Sometimes people vote their conscience, and other lessons from the 2023 session | Opinion

Culture warriors are lousy policymakers.

We learned that in the last full week of the 2023 General Assembly, a short session that turned into an unholy dustup over transgender children, revealing big chinks in the GOP’s monolithic supermajority from a newly emboldened extremist wing. We should have known what would happen after Fancy Farm, when candidates and candidates’ wives started popping off about the latest hot button issue that exists in the minds of Fox News viewers and those who wish to exploit them. Only something that affects less than 1 percent of the population could have caused this much sounds and fury as Kentucky follows the Republican legislatures in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee. Yikes, that’s not a list that I’d be proud to be part of, but like us, they know a lot about poverty, poor educational outcomes and bad health.

The result, of course, was a session long on shouting, crying and scheming, and short on ways to help our always beleaguered state with its intractable intractable problems.

Here are some other things we learned:

1. Sometimes, people vote their conscience, even if it will be politically difficult down the road.

Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, is no liberal snowflake but someone who was clearly troubled by the severity of the original trans healthcare bill in HB 470. He was one of the adults in the Senate caucus room who helped craft a compromise that most people could have lived with, the compromise that was shot to pieces amidst last minute trickery last Thursday. He voted no on the resulting bill, because as he said, it went too far.

“You’ve got one side pushing really hard, which is making the other side push back even harder. We’ve forgotten what’s important. My concern is for the children,” Carroll said. “... When are we going to get past all this extremism, all the radicalism?”

Rep. Killian Timoney, R-Lexington, said his no vote was informed by his faith. Reps. Stephanie Dietz, R-Edgewood, and Rep. Kim Banta, R-Fort Mitchell, also voted no. They should get praised, but they’ll probably get primaried.

Update: On Tuesday, some guy named Thomas Jefferson announced he would challenge Timoney in 2024 to “stand up for conservative principles.” No good deed goes unpunished.

2. Some people won’t.

Sen. Julie Raque Adams has probably passed more important legislation to help families and children than anyone in office right now. She voted no on the final bill. Bob Heleringer, a former legislator and current lobbyist who worked for the Fairness Campaign, noted that Raque Adams had some cover as caucus chair. “If you’re going to be in leadership, then be a leader,” he said. If you’re an advocate, you need to advocate even when the going gets rough.

3. What a difference 20 minutes make.

After the Senate passed the final version of SB 150, ushering in one of the most severe anti-trans healthcare bills in the country, they took up the measure to legalize medical marijuana in 2025. They talked about the years of study and debate, debate they finally listened to the session after Beshear passed an executive order to do the same thing. We got some great grandstanding about how it could help people suffering from illness; Senate President Robert Stivers lamented how demonized he’d been over the issue, before he voted no. And Senate Majority Leader Damon Thayer, who earlier had said he didn’t care if his constituents supported the measure, he wasn’t going to support it, announced in a dramatic mic drop moment that he’d miraculously changed his mind for one reason: “Compassion.” LOL, as the kids say. No wonder people hate politics.

4. Who’s this really gonna hurt? (Besides kids.)

Part of the whole transgender push is tied to the governor’s race, which is why Sen. Max Wise (who used to be considered one of the grownups in the room) pushed the first bill, which eventually became the Frankenstein measure that passed. Republicans wanted to get it to Gov. Andy Beshear, is expected to veto it in plenty of time for the supermajority to override the veto. Good political fodder for the governor’s race, right? Except that no one who truly believes that transgenderism is a threat would vote for Beshear anyway, and not vetoing the bill would hurt him deeply in the liberal enclaves of Lexington and Louisville that he needs so much.

5. Kids have been hurt, just not the way the GOP describes.

No one pushing the anti-trans legislation has any idea how many gender surgeries have been done in the state or how many youth are currently getting gender-affirming medication. A strange omission for a session that dedicated 75 percent of its time and 100 percent of its energy into passing legislation on an issue about which they have no concrete facts they haven’t heard outside of Fox News or OAN.

There is sometimes danger in schools from grooming and indoctrination, but it’s a more traditional kind than lawmakers think. With actual documents and interviews Herald-Leader reporters Beth Musgrave and Valarie Honeycutt Spears found that of 194 teachers whose teaching license was surrendered, suspended or revoked by the state Education Professional Standards Board from 2016 to 2021, 61% were related to sexual misconduct. Furthermore, some of these cases were never punished and some of the perpetrators were passed onto to other school districts.

Rep. James Tipton did produce a bill to address the problem. It sailed through the House but never got a vote in the Senate. So much for real problems.

6. There were a few instances of real, substantive legislation that actually help people in Kentucky.

House Bill 200 will create the Kentucky Health Care Workforce Investment Fund to increase scholarship opportunities in the field. It would use both public and private money to increase scholarship opportunities in the field. There was a small but good bill to provide more education on postpartum depression and other mental illnesses. Both parties worked together to come up with an answer to Kentucky’s terrible juvenile justice system. Senate Bill 229 (sponsored by Adams) clarifies and strengthens how child abuse and neglected in reported and sent to outside agencies. Legislators also took a first step toward improving reading instruction across the state. Low reading scores are a far greater threat to Kentucky children than drag queens.

7. Whither the Democrats?

University of Kentucky political scientist D. Stephen Voss said the Kentucky General Assembly has a rules system that concentrates power too centrally for moderates to make much difference.

“The only way to change the direction of the General Assembly is to get more Democrats in there,” he said. “But in thinking about what came out of the General Assembly, unless you’re wholly left-leaning, what makes you want to support the Democratic Party?”

Right now, the Kentucky Democratic Party is most interested in getting Beshear reelected; but it appears to have done little in the past few years to build a backbench of viable candidates.

“People need a sense that candidates are not just anti-Republican,” Voss said. “The party has offered no vision you would expect to be competitive to voters.”

It’s true. Democrats from Lexington and Louisville offered sustained and passionate arguments against anti-trans efforts, but it’s not clear what could attract people outside those urban centers to more moderate candidates who will focus on kitchen table issues that help people rather than political red meat. Culture warriors, after all, are terrible at policy, but they are really really good on the campaign trail.