow told the Lantern that despite her opponent’s fundraising advantage, her campaign is competitive and that Shell’s nationalizing the race could backfire.? “The commissioner’s job is not to fight Biden. It’s to make sure the office fights for Kentuckians.”?

She also said “Kentucky is not necessarily as divided as people think it is.”

Tamarra Wieder, Kentucky state director for the Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, told the Lantern that the organization decided to endorse in the agriculture commissioner’s race for the first time because of concerns about access to health care in rural Kentucky, especially reproductive care and birth control. Seventy-three of the state’s 120 counties have no OB-GYN, she said. Planned Parenthood has challenged Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion in court.

Shell is endorsed by anti-abortion groups Kentucky Right to Life and Northern Kentucky Right to Life.?

Enlow said she shares Planned Parenthood’s concern about limited access to medical care in rural Kentucky and appreciates its efforts to fill gaps. “When I accepted the endorsement I knew how committed they are to health care in Kentucky and serving populations that are typically underserved.”

The Ark Encounter is seen July 5, 2016 in Williamstown, Kentucky. The Ark Encounter is a theme park centered around a 510 foot long reproduction of Noah's Ark. (Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

New U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson successfully took Kentucky to court to regain tax incentives for the Ark Encounter, a 510-foot wooden replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark located off Interstate 75 in Grant County.

The state tourism cabinet had awarded the project a sales-tax rebate worth up to $18 million, but Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration withdrew the offer in 2014, saying the Ark’s builders, Answers in Genesis, had changed the project’s mission from tourist attraction to religious ministry.

The state cited website postings and statements at investors meetings to support its decision.

Johnson, a member of the Louisiana legislature at the time, was C??EO and chief counsel of Freedom Guard, a public interest law firm in Louisiana that he founded. Freedom Guard represented Answers In Genesis in challenging the state’s denial of incentives.

Johnson appeared in a 24-minute video with Ken Ham, founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis, talking about his work and the lawsuit against Kentucky.

U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in 2016 ruled in favor of Answers in Genesis, saying the state’s exclusion of the ark from the tourism tax incentive based on its “religious purpose and message” violated the First Amendment.

Johnson was quoted at the time as saying: “The court has affirmed a longstanding principle that the Constitution does not permit a state to show hostility towards religion. The First Amendment does not allow Christian organizations to be treated like second-class citizens merely because of what they believe.”

WDRB reported earlier this year that Kentucky had agreed to pay Answers in Genesis $190,000 in legal fees in connection with the case.

Answers in Genesis describes itself as an apologetics Christian ministry, meaning it uses science to defend a literal interpretation of the Bible. Ham also founded the Creation Museum in Petersburg which teaches the Earth is 6,000 years old.

The state has put millions of dollars into road construction to improve access to the Ark, which opened in 2016.

Protestors marched to the Governor’s Mansion in May 2020 attempting to deliver a letter demanding Gov. Andy Beshear resign. (Photo by Sarah Ladd)

At some point during the COVID-19 pandemic it dawned on me: We were living in a time of no good options.?

The “reward” for doing the right thing was isolation and unemployment.?

Opportunists in politics and media inflamed distrust between already hostile camps. And people suffered and died because of crazy stuff they believed from social media.

In Kentucky, our candidates for governor played leading roles in the state’s response and have been critical of each other’s record on COVID.?

Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron has made Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s management of the pandemic a centerpiece of his campaign. Cameron criticizes Beshear for inmate releases and school closings, while touting his own record of filing legal challenges to state and federal pandemic orders.

So, we at the Lantern thought voters might find it helpful to revisit some of those decisions in a pandemic retrospective that was published Wednesday.?

It’s an ambitious piece of journalism by Sarah Ladd, who covered COVID-19 in real time and now reports on a wide range of health and policy issues for the Lantern. She set out to learn if Beshear’s efforts saved lives. I’ll let you read and be the judge.

Working with Sarah on the story took me back to those unsettling days when public health fell prey to pre-existing political fissures and we couldn’t even gather to properly mourn the dead for fear of causing more deaths.

Kids probably got the worst of it in the form of disruptions that can set a person back for life. We owe them supports now to recover emotionally and educationally.?

COVID-19 exacted a lot of suffering in Kentucky. The state’s case and death rates exceeded those of the nation as a whole. More than 19,000 died.?

But Kentuckians weathered COVID with fewer deaths than should have been expected, given our population’s age and high rates of chronic disease and obesity, according to a study published in The Lancet.

Inmates in Kentucky prisons got no such break. Tracking by the Marshall Project and the Associated Press found that Kentucky had the third-highest rates of COVID deaths and cases among state prison inmates. Eight prison staff died.

To slow the virus’s spread Beshear granted commutations to 1,870 prisoners out of a pre-pandemic population of 23,000-plus. Many prisoners who got out went on to commit new crimes, just as the anti-Beshear ads say.

But let’s be real. The revolving prison door never stops, commutations or not. High recidivism is a feature of our criminal justice system not a bug. And mass incarceration is a discussion that most politicians would rather not have.

One of the biggest disappointments of this election season has been Kentucky Republicans’ re-embrace of their old lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key rhetoric.

We already lock up so many Kentuckians that if the state were a country, it would have the world’s seventh highest rate of imprisonment.?

Cameron and Republican lawmakers are calling for longer sentences and creating new crimes even as they bemoan Kentucky’s relatively low workforce participation rate.?Cameron wants voters to believe that Kentuckians are underemployed not because it’s hard to get a job when you have a record or can’t pass a drug test, but because Medicaid is giving them access to free health care.

Cameron knows better, or should. He was once a spokesman for the Kentucky Smart on Crime Coalition which started working in 2016 to address what it has called Kentucky’s “overreliance on incarceration.” The coalition’s members span the political spectrum from the ACLU to Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Bluegrass Institute to Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

One of their main messages is that Kentucky cannot afford to keep sidelining so many potentially productive people by filling up every inch of cell space.?

The root causes of crime and underemployment don’t lend themselves to 30-second political spots. I get that. We seldom if ever hear candidates talk about the systemic conditions that derail lives, poverty, mental illness, racism, school-to-prison pipelines, the omnipresence of firearms, or inequality in education and opportunity. We’re not hearing it now. Not when political hot buttons are so handy.

I don’t know how COVID will play at the polls, whether the coveted undecided voters will be measuring Beshear and Cameron on their pandemic records. (If you are, click here, for more info.)

I do know the winner will be leading a state that has complex challenges and potential. Lingering legacies of COVID-19 will be among those challenges for a long while.

I’m also pretty sure that the reward for doing the right thing during the pandemic was surviving it. Knowing that you protected others is worth something too.

KET will continue its series of Monday night interviews with candidates in the Nov. 7 election through the end of the month. (KET screenshot)

This story has been updated to show that the candidates for attorney general will not appear together on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight.” KET had invited them to debate Oct. 16.

Kentucky secretary of state and one of the two candidates for agriculture commissioner will answer questions Monday night from Renee Shaw on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight.”

KET notified media Friday afternoon that Republican Jonathan Shell would not be appearing on the program. His Democratic opponent for agriculture commissioner, Sierra Enlow, has confirmed that she will appear.

Kevin Grout, a spokesman for Shell’s campaign, said Shell had never accepted the invitation to participate in the live broadcast. KET contacted Shell’s campaign on Friday, Grout said.

KET sent out a second notice later Friday saying: “Republican candidate Jonathan Shell declined KET’s invitation to appear on the program. An earlier media advisory and subsequent update mistakenly implied that Shell was originally scheduled to appear on the program.”

KET will host both candidates for secretary of state — Republican incumbent Michael Adams and Democrat Charles “Buddy” Wheatley, a former state lawmaker — on the Monday program, beginning at 8/7 p.m as part of its series of election coverage on Monday nights in October.

Upcoming candidate appearances on KET, include:

• Governor, Oct. 23;
• Lieutenant governor, Oct. 30

All programs begin at 8/7 p.m. Candidates for auditor and treasurer appeared Oct. 2. The programs will be available for streaming at KET.org and on the PBS Video app.

Grout did not explain why Shell, a former state lawmaker and House majority floor leader, passed up the chance to appear on statewide television. Shell lost his House seat in a close GOP primary in 2018.

Grout said Shell will participate with Enlow in a Farm Bureau “Measure the Candidate Forum” that will be live-streamed beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 10.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, left, then-President Donald Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as she began a series of meetings to prepare for her confirmation hearing, Sept. 29, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Susan Walsh-Pool/Getty Images)

A Louisville audience last month applauded U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell as he touted his historic success in remaking the federal courts.

But McConnell’s proudest accomplishment could also prove to be his party’s electoral undoing as voters again showed the next day in Ohio where a measure sought by anti-abortion forces was defeated.

The federal judiciary that McConnell created is too extreme, too scary, too out of step with most Americans.?

Even people who generally oppose abortion see the wrong in withholding the standard of medical care when a pregnancy is failing or making a child carry her rapist’s child.

Placing greater value on a fetus than on a suffering, bleeding woman, as McConnell’s Supreme Court and Republican Party have allowed in Kentucky and 15 other states, is too much for most of us.

People who want a baby, who already have decorated the nursery, are living out this nightmare in real time, even losing their ability to conceive, because five “conservative” justices overthrew a half-century of legal precedent and ended a right that most Americans support.

Nothing illustrates the state of abortion politics better than a Democrat injecting the issue into a Kentucky governor’s race, as Andy Beshear is doing. In a new Beshear ad?Louisville prosecutor Erin White says “Daniel Cameron thinks a 9-year-old rape survivor should be forced to give birth.”

The near-total ban that the Republican challenger supports and is defending as attorney general has no exceptions for rape and requires that a pregnant patient be in danger of dying before an abortion is considered legal.

Nine was the age of the two youngest abortion recipients in Kentucky in 2021 and last year before the procedure was all but outlawed.

In 2021 in Kentucky, 34 girls ages 15 or younger received abortions, Deborah Yetter reported, based on state records. Now those 34 children would have to travel to another state to end their pregnancies or stay home and give birth.?

That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 swept away guardrails that had allowed states to restrict abortion while still preserving the right to end a pregnancy. The consequences of that decision quickly became frighteningly real in many states, including Kentucky, where some young women sought?sterilization rather than risk an unwanted pregnancy.

The backlash among voters turned what should have been a Republican blowout in last year’s midterm congressional elections into something of a dud — denying McConnell the chance to reclaim the title majority leader and giving Republicans only a slim majority in the U.S. House. Meanwhile, voters in Kentucky and Kansas rejected anti-abortion constitutional amendments.

More recently, Ohioans were asked to stack an upcoming state vote on abortion by giving away some of their own power. The goal was to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60% in time for a November vote on strengthening abortion rights. Buckeyes responded with a resounding no, so now those who want to outlaw abortion are resorting to deceptive ballot language in hopes of misleading voters.

Exit polls after last year’s midterms confirmed that the abortion ruling — and the fears it raised about the risks to other rights — played a big role in Republicans’ poor showing, even though voters cited inflation as their most pressing priority.

Since last November support for abortion rights has increased, according to polling by Gallup.?

Just 13% of Americans want abortion to be outlawed in all circumstances, as it essentially is now in Kentucky.?

The absolutist stance on abortion — echoed by candidates in the first GOP presidential debate — pretty much assures Republicans cannot win a majority of American voters.?

But in McConnell’s “long game” winning a majority of voters might not matter anymore. Because his Supreme Court will enforce minority rule.?

As a refresher, McConnell blocked hundreds of Barack Obama’s judicial appointments and for 11 months refused to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, saying it was too late in Obama’s presidency — then turned around and confirmed Amy Coney Barrett with four months left in Donald Trump’s term. Thanks to McConnell’s brilliance in manipulating the process, Trump appointed nearly as many federal appeals court judges in four years as Obama did in eight years. McConnell also pushed through confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh, completing a trio that guarantees a right-of-center (some would say rabidly right wing) high court for decades.

One of the great things about the U.S. Constitution is its protections against tyranny of the majority. But now we’re subject to tyranny of the minority.

I doubt McConell ever lost a minute’s sleep over the “unborn.” Abortion has little to do with what he wants from his Supreme Court. What McConnell wants are more rulings shoring up the power of the super-rich while chopping away economic protections for ordinary Americans. A court that will weaken voting rights and uphold gerrymandered lawmaking bodies. Judges who value the perogatives of corporations over the needs of people, are eager to shred the social contract, turn thumbs down on protections for our sizzling planet and slash away at what’s left of organized labor.

McConnell’s legacy seems likely to be decades of division as Americans fight for rights — for a nation — they thought had been secured long ago.?

Pine Mountain Settlement School's Charlotte F. Hedges Memorial Chapel, designed by architect Mary Rockwell Hook was built 1922-24. Italian immigrant Luigi Zande, a stonemason, worked on the building. (Photo from Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections)

This story has been updated with a statement released Wednesday by Pine Mountain Settlement School.

An Appalachian arts nonprofit’s gathering at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County ended abruptly last weekend after local residents objected to the group’s presence in the chapel, raising concerns among attendees about their safety.

