Sam Brownback



My dad farmed, my granddad was a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer. Sam "Reverse Robin Hood" Brownback is a former Republican Senator and former Governor of Kansas. He retired from the Senate in 2010, due to self-imposed term limits. This meant he promptly became Governor.

He used to be a pure opportunist. Then he became a zealot. However, nowadays, he's bitter and believes the things he says, if only to be stubborn. He failed at becoming President, so he's going to make his mark however he can. If that means driving the state off a cliff, so be it.

As a mouthpiece for the Tea Party, his views on immigration are considered to be at odds with the general conservative view; apparently, he likes them because of what the Bible said about welcoming strangers. He also tried to pass measures to allow Republicans to impeach Kansas judges who oppose his laws. He had to be ordered by them to fully fund K-12 education; he would never do it, unless at gunpoint.

Mandate
For some wondering how Brownback got reelected, Brownback essentially ran solely against an old, white housewife's image of Obama. Because elderly voters make up so much of the population, it is nearly impossible for Republicans to lose. They don't run on records; those don't appeal to Kansas voters. Instead, they use the word "liberal" a lot and run all sorts of bullshit negative ads:

Informed voters know that Brownback gutted public education and crashed the economy, but old white Republicans have nothing to balance it out. And who can blame them? The news, ads, newspapers, radio, TV all work against them, and they'll never get exposed to another viewpoint in small-town Kansas. The Koch/Murdoch-backed candidate has a massive lead in every election.

Economic policies
This is exactly the sort of thing we want to do here, in Washington. He is a strong proponent of Reaganesque supply-side economics which implemented in Kansas in the form of extensive tax cuts, resulting in extremely high deficits due to tax revenues being approximately cut in half, which have resulted in not just one, but two debt rating downgrades. Brownback responded to this situation by blaming Obama and proposing to double down on the hot mess he created. He appeared to be headed towards doing this after being reelected in 2014 and claiming a mandate, though some Republicans showed resistance. If he had his way, the doubling-down was going to include raiding $95 million from the state highway fund, raiding $41 million from the state teacher pension fund, and cutting agency budgets by 4%.

God as his co-pilot
Back in 2007, he wrote a less than stellar editorial for the New York Times about how he thinks evolution is false. Here's what he had to say on man's origins.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

One might retort that this was a bit of dogmatic theology posing as reasoning.

Although he is very pro-ID, he still maintains a "teach the controversy" view in the political arena. Brownback is a Young Earth Creationist and supporter of the microevolution but not macroevolution argument. He is also afraid that those evil atheist geneticists will create man-animal hybrids and, by golly, he's going to put a stop to that.

Brownback resigned as governor of Kansas for a post in the Trump administration as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Chestbeating Freedom. Doing so saved him the embarrassment of being a Republican and losing an election in Kansas to a Democrat.