A statement issued by the Waymakers Collective says participants decided to end their annual assembly a day early “for the safety of everyone in attendance,” including the school’s staff.

The decision to leave came after “a group of white men and women in trucks and on ATVs from the surrounding” area blocked exit roads and paths and demanded that conference participants leave the chapel.

“We were shocked by this as we had rented out the entire campus of PMSS for our event and were treating the entire property with respect and in the manner we had communicated to PMSS prior to the event,” the Waymakers statement said.

Kentucky State Police and the Harlan County sheriff’s office were called to the scene Saturday but no charges or arrests were made.

Harlan County Sheriff Chris Brewer said deputies remained at the campus “for several hours out of precaution to keep the peace.” He also said his office is not conducting an investigation.

The? confrontation has already cost the school one event. Nicole Garneau, organizer of the Rebellious Performance Retreat, said she is moving the five-day immersive theater workshop from Pine Mountain Settlement School, where it had been scheduled to be held over Labor Day weekend.

“I cannot host a retreat dedicated to supporting artists working on challenging material in a place where we do not feel safe,” Garneau told the Lantern in an email.?“I will be sharing the new location of the retreat only with people who are registered.”?

A statement released Wednesday by the Pine Mountain Settlement School said that photos of the conference posted on social media, especially of the chapel, “upset some members of the local community, who interpreted this as non-Christian.” They reached out to interim director Jason Brashear and board of trustees chair James Greene who asked the Waymakers to vacate the chapel.

“The Collective agreed they would relocate the space at their next class break. However, some community members decided on their own to come to campus, entering the chapel, and blocking access to buildings and roads,” says the PMSS statement.

The statement, printed below, says the school “is reviewing its policies and procedures to ensure that this type of misunderstanding does not occur in the future and to ensure the safety of all guests, visitors, and staff. Pine Mountain will continue its tradition of being open and welcoming to all as well as to promote mutual understanding among all those it serves.”

Founded in 1913 and set on 800 acres, the Pine Mountain Settlement School is a national historic landmark. It once served as a boarding school for young Kentuckians; its residence and dining halls and other buildings still host visitors and events throughout the year, including wildflower and fall color weekends.

Brashear, the interim director, said 5,000 students visited last year to hike, study nature and learn square dancing and crafts.

The Kentucky Arts Council provides operating support to the school “from state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts,” according to the PMSS website.

The Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, which raises money to preserve Kentucky forests and natural habitats, has held artists weekends at the campus. The land trust, Kentucky songwriter Daniel Martin Moore and 40 musicians teamed up in 2019 to produce a double album titled “Pine Mountain Sessions” recorded in the school’s chapel which benefited KNLT and the school.

The Waymakers Collective, which says it has distributed more than $1 million in grants to Appalachian artists and arts organizations, describes itself as “a multiracial group that is also inclusive of queer and trans people.”?

The Waymakers’ statement said that for its annual gathering the chapel had been set up as space “for rest and quiet reflection” and “healing.”

“The set up of the room included pillows, meditation cushions, soothing lights, plants, crystals, and some artwork including a painting that included an ‘Om’ symbol,” the statement said.

“It was a spa-like environment to help facilitate restorativeness, rest, and reflection.”?

“Our coordinator specifically asked if there were any special instructions that should be honored in the chapel,” the statement says. “The only instructions given were not to move the pews as the floors were recently resurfaced. Our team requested two tables in the chapel to display aromatherapy oils and other items for the participants, and upon our arrival, the tables were set up?by the PMSS staff.”

On Saturday, a few conference participants were “gathered in the chapel to rest: taking naps or sitting in quiet reflection or prayer” when two men and a woman who were not part of the group entered and sat apart watching, said the statement.

More people arrived, said the statement, and conference attendees were told that they were “desecrating a Christian space” amid demands that they leave, according to the statement, which also said the local residents used “their vehicles to block the roads and paths to exit.”

The settlement school staff intervened and separated the two groups, said the statement.

“The group of people who entered the chapel stayed for over an hour, often lingering on the outside of where we were gathered as though to tell us we were not welcome and were being watched,” the statement said.

The statement says they later learned that Facebook posts had accused the group of “desecrating the chapel and other horrible allegations that simply are not true.”

The weekly Tri-City News, also of Harlan County, in an article posted on its Facebook page, reported that Bledsoe resident Tate Napier said that he was part of a group of “eight or nine” who entered the chapel “because we wanted to make sure the House of The Lord wasn’t being disrespected.”?

Napier is quoted as saying, “The people in the chapel said they were doing nothing wrong, and I asked if they were in there to worship Jesus, and a few started raising their voices at me, so I told them to just get their stuff — that we weren’t there to argue, and I even helped them gather their things and pack them to their cars. After that all happened, the state police and sheriff deputies showed up, and they agreed to stay out of the chapel, but then, ultimately, they decided to leave because they said they felt unsafe.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Napier posted on his Facebook page that he had received a lot of requests from reporters and journalists — the Lantern sent him a direct message via Facebook — seeking interviews but that he had decided to “leave it” with the interview he gave “a local journalist” on Saturday.

“The news and social media are tools the devil uses the most to stir up division, and I don’t want to partake in anymore,” he said.

Garneau, an actor who has performed at the settlement school, said the decision to cancel the Labor Day weekend performance retreat had left her angry and sad.

“I have attended many wonderful gatherings at Pine Mountain Settlement School, many of which were dedicated to social and racial justice. Rural Eastern Kentucky needs a place like PMSS where people can come together to make Kentucky, and the world, a better place,” she said.?

“I am angry and sad that some members of the Harlan community decided to violate a sacred space for healing, and in so doing, traumatize an entire community of folks gathered at PMSS. I fear this will have repercussions for years to come.”?

The Waymakers Collective statement ended with an invitation to the settlement school staff and leadership to “think, with us, about how to ensure Pine Mountain Settlement School continues to be the inclusive, beautiful, and hospitable place it has historically been for many of us — including how best to communicate with potential guests what your boundaries are for the use of your campus.”

A raucous crowd greets the speakers at the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

The 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic — a feast for connoisseurs of barbecue and Kentucky politics — is in the history books.

After a day of colorful personal interactions with voters and each other, Gov. Andy Beshear and Attorney General Daniel Cameron must now return their attentions to raising vast sums of money to pay for the high-price media campaigns that will dominate Kentucky politics until Nov. 7.

National interest is intense in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race. One of three this year and the most competitive by far, it’s seen as a bellwether of next year’s presidential election.

Voters who on Saturday got to hear directly from candidates in person or on KET’s broadcast can expect to now be inundated with messaging from shadowy independent actors with shadowy motives.

It makes all the face-to-face hollering, hyperbole and insults hurled at Fancy Farm feel downright refreshing — even to a jaded old journalist like me. People who have migrated into social media echo chambers rubbed elbows and maybe even caught each other’s eye.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who said it was his 28th appearance at the picnic, obliquely addressed concerns about his health at a GOP breakfast by vowing he would make more trips to Fancy Farm. McConnell then gave a speech at the main event in which he good-humoredly recounted his 1996 defeat of Gov. Andy Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, in a U.S. Senate race. The elder Beshear went on to become a two-term governor.

None of the politicians on stage mentioned former President Donald Trump, although Cameron has his endorsement and Trump was the region’s overwhelming favorite in 2020. By not touting Trump’s endorsement, Cameron might have been deferring to his mentor, McConnell, who has said Trump, facing three criminal indictments, is bad for the Republican Party. It will be interesting to see how — or if — Trump figures into Kentucky’s election this year.

What will compel Kentucky voters — nationalized issues or more Kentucky-based concerns?

This was the Lantern’s first Fancy Farm foray — we will celebrate our first anniversary at the end of November — and this is our first time covering a governor’s race, though it won’t be our last. ?Let us know what you’d like to read about the upcoming election. My email address is at the bottom of this page.

And hope you enjoy the photo gallery by Austin Anthony.

The speaking: Fancy Farm ’23

Bailey Canamore, 11, of Clinton carries a flag behind GOP political consultant and pundit Scott Jennings as he speaks live on CNN before the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

A Democrat supporter jeers during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Joseph Paige performs a song with the other members of his group The Mighty Shades of Ebony during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Samantha Veal sings My Old Kentucky Home during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell hugs gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron as Elaine Chao, former U.S. cabinet member and McConnell's wife applauds, during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Gov. Andy Beshear speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Gov. Andy Beshear and his wife Britainy acknowledge the crowd after his speech during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose health has been in question of late, waves to the crowd while speaking during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

U.S. Sen.Mitch McConnell and wife Elaine Chao wave to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, state Sen. Robby Mills speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Democrat supporters cheer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Democratic Attorney General candidate Pam Stevenson speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Auditor Mike Harmon tosses notecards with jokes written on them as he speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republican U.S. Rep. James Comer and gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron share a laugh laugh during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Governor Andy Beshear shakes hands with a Kentucky State Police officer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Congressman James Comer, gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron and Cameron’s wife Makenze cheer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republican supporters cheer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Governor Andy Beshear speaks during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron waves to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Democratic supporters cheer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republican auditor candidate Allison Ball waves to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republican supporters cheer during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Education Commissioner Jason Glass addressed the House Education Committee earlier this year. (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by McKenna Horsley)

Jason Glass became a target in the culture wars, but the real casualty is Kentucky’s public schools.

Republicans ran off an education commissioner who openly challenged their anti-LGBTQ agenda. Under the circumstances, Glass’s announcement that he will step down in late September was not surprising. It does raise a troubling question:?

What self-respecting educator will want the job, having seen what happened to Glass, and now that the commissioner must serve at the pleasure of the state Senate’s Republican majority?

Lawmakers thoroughly politicized the selection process earlier this year by enacting a law that Glass acknowledges helped spur him to leave with a year remaining on his four-year contract.?

For the first time, under this new law, education commissioners will be subject to four-year renewable terms and the state Senate has final say over their hiring and firing.?

Previously the appointed Kentucky Board of Education hired the commissioner and set contract terms, a process created in 1990 by the Kentucky Education Reform Act to replace the elected superintendent of public instruction with a professional educator chosen through a national search.

This latest change will make it harder to attract the caliber of education leader that Kentuckians have become accustomed to these last 30 years.

More than credentials or experience, toadyism will become the essential qualification — along with a willingness to pander to whatever bigotry de jure tops Republican lawmakers’ menu. Currently they’re into bullying LGBTQ kids and demonizing teachers as purveyors of indecency. But it’s not a stretch to think the Republicans who control Kentucky’s Senate might want schools to teach that human slavery had its good points as Florida has decreed.

At the very least, Republican lawmakers hanker for a commissioner who would reassure them that privatization, union busting and more tax cuts would be just the ticket for education in Kentucky.?

Glass, who also has said he’s leaving because he didn’t want to “be part of implementing the dangerous and unconstitutional anti-LGBTQI law that the legislature passed this last session,” is Kentucky’s fourth education commissioner in eight years.

The rapid turnover at the top has been fueled, at least in part, by partisan political pressures.?

I called up Brad Hughes, an astute observer of Kentucky education, to hear his thoughts. “Candidates are going to take a hard look at the current climate regardless of who wins the governor’s race in November,” says Hughes, formerly spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association.

The politics of the moment will dissuade some potential commissioners from applying, he said, while the uncertainty and hostility generated by hyper-partisanship filter “right down to the classroom teacher.”

The Senate has long had the power to churn the state school board by rejecting a governor’s appointees, a power it will not hesitate to use if Democrat Andy Beshear fends off Republican challenger Daniel Cameron in November.?

“The uncertainty will not encourage kids in college to pursue a teaching career. To me that’s almost as big a fear as the control factor in the Kentucky Department of Education,” says Hughes.

As far a I can tell, Glass got high marks from teachers, ably led a bulky bureaucracy and supported deeper, more personalized approaches to learning. He will become Western Michigan University’s associate vice president of teaching and learning.?

Michigan’s gain is Kentucky’s loss.

The former surface coal mine in Roxana where U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers wants to build a federal prison. (Photo by No New Letcher Prison)

Opponents of a long-debated federal prison in Letcher County are criticizing U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers for using what they call a “strongman tactic” to “fast track” the project without public comment or an environmental review.

Even the courts, opponents say, would be precluded from hearing legal challenges to the prison, under language that Rogers added to an appropriations bill last week.

Rogers’ provision directs the U.S. attorney general to issue an environmental impact statement and “record of decision” approving the prison within 30 days of the appropriations bill’s enactment. It also says that decisions regarding the prison by the U.S. attorney general and the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons “shall not be subject to judicial review.”

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee has not yet debated the spending bill, which will need to clear several hurdles before it could become law.?

The House’s spending bills are likely to change significantly later this year when the GOP chamber considers reconciling its plans with the bipartisan spending bills the Senate Appropriations Committee has released.?

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 28-1 earlier this month to approve its version of the Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill, which does not include any provision mentioning the Letcher prison.

Rogers has been working since at least 2006 to bring a federal prison to to the southeastern Kentucky county. He touts the prison as a source of employment and economic development in a poor region that has lost thousands of coal industry jobs. The 16-member Letcher County Planning Commission has long sought a prison.

A coalition of opponents — local and national — question the potential economic benefits. They say a proliferation of prisons in Central Appalachia in recent decades has done little to improve the economy, while supporting mass incarceration and putting prisoners and their families at great distances from each other.?

A Tuesday release?issued by two citizens groups, Building Community Not Prisons and Concerned Letcher Countians, takes Rogers to task for trying to push through the project without allowing additional public input. “People in Letcher County deserve to have a say in this because we vote, we pay taxes, we live here and we love this place,” said Dr. Artie Anne Bates, a member of Concerned Letcher Countians. “We don’t want Rep. Rogers stuffing something down our throats that we are not in agreement with.”

Rogers? seemed to have prevailed in 2018 when the Federal Bureau of Prisons approved?construction of a high-security penitentiary and prison camp on a former surface mine in Roxana, saying it would relieve overcrowding of federal prisons in the Mid-Atlantic region.

But the Trump administration pulled the plug, saying the prison was no longer needed because of a decline in prisoner numbers and that the $505 million set aside for the project would be?“wasteful spending.”

President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget proposal?also would cancel funding for the prison.

Rogers, R-Somerset, serving his 22nd House term, is a member and former chairman of the powerful appropriations committee. He is now chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding levels for the Justice Department which is responsible for federal prisons.

According to a news release that Rogers’ office issued in November 2022, $500 million that he secured in an earlier appropriations bill is still available in the Bureau of Prisons budget for construction of the prison.

Since the 2018 approval, the Bureau of Prisons has changed the Letcher plan to a medium-security federal correctional institution.

About 150 people attended (in person or virtually) a “scoping” meeting in Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat, held last November by the Bureau of Prisons to explain the new plan and begin work on a draft environmental impact statement. Opinion was divided with some supporting the prison in hopes that it would spin off other economic activity while others pointed to the persistently high poverty in nearby places that have prisons.

Then-state Rep. Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg, said she preferred the medium-security plan to the ?maximum-security facility that was originally proposed, reported Katie Myers of Ohio Valley Resource.

“The rehabilitation focus is something that I can live with, as a citizen here, a whole lot more easily than I could live with the idea of a maximum-security prison,” Hatton said. “The prison would actually help us get a hotel, and it also will be a really important way that we might get an airport here.” Hatton, who lost her bid for reelection, is now a member of the Kentucky Public Service Commission.

The provision that Rogers has inserted into the current appropriations bill would dictate that an environmental impact statement approved in 2018 for the earlier plan would now suffice to move the project forward.

But opponents insist more study is needed to protect local habitat and human health. “These processes provide essential checks on the prison’s potential environmental impacts on endangered bat habitat, wetlands, and old growth forest, as well as public health consequences of arsenic and radon exposure for both incarcerated people and correctional staff,” says the release from the two citizens groups.

The prison site is near the rare old-growth?Lilley Cornett Woods where Eastern Kentucky University operates the Lilley Cornett Woods Appalachian Ecological Research Station.?

Opponents also insist the region has more pressing needs for federal dollars than another prison.?

Beverly May, a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and a Rogers constituent, said “this $500 million of taxpayer money should be used for housing, flood clean up, and prevention, not this unnecessary prison.”

An email to a Rogers’ spokesperson seeking comment was not returned Tuesday.

Jennifer Shutt in our D.C. bureau contributed to this report.

"This magic pen makes it a law," Gov. Andy Beshear told Emorie Meredith, daughter of Rep. Michael Meredith, behind them, as he signed regulations for sports gambling in Kentucky. Public Protection Cabinet Secretary Ray Perry is on the right. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

LEXINGTON — Gamblers can begin casting legal sports bets at racetrack-related locations across Kentucky on Sept. 7 and through mobile apps on Sept. 28, under emergency regulations signed yesterday by Gov. Andy Beshear at the Red Mile.

The legislature earlier this year made Kentucky the 37th state to legalize sports betting. The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way in 2018 by striking down a federal ban that had excluded most states from legalizing such gambling.

Sports bettors in Kentucky must be 18 or older. Some states have set the minimum age at 21. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Michael Meredith, R-Oakland, explained that 18 is consistent with Kentucky’s other wagering laws.

Only Kentucky’s nine racetracks are eligible to apply for licenses, beginning Tuesday, to operate retail sports betting sites. They can offer sports betting at all of their locations, including satellite “historical horse racing” gambling halls and simulcasting venues.?

Each track also is permitted to partner with up to three marketing platforms for mobile wagering.

The legislature made the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, which developed and approved the regulations, responsible for oversight and enforcement of sports betting.

Racing commission officials during a special meeting Monday said the regulations are designed to protect bettors. The commission plans to add 14 new employees to carry out its new responsibilities.

Beshear said the state anticipates $23 million a year in tax revenue from sports wagering and that the law will keep entertainment and tax dollars now going to surrounding states in Kentucky.

A quarterhorse racetrack being developed in Ashland and a harness racing track in Corbin may not be ready in time to open for retail sports betting by Sept. 7, Beshear said, although their mobile partners can begin taking bets on Sept. 28.?

Lyle Roelofs, outgoing president of Berea College, presents a symbolic wooden mace to new President Cheryl Nixon as trustee Vance Blade looks on, during a transition ceremony at the Boone Tavern Event Center in Berea, June 30, 2023 . (Berea College photo)

BEREA — The day before Cheryl Nixon became Berea College’s 10th and first woman president, the U.S. Supreme Court renounced one of the principles on which the small but revered Christian, liberal arts college is built.

“Our founder, the Rev. John Fee, was a staunch abolitionist and believed that there was a debt to be repaid to the newly freed African Americans,” outgoing President Lyle Roelofs explained during an event Friday in which he handed off a symbolic wooden mace to his successor (who later quipped to media, that, yes, she is President Nixon, though no relation to the other one).

Both educators used the occasion to reaffirm Berea’s commitment to “interracial education” in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision striking down race-conscious college admissions.?

That 174-year commitment, ?Roelofs said, brings “the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution into play” because of the “nexus between our spiritual commitments at Berea College and the mission we pursue.”

Similarly, 56 Catholic schools, led by Georgetown University, filed a brief last year supporting affirmative action and asserting that racially diverse admissions are “inextricably intertwined” with their religious foundations.?

The Supreme Court did allow the nation’s military academies to continue considering the race of would-be students, an exemption that U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger, called “outright grotesque.” Crow, a Colorado Democrat, tweeted: “The court is saying diversity shouldn’t matter, EXCEPT when deciding who can fight and die for our country — reinforcing the notion that these communities can sacrifice for America but not be full participants in every other way.”

Berea’s Nixon — a scholar of the 19th century novel and most recently provost and vice president for academic affairs at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado — voiced disappointment at the court’s decision and “what it may mean for the future.”

In practice, however, the ruling will have little effect on Berea, predicted Roeloffs and Nixon, because the college already has a process geared toward admitting those who face social and economic hardships based on a “holistic” review of applicants’ life stories — the sort of consideration endorsed by Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, who said admissions officers still can consider what applicants write about their personal struggles related to race.

Said Nixon: “We serve only those students who cannot afford a high quality residential college education. … None of our students can be described as persons of privilege. Very few are children of alumni and donors. Indeed, more than half of last year’s graduating class were the first ever college graduates from their families.”?

Berea can do this, while charging no tuition, because it has a small enrollment (445 freshmen entering come fall) and a large endowment (more than $1.4 billion).

The challenges of building diverse student bodies will be more difficult for selective flagship public universities and larger private schools, Roelofs and Nixon acknowledged.?

Even Berea’s own history, steeped in social justice, attests to the challenges of building diversity.

“We had a 50-50 community in the late 19th century,” Roelofs told me in a conversation after the ceremony.

In 1904, the Kentucky legislature specifically targeted Berea and outlawed racial integration in education. Berea lost appeals in state and federal courts. Siding with Berea, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, son of Kentucky slaveholders, issued a vigorous dissent, deploring “prejudice of race.”?

Not until 1950, when Kentucky’s shameful Day Act was amended, did Black students return to Berea.

It was not easy for them, said Roelofs. And, more than 70 years later, Berea has yet to regain equality in enrollment. Non-white students make up 42% of Berea’s enrollment; 30% of the next freshman class identify as Black or African American.

“An institution that’s been all white for 50 years develops all these patterns that people don’t question, don’t think about,” said Roelofs. “It takes courageous people, some of whom are on our board of trustees now, to come in and do their part. They probably think, ‘Why do I have to do this? Why don’t these white people around me take this on?’ It’s hard.”

Roelofs noted that Black enrollment dropped in both the University of California system and University of Michigan after those states banned affirmative action in admissions.?

At the center of this controversy are about 100 selective schools. A diploma from many of them is a ticket into the upper ranks of business and government and into medical and other professional schools. These “elite” institutions remain free to give preferential treatment to “legacies” — applicants whose parents and grandparents are alumni or donors.?

In fact, it all feels a bit removed from the lives of many young Kentuckians, who must weigh whether they can afford any college at all.?

Enrollment in higher education is in decline nationally and in Kentucky — in no small part because many question whether ?the debt incurred to finance ever-rising tuition justifies the expected return.

That should worry everyone because educational opportunity has long been the door to economic advancement and good citizenship.

Berea’s new President Nixon was right when she said the nation needs Berea’s values now “more than ever.”?

What Cheryl Nixon, Berea College’s new president, said about the affirmative action ruling

I must say that I am disappointed in the court’s decision and what it may mean for the future. I’m sure that you, the Berea community and trustees,? students, faculty, staff share in this disappointment. Despite our shared disappointment, I must affirm that Berea College is unique in higher education and our situation is very different from most other colleges and universities.?

We were founded to enact interracial education. We were founded to educate black and white together equally, we know that this diversity has been the source of our excellence. I must thus state, as strongly and emphatically as possible, that the court’s decision will not cause us to change or back away from our founding value of interracial education.

Interracial education has been both the firm foundation on which we stand and the shining light that guides us to a more perfect future for over 165 years. And it will be that foundation and that shining light for hundreds of years to come. Over the coming days, I will ask you to join with me to ensure that our values, our commitments are only strengthened, that we stand together and we stand firm in putting these ideals into action.

It is our duty to ensure that our founding vision not only endures, but thrives. We were founded on the principle of equality. This is our commitment and we will not waver.

We were founded on the principle of integration. This is our commitment and we will not waver. We were founded …

(Audience burst into applause.)

These are principles worthy of applause. We were founded on the principle of social justice. This is our commitment and we will not waver? and we were founded on the principle of educational opportunity for all. This is our commitment and we will not waver.

Berea College’s commitment to interracial education has certainly been challenged, even violently tested before, and as we have done when challenged in the past, we will come together to strengthen, even to improve and to expand our commitments. At a time like this, I would like us to not only reaffirm our commitments, but to position them as active. The active values that lead us indeed can lead the whole nation to new understandings.?

As we determine our next steps forward from the Supreme Court decision within our values, we have ideals that are truly unique again, that no other school expresses and no other school enacts in quite the same way. We must be proud, stand firm and lead from those values. We connect equality to the idea of impartial love to true emotional bonds, and we connect the idea of equality to kinship, to the idea that we are all truly interrelated at our heart.?

Berea expresses an all-embrace,? …? (a) loving interconnectedness that seeks to find the best in ourselves and each other, and we seek to radically expand that interconnectedness to welcome all into the educational opportunities we provide.?

These are the values from which we can lead and which the nation needs more than ever. We serve only those students who cannot afford a high quality residential college education.?

None of our students can be described as persons of privilege. Very few are children of alumni and donors. Indeed, more than half of last year’s graduating class? were the first ever college graduates from their families. Many are from Kentucky and Appalachia, and we serve our region, we serve our neighbors. Most Berea applicants have overcome significant obstacles, whether it be racial discrimination, extreme poverty, family or personal challenges, just to be ready and able to come to us and to excel in college.?

Our mission and our size is such that we can and will continue to consider every aspect of an applicant’s personal journey, their perseverance, their commitment, and their ability to take advantage of every opportunity that Berea can offer. We will do this together through the efforts of our students, our staff, our faculty, our trustees, our friends, both here in Berea and across the country.?

As Berea’s next president, I pledge to uphold the great commitments, the college’s Christian identity statement and our service to Kentucky and Appalachia. I pledge to uphold our commitment to interracial education. The idea that we are equal and that we are united in that equality is in Berea’s very marrow, in our very bone.? It is in our very heart. It is in our very blood. I am grateful, indeed, privileged for the opportunity to serve Berea as president in the spirit and tradition of our founders. In those words, we know so well and resonate so deeply. God has made of one blood, one blood, all peoples of the earth. Thank you.?

Cheryl Nixon, Berea College’s 10th president, responded to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, during a transition ceremony, June 30, 2023. (Berea College photo)

“Policy change takes time, often decades," says Ellen Hahn, a professor of nursing and public health and director of the Kentucky Center for Smoke-free Policy at the University of Kentucky.

LEXINGTON — Hard to believe: Almost a generation of Kentuckians has never had to come home from a night out with their throats stinging and hair stinking from tobacco smoke.

I’m thinking of people who grow up or go to college in Lexington, which is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Kentucky’s first-smoke free law on July 1.?

Clearing the air of smoke makes life more pleasant.

More important: It makes life longer and people healthier. The benefits of workplace smoking bans kick in immediately and compound over time, as a bevy of peer-reviewed research by the University of Kentucky has established. Lung cancers, heart attacks, premature births all decline.

Twenty years on, what once seemed nearly impossible, downright miraculous, in this tobacco state is something many of us take for granted: More than 1 in 3 Kentuckians (38%) live in a municipality that has enacted comprehensive protections from secondhand smoke.?

The number of people benefiting is considerably higher as residents of counties that don’t protect against secondhand smoke travel to cities that do in order to work, shop, do business, dine and have fun.

Fifty-eight local governments, large and small, have enacted some degree of smoke-free policy.?

That’s not nearly enough. But it’s also remarkable, considering that in 2003 even doctors had to be convinced with scientific evidence that breathing others’ tobacco smoke was a real and serious threat to health.

At the state level, Kentucky’s tobacco policies are an abject failure — by design. The hold that tobacco maintains on this state’s politics defies logic or compassion. And Kentuckians pay dearly, as all our grisly health standings attest.

Policy change is a team sport

So, one of the questions I had for UK’s Ellen Hahn — Kentucky’s preeminent crusader for smoke-free lungs, hearts and laws — is how she keeps going in such a hostile environment. More than anyone, Hahn, her colleagues at the Kentucky Center for Smoke-free Policy and their allies have sown the seeds that bloomed into grassroots movements that led to local smoking bans.

Here’s what she said: “Policy change takes time, often decades. Policy change is also a team sport. While a few people can make a difference, I could not stick with it without support from others.

“As a nurse, I am naturally a patient advocate, giving voice to the voiceless, and as a public health nurse, my patient is the community. I am willing to wait for effective change. … The payoff for society is definitely worth the wait.”

I also asked, if she suddenly magically had the power to make tobacco policy for the whole state, what would she do?

That, she says, is a “no brainer.”

• “A comprehensive smoke-free law that covers every community in the state would make a huge difference.” UK research has shown that moderate or weak laws do not confer the same health and economic benefits, so any state law should cover all workplaces — with no exceptions for bars, bowling alleys, gambling venues, etc., or ventilation because it’s ineffective. A statewide law that preempted stronger local ordinances would be a giant step in the wrong direction.
• ?The “second pillar” is price, which lawmakers can increase through taxation. Kentucky has increased the per pack tax on cigarettes in recent years to $1.10 (37th highest among the states, D.C. and three territories) and added taxes to electronic products. Price increases are known to deter young people from starting and to motivate adults to quit.
• Access to cessation services is next on the list. Kentucky looks great on paper. We have a law guaranteeing access to quit-smoking medications and counseling, but it has not been implemented the way it should be.
• “The fourth pillar is funding for a strong, hard-hitting media campaign — public education.” This is something Kentucky has never done. “It’s really hard to reach people with messaging and the tobacco companies are still spending millions and millions in Kentucky marketing their products.”?

Kentucky spends just 3.5% of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends on tobacco control and prevention.

“So it’s really not a shock that we have such high smoking rates,” says Hahn. “Because we don’t invest in prevention. And the sad part is we know what works to reduce smoking. We’re just not doing it.”

Kentucky and West Virginia run neck and neck for the nation’s highest rate of adult smokers, almost 24%. In 2021, only West Virginia and Mississippi exceeded Kentucky’s death rate from cancer. Kentucky has the second-highest prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among adults. And we’re cultivating one of the highest rates of youth smoking, more than double the national rate.

Smart tobacco-control policies bestow so many economic advantages — not just in health-care savings to business and government but also in creating a quality of life attractive to employers and tourism. I told Hahn that I see Kentucky’s tobacco-control failures deepening the inequities between the state’s “haves” and “have nots.”

She didn’t disagree but was quick to point to quite a few places that have defied stereotype by enacting comprehensive smoke-free laws. Owsley County, for instance, which usually gets attention for its poverty. Hahn credits people like Cale Turner, former judge-executive in Owsley County, and Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander for enlightened leadership on this critical public health issue.

At the recent Kentucky Tobacco Control Conference, the first since the pandemic, Alexander participated in a panel discussion with Ryan Salzman, a member of the Bellevue City Council which recently added that picturesque Ohio River town to the smoke-free list, and Mayor Linda Gorton, who voted for Lexington’s smoke-free law as a council member.?

“It was so good just to hear them talk about the issues,” Hahn said, “and, you know, nothing’s easy. But they all three of them feel like it’s one of the best legacies that they’re going to leave their communities.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the conditions at eight of the youth detention centers and one development center in the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice.?(Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — In a surprising move, Kentucky’s legislature earlier this year mandated up to 48 hours of detention for juveniles accused of certain serious crimes.

Surprising because the decision flies in the face of decades of research. It also conflicts with efforts by many states, including Kentucky, to steer juveniles away from detention into community-based programs that, according to all that research, produce better outcomes.

The change will further strain a juvenile detention system that had spiraled into crisis. The escalating violence, neglect and understaffing became impossible to ignore in light of reporting by John Cheves of the Lexington Herald-Leader and Sharon Burton of the Adair County Community Voice.

Senate action delayed the effective date of the 48-hour mandatory hold until July 2024, presumably to prepare for the influx of youth.

The delay, thankfully, also gives lawmakers time to revisit the decision.

Kentucky data suggests that juveniles entering detention at intake will increase by a third once the change takes effect.

The new law robs current decision-makers — law enforcement officers, court designated workers and judges — of any discretion in the hours after a juvenile has been accused of any of 15 violent felony offenses. This is the period prior to a judge holding a detention hearing and long before any determination of guilt.?

Last year, 415 juveniles were released at this point in the process while 1,162 entered detention, according to data compiled by the Administrative Office of the Courts and recently presented to the Juvenile Justice Oversight Council.?

In other words, if the new law had been in effect in 2022, an additional 415 juveniles would have entered detention immediately after arrest and before their first hearing — a 35% increase.?

In addition to juveniles awaiting their first hearing, the eight juvenile detention centers also hold youth who have been found guilty of serious offenses.?

The eight secure detention centers held 213 youth on May 23. (Kentucky operates 21 other less secure juvenile facilities — group homes, youth development centers and day treatment centers.)

Most Democrats voted against House Bill 3, the vehicle for the 48-hour mandatory hold.

Republicans’ rationale for ditching the current process has never been entirely clear to me, except perhaps a belief by some, most prominently HB 3 sponsor Rep. Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville, that a stint in detention would scare some kids straight.?

What science tells us, though, is that a traumatic experience, such as being locked up far from home with truly violent people, doesn’t straighten out kids, it messes them up. Trauma? inflicts lasting harm, physical and psychological, and is a predictor of adult criminality.?

HB 3 also mandates a mental health assessment for kids who are detained at intake, which sounds good but presents practical challenges and, some fear, could prolong detention while kids await assessment.??

Bratcher, for one, is not up for revisiting the pros and cons of mandatory detention. He made that clear at the May 26 meeting of the Juvenile Justice Oversight Council.

“I’m so sick of talking about that. Violent people belong incarcerated — if that’s the right word for juveniles —? until somebody with authority like a judge decides what to do. That’s my opinion and I’ve had all the political talks I want to to talk about it.”

Granted, the crimes for which HB 3 makes detention automatic sound scary — until you consider the mitigating factors that now enter into decisions about whether to release or detain. For example, was a kid the youngest and least culpable (couldn’t see over the steering wheel) in a group of juveniles who stole a car? A teen who commits “arson” by setting a trash can on fire as a prank should be held accountable, but two nights in detention would be over the top.

As the data shows, most juveniles accused of violent offenses already are sent to secure detention under a process that’s been working for years.

So, let’s ask: Did the same Kentucky decision-makers who sent 1,162 newly-accused juveniles to detention last year make a mistake by allowing 415 juveniles to remain in their communities while any charges against them were decided?

The answer is knowable. Lawmakers should compare the impacts on public safety and on kids, as well as the costs, for juveniles who were released at intake versus those who were detained.

Then the legislature could make an informed decision about whether to reverse the mandatory 48-hour hold.

Lawmakers also recently learned that understaffing in juvenile detention centers has not been solved by an increase in starting pay to $50,000 a year, though new hires are coming on board.?

Since Jan. 1, detention staff has increased from 313 filled positions to 349 filled positions as of May 10, Justice and Public Safety Secretary Kerry Harvey told the oversight council on May 26.

That left juvenile detention centers with 73 vacant staffing positions, according to a May 31 email from a spokesperson for the justice cabinet.

Both sides of the political aisle united around an array of juvenile justice remedies in this year’s legislative session and backed them with tens of millions of dollars for salaries and construction.

I don’t know how much it would cost to detain 415 more juveniles over the course of a year, but it wouldn’t be cheap. The state would get better outcomes by putting any additional money into community-based programs rather than detention.?

In 2014, the legislature enacted juvenile justice reforms aimed at diverting juveniles from the court system into programs that hold kids accountable and provide supports in their communities. Subsequent studies have shown that recidivism (the rate of subsequent complaints) has declined or remained the same as more juveniles have been diverted.

The new mandatory detention law seems certain to produce worse results at a higher cost to taxpayers.

Let’s reconsider.

Emma Curtis (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

LEXINGTON — Democrat Emma Curtis on Thursday kicked off her campaign to succeed the late Rep. Lamin Swann as state representative from a south Lexington district.

Curtis, who would be Kentucky’s first transgender legislator, said she wants to be a voice for transgender youth but is equally committed to working for the 93rd District to advance affordable housing, reproductive health, and education by raising teachers’ salaries not lowering standards.

Standing before a small crowd of supporters and news reporters in the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza, Curtis said, “I think it is an incredibly poignant moment to be announcing here today on the first day of LGBTQ Pride Month after the onslaught of legislative attacks this past session on LGBTQ kids and in particular trans youth. And I want every trans kid, every queer kid watching this today to know that Kentucky is for them too, and they have a say in the future of this commonwealth.”

Curtis — who? said she grew up on a tobacco farm in Woodford County, studied at Centre College and works as a filmmaker — became the face of transgender Kentuckians during the recent legislative session when she frequently testified before committees of lawmakers considering anti-LGBTQ bills, most of which became law.

The special election for Swann’s seat will be held Nov. 7, the same day as the General Election.

Swann, 45, who died May 14, was in his first legislative term. The 93rd House District gained its current configuration during redistricting in 2022 in response to population growth in Lexington and population loss in Eastern Kentucky.

Political party executive committee members in Fayette County will choose nominees.

Curtis, 26, said the Democrats will pick a nominee in September. She said she was “extremely confident” of receiving the Democratic nomination and victory in the special election in November.

On Thursday, Curtis described Swann as a “friend and mentor” who pushed her to “go from just being somebody who attended political events to somebody who organizes political events.” She said Swann supporters had urged her to run. “I am very much inspired to pick up the torch where he left it” and to? “continue his legacy of being the most accessible, most transparent and the most available state representative I can be for my constituents.”

Curtis disputed what she called the “myth” that “Kentucky is not ready for a trans candidate.”

“Something that I learned from Rep. Swann is that your identity, who you are, is your superpower. This is your biggest strength and it is your biggest asset. And I am very much looking forward to turning out the LGBTQ vote across the state.”?

UPS is a microcosm of what’s happened to workers across the state and country in recent decades. In 1982 and again in 2018, the company established new compensation tiers that meant much lower wages for newly-hired and part-time workers, the latter of whom are now 60% of the UPS workforce. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

LEXINGTON — A University of Kentucky researcher is recommending more training for drivers of medium- and light-weight trucks based on a study of injury reports.

Terry Bunn, director of the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center, said drivers of smaller trucks who were injured in crashes lost more work time than drivers of heavy trucks injured in crashes.

Also, drivers who were injured in smaller trucks tended to be younger than those injured in crashes involving heavy trucks.

“Heavy-truck drivers have to undergo mandatory training. They have to have the certified driver’s license. They’re under Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations. The light- and medium-truck drivers are not,” Bunn said.?

“And that’s pretty much what I’ve recommended out of this study: Companies need to establish mandatory driver training for their drivers.”

Bunn and three other researchers studied 11,790 first-reports-of-injury filed from 2010 to 2019 with the workers compensation program in Kentucky. Their study?was published in December in the Journal of Safety Research.?

Drivers younger than 25 accounted for 12% of reported injuries in light- and medium weight trucks compared with 4% in heavy trucks.

The workers comp reports also revealed a significantly higher percentage of light- and medium-truck drivers with lost work time due to injuries compared to heavy-truck drivers.?

The period under study was before the COVID-19 pandemic produced a surge in e-commerce and deliveries.?

To ensure valid results, Bunn said, at least five years of data would be needed before updating the study to see what effects, if any, increased e-commerce and deliveries had on injury trends.?

Heavy trucks refer to those weighing more than 26,001 pounds, including semis, coal trucks and dump trucks.?

“Medium” refers to trucks weighing 10,000 pounds to 26,000 pounds; “light” refers to trucks weighing 10,000 pounds or less such as utility vans.?

The most common light and medium trucks in Bunn’s data were delivering retail and wholesale goods.?

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has also recommended training for light-truck drivers, said Bunn, although little research has been done on accidents involving smaller trucks, in contrast to a large body of research on heavy truck safety.

Driving a truck is a risky job. The occupational fatality rate was 27.2 deaths per 100,000 truck drivers in 2019 compared to the overall U.S. rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. That year, 471 truck drivers suffered on-the-job fatal injuries.?

One of the UK study’s limitations, Bunn said, was not being able to determine from the workers comp data who had been at fault in a crash. “The next study that needs to be done” would include data showing who was at fault, she said.

The analysis showed that rear-end crashes, running redlights and turning in front of other vehicles were the most common reasons cited for injury crashes involving light and medium trucks.?

The researchers recommend that employers of light and medium trucks provide targeted training to drivers who have been in crashes to address distracted driving and preventing rear-end crashes. “In-vehicle monitoring systems, which help identify risky driving behaviors, might be considered as effective in increasing driver safety,” said Bunn.

Among heavy truck drivers, collision, sideswipe, rollover, jackknife, vehicle upset and unclassified crashes involving sudden stops or starts were the most common causes of injuries. The researchers recommended enhanced driver safety training on speeding on narrow roadways, nearing intersections and downshifting on hills for heavy truck drivers.?

Chairs were waiting on stage for two public officials who did not accept the invitation to attend the Nehemiah Action Assembly. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

LEXINGTON — It had nothing to do with horses or basketball, but Kentucky’s second-largest city had what I consider to be one of its best nights of the year as 1,500 people came together Monday to make some demands.

The demands had been researched and discussed and were issued only after negotiations and the laying of groundwork.

Still, two local officials — the police chief and the head of Lextran, the local public transit system — stiffed the attendees rather than respond to their requests for action.

This was Lexington’s 20th Nehemiah Action Assembly, an event that may be unique in turning the tables on who controls the microphone. It’s a rare opportunity for citizens, united in their goals, to publicly hold public officials accountable. That’s why I look forward to these gatherings and why, I suspect, a lot of politicians do not.

Held in a convention hall at the Central Bank Center, the gatherings are organized by BUILD or Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct-action which counts 16,000 members representing 26 congregations.

BUILD’s priorities in 2023 echoed concerns the members have voiced for years: Preventing violence. Providing affordable housing. Caring for the sick and vulnerable.

Louisville’s counterpart is CLOUT or Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together.

Both are part of a self-described “national network of congregation-based community organizations” in 28 metro areas and 10 states. The network is known as DART or Direct Action and Research Training Center.?

The Rev. Nathl Moore of First African Baptist Church explained that the principle of “direct action” is inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he explained why in 1963 civil rights protesters had to take to the streets, put their bodies on the line — because going through the courts (and, I would add, other so-called proper channels) was never going to bring change, never going to end racial injustice and brutality.

BUILD gatherings are not so confrontational, though they are spirited. A speaker at the podium will cry out, “Rise up.” The crowd responds, “And build! Rise up. And build!”

They also adhere to a tight schedule in which no one has the podium or the opportunity to pontificate for very long, which I also deeply admire. Someone from BUILD literally holds the mic while the public official is held to a two-minute response.

BUILD’s greatest accomplishment has been elevating the need for local government’s involvement in increasing Lexington’s supply of affordable housing.?

A seven-year campaign finally bore fruit in 2014 in the creation of a city fund that provides loans and grants to develop affordable housing. The fund was launched with $3 million and, by imposing an ordinance on itself, the council committed to budgeting $2 million a year thereafter.

On June 27, the council will vote on a plan, proposed by BUILD last year, to increase the annual affordable housing appropriation to $4.5 million or 1% of the city’s prior year revenue.?

On Monday night, at-large council member James Brown and a half-dozen other council members repeated their commitment to the increase and also to working to eventually bring the city’s affordable housing commitment to $10 million a year.

At-large council member Chuck Ellinger II also committed to helping inform stakeholders about the potential for a community microtransit system that speakers testified would be a “game changer” for people who have mental illness, are disabled or elderly.?

The crowd was told that generous federal grants are available to launch the ride service and that hundreds of cities already are deploying vans and shuttles to provide the convenience of Uber or Lyft at public transit prices.

That does sound like a tall order, which might explain why Lextran general manager Jill Barnett did not show up to respond to BUILD’s request that Lextran start a microtransit pilot program, though she can rest assured this is not the last she’ll hear of it.

Police Chief Lawrence Weathers was also a no-show, which meant he did not hear speakers report that homicides, mostly shootings, in Lexington have risen from 16 in 2015 to 44 last year.?

For years, BUILD has been urging the city to adopt a strategy developed by the National Network for Safe Communities in which community leaders, law enforcement and social service agencies intervene in the lives of people identified as at risk for committing violence and provide them with supports before someone ends up dead or in prison.?Former Mayor Jim Gray did bring in the NNSC staff which made some recommendations that the city never adopted.

The hardest part of the annual assemblies is hearing from Lexington residents whose lives have been shattered by gun violence, neighbors who are afraid to sit on their porches or let their grandkids play in the park or even leave home at night, who have buried loved ones and then helped friends bury loved ones.?

BUILD wanted to ask Weathers to take some of his staff to meet with the police departments in New Haven, Connecticut and Miami-Dade, Florida to discuss how the strategy is working there and to meet with BUILD to report on the discussions.

Mayor Linda Gorton and others have said the strategy has a spotty record in other cities, that it veers toward racial profiling and that Lexington is implementing its own anti-violence strategies — none of which has dented BUILD’s persistence. BUILD members were given a phone number that they were told rings the chief’s secretary and told “if the police chief does not show, we must bring the crisis to him.”

Bishop John Stowe of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington pronounced the final amen.

Gerald Neal (Photo by LRC Public Information)

Members of Kentucky’s Black Legislative Caucus on Monday implored their colleagues in the General Assembly to address what Rep. George Brown called “an epidemic of gun violence.”?

On the heels of mass shootings in Louisville and Nashville, caucus chair Brown, D-Lexington, said, “We call on our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to help us do the right thing.”

Brown and others spoke at a morning news conference at the Capitol in which they expressed support for the “Tennessee Three,” lawmakers who led protests on the Tennessee House floor demanding gun reforms after three children and three adults were gunned down at a school in Nashville. Two of the three Democrats, both Black men, were expelled from the legislature by the Republican majority but restored to their seats by their local governments.?

Brown said Black legislative caucus members from around the country will be in Tennessee Tuesday for demonstrations of support in Nashville and Knoxville for the expelled lawmakers. “We are standing with our fellow state legislators …? and share their sentiment in the need to pass comprehensive gun control legislation in our states.”

Kentucky Senate Minority Floor Leader Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, said the move in Tennessee to muffle elected Black representatives was a blow to democracy and that their “suppression” is intertwined with the politics of gun safety. “Extreme power” demands “extreme responsibility,” Neal said.

Neal also?expressed optimism that Republican lawmakers in Kentucky will sit down for an “honest and factual” discussion of ideas and “proven methodologies” for stemming the gun-related bloodshed that Neal says is killing urban and rural Kentuckians alike.

“Gun violence is a scourge we must address. We must have open and honest discussion about gun violence. All this ideological stuff, all this strategic stuff in trying to exert power in one way or another is not sufficient because people are literally dying in our communities each and every day,” Neal said.?“The first responsibility of government is to protect the safety of its citizenry. To the extent we do not do all we can to protect life we have failed in our responsibility.”

House Minority Leader Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, spoke in favor of a “red flag” law allowing judges to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a threat to themselves or others. Graham said 19 states, including Indiana and Florida, have enacted such laws and that judges in Florida have used the law 8,000 times in recent years to remove guns from people considered dangerous.?

Graham likened a “red flag” law’s constitutionality to preventive measures enacted by Kentucky’s legislature, including “Casey’s Law” in 2004, which allows intervention to help someone suffering from addiction and “Tim’s Law” in 2017, protecting people suffering from mental illness.?Such a law would be “one more tool to stop gun violence,” Graham said.

Brown said he has introduced bills in recent sessions limiting assault weapons and ammunition and strengthening background checks on gun buyers but they were never even assigned to a committee.

Brown called on lawmakers to immediately address the now-required sale of firearms confiscated by police in Kentucky. He said guns used “to kill people and violate people’s rights”? do not “need to be put back on the street.”

The lawmakers did not call for a special session of the legislature, however. Only a governor can call lawmakers into special session.

They said they plan to seek discussions with Republican leaders of Kentucky’s legislative supermajority, who have remained silent in response to calls for action after two mass shootings in Louisville in one week. Five victims were killed April 10 at a downtown bank by an employee wielding an AR-15 rifle, who was killed by police. On Saturday two people were killed and four injured when gunfire erupted in Louisville’s crowded Chickasaw Park.

Protesters chant "shame, shame, shame" after a Kentucky legislative committee advanced anti-trans legislation, March 2, 2023, in the Kentucky Capitol Annex. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Sarah Ladd)

FRANKFORT — I was sitting at my desk a stone’s throw from the Kentucky Capitol googling Galileo.

Was the father of modern science really shown the instruments of torture to make him renounce his belief that the Earth circles the sun??

The authorities had divined that it was the other way around, that God had put them at the center of the universe. Galileo unsettled their comfy world view.

Why, you may wonder, was I reading up on someone who died in 1642?

Kentucky’s General Assembly had me desperate for evidence that rule by fear has an expiration date, that it works for only so long, that eventually humanity and the power of knowledge win out.

That may sound naive after what we just witnessed. More than a few times, I marveled: How can these basically decent, if incurious and conservative, lawmakers be so cruel?

Our Republicans weren’t marching just in lockstep with each other. They were part of some grander plan, out of an old playbook:?

• Stir up fear of the “other,” in this case a small group of transgender kids.?
• Spread distrust of education and knowledge itself.

A wave of 435 bills aimed at curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ people is moving through state legislatures, according to tracking by the American Civil Liberties Union. No popular groundswell produced this wave; neither did coincidence.

Will it work? It might.?

Republicans benefitted at the polls in 2004 by putting same-sex marriage on the ballot in multiple states, including Kentucky. At least one U.S. Supreme Court justice has hinted at reversing the right of adults to marry whom they choose and even their right to obtain contraception.

But Americans have moved on. Yes, there are exceptions, but no one is much bothered anymore by a loving family that does not conform to an old stereotype (that never matched reality in the first place).?

Questions of gender identity understandably rattle the empathy-challenged and those who see things as black-white, boy-girl, us-them. Who insist the universe revolves around their beliefs.

As the late-night legislative debates raised emotions, obvious bigotry against LGBTQ+ people occasionally flared.

But for the most part Republicans stuck to their script that concern, even love, for children fueled their determination to act against medical advice by banning some health care for some kids. They were protecting them, they insisted, from parents who might make bad decisions, leaving those parents with one decision, whether to leave Kentucky to find care for their children.

The same Republican lawmakers also insisted they had to safeguard parents’ rights by enacting restrictions on what can be read, seen or talked about in public schools.

The new complaint process seems tailored to turn school board meetings into trial courts for books. The new law even has an emergency clause, launching the Inquisition in plenty of time for this fall’s governor’s race.

“Gender Queer,” a graphic memoir about a nonbinary adolescent, has roused the most outrage here and elsewhere. I should read it.

But even having not seen it, I’d bet that nothing in any school library comes close to matching the obscenity that Sen. Jason Howell, R-Murray, says invaded his Twitter account without his knowledge and stayed there for almost two years.

Howell sponsored the rid-our-schools-of-obscenity bill and has every right to view pornography. He says hacking put the porn in his “likes.” In response to our story, several people suggested to me that his Twitter could have been attacked by bots sent to drive up followers for the porn accounts.

My point: If sexually explicit material can just appear in the cell phone of a lawyer and legislator, imagine what a curious adolescent can find on the internet.?

Access to facts about the human body does not corrupt kids. Neither do novels, poems or sculpture. Age-appropriate education about sex, its mechanics, the feelings and questions it sparks, does not harm kids. It arms kids for what our sex-saturated culture and their own hormones throw at them.

Education protects.

It protects children from sexual abuse by giving them the words and, we hope, the trust, to talk to a protective adult.

It’s worth noting that this legislature entertained characterizations of educators as “groomers” and indoctrinators, but killed (in the Senate) a bill that would have kept real groomers, teachers found responsible for sexual misconduct with students, from moving on and getting a job at another school.

Hostility toward education is a thread in Kentucky’s history. But so is protesting injustice — granted, a thinner, more fragile thread.?

I’m old enough to remember when queer people closeted themselves, hid who they were to avoid unsettling or inciting the established order.?

Those days are gone, thank God.

Though the threat of violence looms still, LGBTQ+ Kentuckians and their friends, especially young people, came out and cried out against injustice and bigotry.

My generation is leaving behind a god-awful mess — an economy that works for too few, a planet suffering rapid climate change, a politics that feeds on division.

But the hundreds of Kentuckians who rallied at their Capitol, unafraid to show who they are and who they love, represent real progress in my lifetime.?

Galileo was threatened with torture, convicted of heresy but sentenced to house arrest. During those last nine years of his life he wrote a book admired by Albert Einstein who dubbed the old star-gazer the father of modern science.?

The supermajority’s culture warriors may rule from the center of Kentucky’s political universe. But like the rest of us, they’re riding a spinning orb, circling a star, in a moral universe that another visionary once said has an admittedly long arc “that bends toward justice.”

Natural disasters on both ends of Kentucky have increased the demand for affordable housing and rents. Delilah Jenkins, 6, runs home after getting off the bus last month at Camp Graves in Graves County where she lives with her family in transitional housing after being displaced by the December 2021 tornado. (Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

FRANKFORT — Although it was much less than they had hoped, affordable-housing advocates in Kentucky are applauding the legislature’s decision to put $20 million into a new Rural Housing Trust Fund.

The money is not a new appropriation but comes from more than $400 million the legislature had set aside last year for disaster relief and recovery on both ends of Kentucky.?

??Final approval for the $20 million came Thursday night as lawmakers accepted legislation hammered out in conference committees.

On Friday, Adrienne Bush,?executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, issued a statement thanking lawmakers and their leaders.?

The initial $20 million in seed money “will empower communities to scale up their housing response and finally allow Kentuckians to begin to rebuild their lives,” Bush said, while also allowing “communities to respond to current disaster housing needs, as well as respond to future needs in underserved communities.”

??Jim King, CEO of Fahe, a Berea-based nonprofit that works with other nonprofits to finance affordable housing, thanked Senate President Robert Stivers and the General Assembly for?“providing this initial funding to address the critical need for housing in the communities of East and West Kentucky still reeling from recent natural disasters.?

“We hope to continue working with state leadership to secure long-term investments in safe, stable housing that working families can afford,” King said.

Housing advocates said the state money will help bridge a gap while Eastern Kentucky waits for more federal disaster money to flow to the region. ?Ten Eastern Kentucky counties will share in $300 million in disaster funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Sen. Mitch McConnell announced this week.

Catastrophic housing situation

Even before tornadoes and floods wiped out thousands of homes, Kentucky suffered a shortage of almost 79,000 affordable housing units, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016-2020.?

After flash flooding last summer destroyed and damaged thousands of homes in Eastern Kentucky, some public officials said new housing construction had become critical to the region’s economic survival.?

“Perry County was in a housing crisis prior to the July 2022 flood disaster. Now we are in a catastrophic housing situation,”?Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander said in January.?

A coalition of nonprofits ?asked the legislature to put $150 million this year and another $150 million next year into?an Affordable Housing Emergency Action Recovery Trust Fund, dubbed AHEART, and to commit to increasing state support for affordable housing construction in future state budgets.

On Feb. 21, advocates rallying at the Capitol renewed their call for the legislature to tap the state’s record surplus, sometimes called the “rainy day fund,” to help finance housing. “Lord knows we’ve had some rainy days here in Kentucky,” Scott McReynolds,? executive director of the Housing Development Alliance in Perry County, told the February rally. The state’s rainy day fund has been projected to reach $3 billion by mid-2023.

Citing flood victims “buying storage sheds to live in because that’s all they can afford with their FEMA” assistance, McReynolds also said “you can’t start planning until you know your budget.”

Stivers told reporters that day that discussions were underway that could lead to housing legislation during this session.

The $20 million being set aside for housing comes from money the legislature last year put into State Aid Funding for Emergencies or SAFE: $200 million to recover from tornadoes in the west and $213 million after floods in the mountains. The newly-approved legislation taps the funds for $10 million each to be spent in the respective regions.

The housing provisions — added to House Bills 448 and 360 and finalized behind closed doors in free conference committees — create an 11-member Rural Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee with the state agriculture commissioner as its presiding officer.?

The Rural Housing Trust? Fund would ?be housed in the Kentucky Housing Corporation and could receive state and federal money, grants and gifts. The fund can be used?to makes loans or grants for acquisition, construction or rehabilitation of rural housing units in areas impacted by the tornadoes and floods.

The Senate added a provision replacing the lieutenant governor with the commissioner of agriculture on the Kentucky Housing Corp.’s board of directions.?

Gov. Andy Beshear is expected to sign the legislation.

McConnell says $300 million coming from feds

Ten Eastern Kentucky counties also are in line for $300 million in federal assistance through a HUD disaster-assistance program, McConnell announced this week.

The Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program provides flexible funds for long-term recovery in communities affected by natural disasters, according to McConnell’s office. ?The money can be used for a variety of purposes, including helping local governments cover their cost share of federal disaster recovery programs from other agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Highway Administration. Communities can also use these funds to address their unique housing needs and promote economic development.

The state will oversee the HUD funding to Breathitt, Casey, Clay, Cumberland, Floyd, Harlan, Johnson, Knott, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Lincoln, Magoffin, Martin, Owsley, Perry, Pike, Powell, Whitley and Wolfe counties.

The federal government funding bill that Congress approved in December provides an additional $3 billion in CDBG-DR funding for the country’s hardest-hit communities, according to the news release from McConnell’s office.

“Senator McConnell was the only current member of the Kentucky delegation to support this legislation, which made today’s funding possible. In addition, as a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senator worked to secure funding for multiple federal programs that would support Eastern Kentucky’s recovery efforts, including the CDBG-DR program,” according to McConnell’s office.

An analysis??by the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens Law Center estimates the cost to rebuild and repair housing lost to last summer’s flood will be $450 million to $950 million, depending on how many homes are relocated to less flood-prone areas. The lower figure is for rebuilding in areas that flooded rather than acquiring new sites at higher elevations. The report says that the higher-cost option could prove more economical in the long-run by?averting future damage and also likely saving lives during future floods.?So far state and philanthropic sources have provided $159 million for rebuilding and repairing housing, according to the report.

Coal was loaded in Cumberland in Harlan County in 2019. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT —The Senate on Thursday approved a bill to keep coal-fired power plants operating in Kentucky, as supporters of the measure railed against federal overreach and the few opponents warned the bill could result in costly state overregulation of utilities.

Senate Bill 4 is opposed by the state’s investor-owned utilities, who say it would prevent them from retiring uneconomical fossil fuel-fired generators and burden consumers with unnecessary costs.?

Republican Sen. Shelley Funke Frommeyer of Alexandria also opposed the bill, saying “stakeholders” haven’t been at the table to discuss “a complex issue” and that the discussion should occur during the interim between sessions.

“I have a fear we may be taking this too far. …. We’d be picking a winner,” she said, adding that lawmakers should be “fuel-agnostic.”?

Three other Republicans from Northern Kentucky and Louisville joined her in voting against SB 4, along with four Democrats, including Sen. David Yates of Louisville, who warned that it would raise consumers’ power bills.

The bill was approved 25-8.

The sponsor, Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, countered that the bill would encourage utilities to enter into longer contracts to buy coal, stabilizing prices and even lowering costs.

Through a floor amendment, Mills deleted a controversial provision that utilities said established an impossible test for a utility to win Public Service Commission approval for retiring coal-fired generation.

Mills’ amendment deleted requirements of evidence that fossil fuel-fired plant retirements would not affect the reliability of the transmission systems run by regional transmission organizations and independent system operators.?

Utility executives have previously said such organizations are responsible for operating larger, regional transmission grids and don’t have the authority or ability to provide information regarding electricity reliability on a smaller scale.?

The bill that won Senate approval sets out several tests for replacing retired electric generation, including maintaining or improving reliability and resilience of the grid, not binding ratepayers with avoidable costs, and that the retirement decision not be the result of any financial incentives or benefits offered by the federal government. The PSC would be responsible for enforcing the mandates.

Mills said the bill would help stave off the “coming capacity shortage” and avoid blackouts.

In supporting the bill, Sen. Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, railed against “limousine liberals” in “corporate jets” who are devastating Eastern Kentucky and other rural areas by imposing a green agenda that is destroying jobs, including coal mining, “because someone in Washington or Wall Street wants to feel good about themselves.”?

Sen. Johnnie L. Turner, R-Harlan, criticized the federal government for providing financial incentives to move away from coal to renewable energy.

Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, Republican Kelly Craft’s running mate in the gubernatorial primary, blamed Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear for not challenging the Biden administration’s energy policies and said Kentucky should not give up what has been its traditional advantage of cheap power.?

Wise said “D.C. bureaucrats know nothing about what Kentucky needs.”?

Sen. Stephen West, R-Paris, said electrical costs are bound to rise because of former President Barack Obama’s energy and environmental policies.?

“The war on coal is basically over and they won,” West said.?

Kentucky public school teachers protested outside the House chamber in April 2018. The month before the legislature rushed through changes in their retirement system in a single day. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — Generations of Kentuckians suffered because education was treated as a political spoil.?Schools run for the benefit of adults chained the state to poverty.?

In 1990, the legislature shielded public education from political interference as part of a sweeping reform.

Schools improved, Kentuckians became better educated and Kentucky was held up as a model.

That protection from raw politics is now being stripped away in a spasm of culture-wars histrionics and a Republican drive for even more control.

Why any lawmakers want a return to the bad old days is mystifying, though, on second thought, there’s not much mystery to a power grab or wanting to punish your political adversaries.

This particular power grab is just so shortsighted and wrong: The Senate last week approved transforming the Kentucky Department of Education into a tool of Senate Republicans by obliging the top state school officer to pander to the Senate or become unemployed.

Senate Bill 107, which came out of the Senate 29-4 with three senators not voting, establishes a four-year term for the commissioner of education, and subjects the commissioner’s appointment or reappointment to Senate confirmation.

It’s a bad way to go.

The position of education commissioner was created as part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990. Voters approved a constitutional amendment abolishing the elected position of state superintendent of public instruction.

The idea was to search the nation for a highly qualified commissioner who would be independent and accountable to the state Board of Education for producing measurable improvements in student learning.?

SB 107 would make the commissioner answerable not even to voters but to 38 members of the state Senate.?

SB 107 also creates a new nominating process for members of the Kentucky Board of Education. The members of the state board are already subject to confirmation by the Senate after nomination by the governor. If SB 107 becomes law, a new committee would recommend state board nominees to the governor.

This power grab is unfolding as Republicans push multiple bills that demonize teachers and sow distrust of public schools.?

Why are Republicans attacking educators and education in a worsening teacher shortage?

The obvious answer is that teachers have been the most effective force challenging the Republicans who control Kentucky’s legislature and dominate its politics.

The more complicated answer is that all these bills pitting parents against educators and promoting false narratives of depraved curriculum and obscene books are part of a long strategy. This strategy is managed by those who would destroy this nation’s public schools and put education in private hands.?

I doubt that many Kentucky lawmakers see how they’re pawns in this long game. The few who do understand the big picture don’t seem to mind if schools and students become collateral damage in their quest to thwart the Kentucky Education Association, the Jefferson County Teachers Association and KY120 United-AFT.??

The legislature enacted the reforms that depoliticized education with bipartisan support. None other than former Senate President David Williams made a moving speech in their favor.?

The law had two major thrusts:?

• Increase and equalize funding of public schools through a penny increase in the sales tax.?
• Depoliticize hiring from the district level up and entrust decisions about education to educators who would be insulated from political pressure.?

It worked well.

The law shifted responsibility for hiring school employees from elected school boards to a superintendent who became the board’s only hire. No longer did working in Kentucky schools require knowing the right person or belonging to the right family or political faction. The reforms made half of local school board members ineligible for reelection because they had family members employed by the district.

Schools were freed from the tyranny of nepotism and politics, just as KERA’s funding equalization for the first time gave schools in poor places almost as much money to educate their kids as richer communities had been spending.

That funding equity has been slipping for years as lawmakers and governors eroded the state’s tax base with tax favors called “incentives” to businesses, along with regressive tax cuts such as the income tax cuts enacted in 2018, last year and this month. The funding inequality is now almost as wide as when the famous lawsuit that led to the reform act was filed.

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin treated the education commissioner’s office as a political spoil, pressuring out Commissioner Stephen Pruitt and installing a member of his own administration without a national search. On his first day as governor, Democrat Andy Beshear dumped all of Bevin’s board members, the action that seems to have inspired the Senate’s desire to create a nominating committee for the state board.

Borrowing a page from Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican Kelly Craft vows to clean house at the “woke” Kentucky Department of Education if she becomes governor.?

I don’t know if all the histrionics can convince Kentuckians that the teachers who hand them a hymnal on Sunday or stand in the grocery line with them are agents of sexual depravity and some ill-defined agenda to lead our youth astray.

The state has put years of effort into convincing Kentuckians that education is the path to a better life, that jobs of the future will require schooling beyond high school, that “education pays.”???

It’s perplexing to see our elected representatives working to turn back the clock to when education was seen as a corrupting influence that would lure kids from the farm or mine by planting big ideas in their heads. Perplexing until you remember that demagoguery has always thrived on parched, narrow minds.

FRANKFORT — I researched “furry” so you wouldn’t have to.

I had been only peripherally aware of the hoax that schools are equipping restrooms with litter boxes to accommodate students who identify as animals.

Then the Kelly Craft-Max Wise campaign dumped an allusion to this tall tale onto the Kentucky Senate floor and into the governor’s race, and I thought I’d better pay attention.?

Best I can figure, Craft’s campaign divined that in a packed Republican primary the winner need not show an aptitude for governing, but merely fire up enough voters — and it won’t take that many — to finish first.

The absurd story — which, it turns out, other Republican politicians are spreading — serves Craft’s purposes by fanning fears that respecting people who have “nonconforming” gender identities is one step short of people insisting they’re not even people, while also dehumanizing students who are transgender or nonbinary.

Craft paints the Kentucky Department of Education as the agent of a “woke agenda”?out to subvert parental authority. Her vow to dismantle the department echoes Republicans who want to privatize public education and have long demanded an end to the U.S. Department of Education.

A couple of days after Craft attacked the department, Wise addressed the Senate, accusing Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason E. Glass of wanting to fire teachers who refuse to refer to a student as a “furry,” an accusation that Glass labeled false, ridiculous and hurtful.

Perhaps stung by the backlash and thinking it would vindicate him, Wise tweeted out an article by a Louisville television station from August 2021 in which an anonymous grandmother says that students in Meade County were coming to school dressed as cats, making her grandchildren not want to go to school. The district’s superintendent confirmed that some students had shown up in cat costumes, which violated the dress code; the dress code won. Order prevailed.

Not a whisker of truth

So widespread is this feline-induced panic that news organizations have unleashed their fact checkers.?NBC News reports that at least 20 GOP candidates and elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and the Republican candidate for Minnesota governor, have claimed that K-12 schools are making accommodations for students who identify as cats.

No one anywhere has found a whisker of truth to these stories, which doesn’t stop them from getting millions of views on social media.?

After podcaster Joe Rogan claimed that a mother of a cat-identifying student had badgered school officials into putting a litter box in the girls restroom, Reuters reported finding no evidence to back that or any of the litter box claims.?Reuters reported that school officials in Minnesota, Colorado and Tennessee had denied such reports and that “ the Associated Press, PolitiFact and USA Today have also debunked claims about litter boxes in schools.”

People like Joe Rogan spread sensational lies to make money. Why people are so willfully duped, I wish I understood.

That someone like Max Wise, previously regarded as serious and level headed, would reinforce such bigotry-inflaming nonsense is troubling.

Tough times for kids and teachers

These are serious times for young people and their schools. The pandemic did a number on a lot of kids.?

About 1 in 4 children and adolescents across 11 countries, including the U.S., experienced strong distress during the pandemic, reports the Journal of the American Medical Association.?Depression and anxiety have been the most common consequences, but behavior and attention problems have also increased, especially in younger children, studies have found.

Educators scrambling to help students make up for learning lost during remote instruction don’t need the stress and distraction of being scapegoated by politicians. And neither do struggling kids.

In 2019, Wise, then chair of the Senate Education Committee, helped shepherd through the School Safety and Resiliency Act, which recognized “that all schools must provide a place for students to feel safe and supported to learn.” The act?set a goal of providing a ?guidance counselor for every 250 students, something the Republican legislature, which just cut the income tax for the second time in a year, has not come close to funding.

Wise must be privately cringing at Craft’s desire to dismantle the Department of Education, a wildly impractical idea because the legislature has assigned the department lots of duties, many of them critical to the operation of the efficient system of common schools mandated by Kentucky’s Constitution. For years, Wise was in a prime position to push to radically remake the department, but never saw the need until joining the Craft ticket.

To be fair, Wise’s Senate Bill 150, which he says would safeguard parents’ rights, is far from the cruelest anti-LGBTQ bill introduced this session.?The kindest scenario may be that Wise’s bill is Republicans’ chosen vehicle for serving up red meat to the base.

Republicans must also be mindful of coming off as too mean. Their nominee will face a popular Democratic governor who’s known for his dorky-dad style and compassion.

I also should acknowledge that there is a subculture of mostly young people who like to play around in animal costumes (much like sports teams’ lovable mascots), just as there are subcultures that don military garb to reenact Civil War battles, enjoy competitions among fantasy sports teams and wear fezzes while driving tiny cars in circles.

We respect and even celebrate innocent fantasies and playacting among our fellow humans because diversity makes life richer.

Instead of seeing a threat, some people should try respecting, even celebrating, a fellow human who is saying “this is who I really am.”

The light could go out on many public records in Kentucky, experts warn, under House Bill 509. Above, the Kentucky Capitol at dusk, Jan. 4, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

FRANKFORT — I’ll say this for the pleasant delusion that has settled over the Capitol like Kentucky River fog: It’s bipartisan.?

Politicians on both sides of the aisle appear convinced that their virtuous policies and economic acumen account for state government’s record-high revenue surplus.

No one gives credit where credit is due — to the novel coronavirus and the massive infusion of pandemic relief dollars.?

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear credits his administration’s dealmaking and job recruitment for securing “the best two-year period in state history for economic growth.”?

Republicans insist their pro-business, anti-labor laws set the stage for that growth. “I think if the sun rose today, he was trying to take credit for it,” Senate President Robert Stivers said of Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth speech last week.?Republicans also tout their supermajority’s continuing shift to a taxation system that relies more on regressive sales taxes, a move that is expected to take another step this session toward eventually ending Kentucky’s income tax altogether.

Not so much as a nod from either camp to the massive pandemic spending by the federal government that brought us this unusual moment.

I like to think the Bluegrass State is unique as much as the next Kentuckian. But when it comes to our bulging $2.7 billion rainy day fund, sorry, it’s not even slightly unusual.?

States across the nation are posting record amounts of unspent cash and returning part of it to taxpayers through one-time rebates, or, as in Kentucky, permanent tax cuts.

States ended fiscal 2022 with $343 billion on hand, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, which explains?that “total balances have seen tremendous growth recently, roughly tripling in size over the past two years after revenues far exceeded enacted budget forecasts in fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022.”

How did this happen? Presidents and lawmakers from both parties reasonably feared that the worst pandemic in a century would force widespread layoffs and collapse the economy, so to prevent that they eagerly pumped federal dollars into personal bank accounts and state and local governments.?

It worked. ?The economy rebounded from its initial slump in 2020, has been adding jobs and wage increases, while also experiencing inflation, all of which pushed up collections of sales and income taxes. Even the higher interest rates imposed to curb inflation are enriching state coffers by yielding higher returns on state investments.

Here’s the thing: It’s temporary.?

Covid relief payments have ended. Federal pandemic assistance to state and local governments has ended or is winding down.

No one knows what’s coming. Some economists predict a recession. If that happens, Kentucky’s revenues would plunge, admittedly, a more familiar sensation in a state that suffered a decade of budget cutting.

Yet job growth has remained robust, though at a slower pace in December than earlier months. Amazon and other tech companies are laying off workers and the stock market is in a funk, though some economists say investors are perhaps misreading the signs and the economy could be headed for a “K-shaped soft landing.”

I beg you, dear reader, do not ask me what that means. My eyes are glazing over from reading all the conflicting economic analyses. So I will return to something I know: politicians and their knack for patting themselves on the back.

If Kentucky pols of both parties want to congratulate themselves in years to come, they’d do well to shake off the delusion that most of this surplus is anything but a fortunate fluke that will not be recurring in future state budgets.

It’s human and political nature to go for more immediate gratification, I guess. The House advanced a bill cutting the income tax, to the benefit of higher earners, for the second straight year at a cumulative cost to the state of a whopping $1.2 billion. Beshear, seeking re-election, pushed for 5% teacher raises and universal pre-school, which the Republican majority will not give him. ?

As I wrote in this space last week, investing in affordable housing, especially on an emergency basis in flood-stricken Eastern Kentucky, seems the ideal use for so much one-time money. I detected not a flicker of interest in that idea from lawmakers or governor in the legislature’s first week. (I hope I’m wrong about that.)

Creating an affordable housing trust fund, as a coalition of housing nonprofits has proposed, would give Kentuckians, if only indirectly, at least one lasting good from the pandemic’s miseries.

Kentucky’s unemployment rate is 4%, a bit higher than the national rate, but as always unemployment is much higher in some Kentucky locales where recession is the norm.?I fear those places and their people will be be forgotten in the temporary glow of state budget plenty.?

Jackson, the Breathitt County seat, on July 29, 2022. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — A proposal by nonprofits working to keep Kentuckians housed is almost touching for its modesty: $150 million as a downpayment on affordable housing seems like the least the legislature could do this session, considering both the enormity of the need and the state’s pandemic windfall.

In Eastern Kentucky, flooded homes that were salvageable are rotting and molding and becoming unsalvageable while awaiting repair, even as Kentucky’s “rainy day fund,” formally known as the Budget Reserve Trust Fund, is projected to reach an unheard-of almost $3 billion by June.

It’s a rainy day, indeed, for Kentucky places that see no future in their forecasts without a big burst of housing construction.

The revenue surplus — common among states, at least temporarily — was fueled by federal stimulus spending that propped up the economy during the pandemic and also by currently high inflation. In other words, much of the surplus will not recur in future state budgets.

It’s hard to imagine a better use for one-time money than investing in solid, energy-efficient homes for Kentuckians.

Even before tornadoes and floods wiped out thousands of homes on both ends of the state, Kentucky suffered a shortage of almost 79,000 affordable housing units, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016-2020.?

The private market will not fix this housing shortage. Neither will another cut in the state income tax that some Republicans are eager to enact.?

We can save for another day the debate over supply-side economics, AKA “trickle-down.” I grant you the appeal of leaving more money in private pockets as a means to stimulate economic growth, even if the evidence is thin.

I’m guessing we can all agree, however, that money saved from income tax cuts won’t be invested in building rental housing or helping residents become homeowners in places like Jackson or Mayfield. The affordable housing field is dominated by nonprofits (as in, no profit) for a reason.

Action by the legislature earlier this year reduced the state income tax rate from 5% to 4.5% effective Jan. 1, a cut not even close to fully offset by the expansion of the sales tax to 35 additional services, also effective Jan. 1.

Some Republicans are pushing for another cut, to 4%, in this session, which would cost Kentucky a cumulative $1.2 billion a year by 2025; that’s more than 8% of the General Fund?and?more than the legislature appropriates for all of higher education.

Lowering income taxes disproportionately benefits higher earners. Cutting the income tax rate again might free up money that boosts employment at Bluegrass restaurants or buys deluxe vacations, but it won’t do much, if anything, for the small towns and rural counties that are most desperate for jobs.

Housing construction and repair, on the other hand, would bring work to places — urban and rural — where jobs are needed most. Investing in housing would boost local economies in communities that were struggling to survive, even before unprecedented floods and tornadoes walloped them.

The Kentucky coalition’s proposal, endorsed by more than two dozen organizations, is designed not to duplicate funding ?from the federal government or other sources, but to fill funding gaps, while providing much-needed flexibility to respond to local needs.

Kentucky’s legislature, like others in the South, traditionally has not made direct appropriations for affordable housing, but changing circumstances now demand it, says Adrienne Bush, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky.

“Yes, the state does have a role,” she told me.

Her advice to lawmakers: “Look at your constituents. The housing market is leaving them behind. That was before the disaster.”

Here’s what the coalition is proposing:

• ?In addition to $150 million this year, another $150 million next year to establish an Affordable Housing Emergency Action Recovery Trust Fund, dubbed AHEART. The fund would? hasten repair or replacement of thousands of flood-damaged homes while creating “an infrastructure to respond to the next climate disaster,” said Bush.
• Next year, when the legislature adopts a new state budget, Kentucky’s existing Affordable Housing Trust Fund overseen by the Kentucky Housing Corp. would get about $115 million. The existing trust fund helps pay for home repairs and gap financing for nonprofit developers. The coalition proposes using $70 million in new money to rehabilitate vacant and abandoned houses to make them livable.
• Finally, the coalition proposes doubling the deed transfer tax, paid each time a residential mortgage is recorded with a county clerk, from $6 to $12. That tax goes into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and now generates $4 million to $6 million a year. With the proposed change it would generate $10 million to $12 million annually for affordable housing.

The legislature in a special session in August approved $213 million for flood relief but rejected Sen. Brandon Smith’s funding proposal for housing.

At the time, several powerful lawmakers said they would be willing to look at long-term housing during the regular session convening Tuesday. Here’s hoping they do. Not opening the budget in a non-budget year would be a lame excuse to again do nothing in response to Kentucky’s housing emergency.

This commentary has been updated to correct an earlier error in the amount of the state’s projected rainy day fund.

Teachers filled the Kentucky House gallery on April 13, 2018. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

I get why teachers in Kentucky are suspicious of almost anything coming out of the GOP-controlled legislature. Republicans earned that distrust through words and deeds, most notoriously the surprise attack on teachers’ pensions in 2018.

I’m begging educators to see beyond the poisonous political atmosphere and seize ownership of a push to change reading instruction.?

Lawmakers launched the effort earlier this year with bipartisan support. It’s backed by $32 million from state sources.

Teachers understandably bristle at having any new demands piled onto their already overflowing plates. I get that too. But this is not just another hoop to jump through.?

What’s at stake is central to everything we hope for our young people.?

What’s at stake are crisis numbers of young Kentuckians who are not learning to read.?

And they won’t learn until they are taught the way their brains demand.?

I take this personally.

My daughter was part of that large group of children who cannot crack the code without instruction steeped in phonics by a teacher knowledgeable in how the brain processes language.

She would happily listen for hours as I read Harry Potter or “Little House on the Prairie” but by age 7 had resigned herself to a life of illiteracy.?

“I don’t read” was what she first told the speech therapist who led the practice where she would, in fact, learn to read, in fairly short order.

With the right teaching she was whizzing through chapter books by third grade and later maxing out reading comprehension on college-entrance exams.

Rewards will flow swiftly, I predict, to schools that adopt a science-based approach to teaching reading.

My family story is admittedly one of privilege. Teachers at my daughter’s small private Montessori School in Lexington referred us to professionals who employed a multi-sensory approach: Some combinations of letters are roof-scrapers (touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth), some are lip-poppers (self-explanatory).

At home she practiced “Earobics,” an online “game” developed by the Chicago public schools.?

My employer gave me flexibility to take her to the after-school lessons for which my health insurance helped pay. My daughter also had the advantage of living in a word-rich environment, surrounded by recreational readers.

Kids who grow up in word-poor environments, or in homes where English is not the first language, might figure out the decoding yet struggle with comprehension and will need teaching to fill that gap in their experiences.?

The bottom line is, all kids can learn, most at high levels, but not unless they get the science-based teaching that identifies and fills their needs. Senate Bill 9, enacted earlier this year, puts Kentucky on that path. But we won’t get there without broad buy-in from all levels of education.

Buy-in needed

Already there is progress: 1,800 Kentucky educators, most teachers in the early grades, have begun an intensive, two-year course in which they will gain the knowledge and practical skills to effectively teach reading. (The less good news is there were slots for another 600 to sign up.)

School administrators, school boards and colleges of education must get behind the effort, including offering supports and incentives for teachers to retool.

My daughter’s diagnosis was lack of phonemic awareness and delays in auditory processing, which refers not to how the ear works but how the brain hears and decodes.

Experts estimate that 60% of children need explicit and systematic phonics instruction to become able readers. Without it, reading will always be a chore for half of that group, and half will never be readers. Some, like my daughter, will need specialized interventions, while many will get what they need from 20 minutes of phonics instruction a day.?

In the 20-plus years since my daughter cracked the code, I wondered many times how schools were responding to the needs of children like her. Or, more to the point, if they were responding. Yet, when I heard that phonics instruction had all but been abandoned in the very many years since I learned to read, I thought that had to be an exaggeration, because how can you teach reading without phonics?

I feel terrible that I waited until now to use my platform as a journalist to explore the subject. Because, sure enough, many schools now provide little to no explicit instruction in decoding the printed word.?

Alarming data

The results are alarming. Kentucky was losing ground in reading even before COVID-19’s disruptions. Half of Kentucky’s third graders fell short of proficiency in 2019, according to state tests. The downward trend is continuing. Reading proficiency among Kentucky’s fourth-graders ranks its lowest since Kentucky began participating in the 50-state National Assessment of Educational Progress. Just 31 percent of Kentucky’s fourth-graders were proficient readers in 2022, which was still good enough to rank Kentucky 29th among states, suggesting this challenge is not unique to us.

My hat is off to Mandy McLaren whose reporting in The Courier Journal has driven home the urgency of change. McLaren, who majored in broadcast journalism and political science and then taught in New Orleans as part of Teach for America, is off to The Boston Globe, where she will be part of a six-person team covering education.

I told her I would keep an eye on the reading beat in Kentucky. Please, share with me your observations and concerns.

I won’t venture into the pedagogical debate over reading instruction except to say that it’s fierce, the warring camps entrenched and the conflict heartbreakingly self-defeating. It took four years for a reading bill, backed by the Kentucky Department of Education, to get through the legislature.?

Kentucky cannot waste more time. The wrong that’s being done to our children demands a crisis response.

Today’s students have the most at stake, obviously. But teachers and principals also stand to be deeply rewarded by change. A school where more children are reading at higher levels will be a happier, more productive place for all.

A child looks at the destroyed First Baptist Church in Mayfield on Dec. 15, 2021. Multiple tornadoes struck several Midwest states causing widespread destruction and many fatalities. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

How many times have we seen it? Disaster strikes. The media descend.

For a few days, the world is mesmerized. Until something new beckons; the media move on.

And the victims recede in our ever-shortening attention spans and are forgotten.

I’m proud the Kentucky Lantern’s debut brought you journalism that does not move on and does not forget.

Journalism rooted in place, like the Lantern’s, has the power and duty to lift up the stories of people who are battered by forces beyond their control, whether those forces are economic, political or crazy, scary weather.

There is so much to think about and talk about in the work of Liam Niemeyer, Sarah Ladd and Julia Rendleman, as they take us to communities devastated almost a year ago by a tornado that stayed on the ground for 165 miles.

In Mayfield, Tom Waldrop, co-chair of a recovery committee, told Niemeyer that the town is in a race to build housing before all the people who are living with relatives or in travel trailers give up and move away. In other words, a race for Mayfield’s survival.?

Niemeyer heard similar worries in Dawson Springs, once a spa town, filled now with more reminders of what’s gone, including the sound of children playing in a park wrecked by the tornado and a huge amount of housing. How people will find jobs weighs on many minds, especially once the post-tornado construction slows.?

Ladd’s reporting reminds us that the traumas experienced by survivors of tornadoes and floods can have the same effects on mental health as the traumas experienced by soldiers in war.

The future holds great uncertainty for Western Kentucky’s tornado survivors and their hometowns; likewise, in Eastern Kentucky, slammed last summer by what now seems like the? annual 100-year flood.

What is certain: There will be more climate disasters, more lost lives, more displaced survivors.

While scientists are reluctant to pin a tornado, or almost any single event, on climate change, the tornado belt has moved east, putting Kentucky in the crosshairs. Also, warming oceans heat the air, supercharging rainstorms, like the one that dumped 4 inches in an hour on parts of Eastern Kentucky, and also setting the stage for tornadoes when cold northern air meets unseasonably warm air, as happened over a big swathe of the midwest last Dec. 10-11, producing an outbreak that killed 90 people, 80 in Kentucky.?

We also know that climate change is disproportionately harming those living on the margins, minorities and low-income people, or as the Environmental Protection Agency puts it, “underserved communities who are least able to prepare for, and recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts.”

Sadly, in Kentucky, we can barely have a serious ?conversation about how to respond. Too many of our politicians still pretend the climate emergency is not real or would be too expensive to address, as if the weather disasters of the last 12 months were bargains.?

Or that it’s a joke.

Republican candidate for governor Kelly Craft told a campaign gathering last month that one of her first acts in office would be to put “Coal Keeps the Lights On” license plates on her state vehicle, according to The Kentucky Gazette. ?Craft was expressing solidarity with some Kentuckians, but not those who went for weeks without power or are homeless because of a climate disaster.

One of her primary competitors, Daniel Cameron, joined 11 other Republican attorneys general in an attempt to police the lending practices of banks, lest the financial institutions go overboard on trying to save the planet. Cameron’s move drew a lawsuit from the Kentucky Bankers Association.?

Outgoing Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. included a warning about climate change in his final address to legislators last month, drawing “ire” from members of an interim committee, reports WFPL’s Dalton York.?

“With time running out, we need to escalate our emergency planning to minimize future property loss and reduce disruption in our courts,” Minton said.

Sen. Philip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, huffed, “I would think that would fall within the policing powers of the legislature to create energy policy.”

To which Minton replied, “Well, if the legislature can control the weather.”?

The Lantern is one place where Kentuckians can have serious conversations about climate and all its implications.

Something that’s been on my mind since the summer floods: What do we collectively owe climate victims?

Now that we’re in a permanent state of climate-induced emergency, the structures we rely on in this country to prepare for and respond to tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires seem too weak. The Federal Emergency Management Agency seemed to be the source of endless frustration for Kentucky flood victims.

It’s a variation on the question that dominated the COP 27 Climate Summit in Egypt last month: What do rich countries that put all the heat-trapping carbon into the air owe the poor countries that contributed little to the problem but are suffering the most because of it?
Decisions about how and where to rebuild, how to build climate resilience into our communities and infrastructure, along with how to make the transition from fossil fuels to carbon-neutral energy sources, raise complex questions that demand commitment from policymakers.

We’ll do our part to nudge that conversation along. We’ll keep reporting how policy — or lack of policy — plays out in the lives of Kentuckians. We won’t be moving on. We’re rooted here. And glad of it.

Getty Images

FRANKFORT?— Welcome to the Kentucky Lantern.

I’m thrilled you’re reading us. Please, come back and invite your friends.

As a nonprofit we can make our news and commentary free to read without paywalls and also free to republish.?

While this economic model is relatively new, our mission is so deeply rooted in American democracy that it’s enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment: We’re here to report why and how those in power make decisions, and to explore how those decisions play out in the lives of Kentuckians.?

We’re calling ourselves Kentucky Lantern because paths to a better future become clear when journalists shine the light of accountability.

Unfortunately, many fewer journalists are keeping an eye on county seats and state capitals. Since 2005, the number of journalists employed by U.S. newspapers has declined by 60%, in tandem with a 60% drop in newspaper revenue.?

The losses — from 75,000 newsroom employees in 2005 to only 31,400 in 2021 — have come overwhelmingly from journalists covering local and state news.

Partially offsetting that decline are 10,000 journalists employed since 2008 by digital-only news operations.?

I’m still stunned by how fast advertising — the financial lifeblood of newspapers — migrated from print to digital. Newspapers have adapted, but it takes thousands of digital views to equal the income that once was generated by a single full-page ad.

I got to know — and love — the news business and Kentucky by working at newspapers across the state. As a new University of Kentucky grad, I started at the Flemingsburg Times Democrat, followed by the Lebanon Enterprise, Elizabethtown News-Enterprise, Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer and for a long stint at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I also worked as a reporter in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.?

Three of my eight newspapers no longer exist. Nationally, the death rate since 2005 stands at about 1 in 4. Researchers predict that within three years a third of U.S. newspapers will have bitten the dust.

In Kentucky, we’ve lost The Kentucky Post and the Glasgow Daily Times while many smaller newspapers, including my hometown Morehead News, have been consolidated into digital sites that post news from around a region.

Writing this, I can’t help but think back to the newspaper buildings where I have spent most of my waking hours, in particular, the backshops. In those coffee-fueled bee hives of activity, compositors built display advertisements for local businesses, organized the “want ads” into neat columns, and laid out type and photographs, usually finishing the front page last in case news broke late.?

Just as newspapers united communities around causes and events, the advertisements were the oil in local economies, whether you were shopping for a job, a winter coat or a bird dog pup.?

Many of those backshops are empty now, gone the way of so many local banks, grocers and merchants. The economic pressures on newspapers and local businesses are not all that different.?

People still need groceries, winter coats and hunting dogs, though, and they still need the information that the Kentucky Lantern is committed to providing.?

Research has found that people who have strong ties to local news also engage in their communities, as volunteers and voters in local elections.?

Kentucky Lantern is supported not by advertisers but donors, both individuals and foundations, who value local and state journalism as a public good.?

We disclose all donors of more than $500.

Our parent, States Newsroom, a 501(c)(3) organization in Chapel Hill, N.C., has a nationwide reach though each of the newsrooms is shaped by journalists, like the Lantern’s staff, who have deep ties to the places they’re covering.

I’m confident in the firewall between our donors and our journalism, just as I’m confident in the firewall between our news and opinion. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.?

And I am super excited to be here, leading a team of inquisitive, idealistic journalists working in an office a quick walk from the Capitol.

We are committed to doing our part to make Kentucky fairer for all. Our commentary will come from a progressive viewpoint.

We’re also committed to the discipline of journalism. That means our news reporting will be independent, impartial, fair. When we make mistakes, we will correct them.

Our content is licensed by Creative Commons, available to be republished by others. We ask only that you attribute the work and include a link to this site.

Our goal is to earn your trust with timely, incisive, factual reporting and opinion.?

Give us a long look. Send us your tips and help us tell your stories. I look forward to hearing what you think