12/22/17 — Rep. Dan Johnson, Bevin’s Blocks, Who’s Speaker?, and the Shortfall Blues

Robert Kahne

Published in

My Old Kentucky Podcast

6 min readJan 4, 2018

Dan Johnson

The biggest story in Kentucky politics over the past few weeks has been the massive Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting story about Bulleit County state representative Dan “Pope” Johnson, and Rep. Johnson’s suicide last week.
We first started talking about Dan Johnson last year, when the the Republican Party of Kentucky asked him to quit his race for state house last year after it was discovered that he was sharing racist memes on his facebook. After that, he won his seat and served in the last legislative session as a back-bencher.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting released a massive story a few weeks ago that was very thoroughly reported and very well crafted. It’s an amazing story — Dan Johnson likely committed insurance fraud once, and might have twice by burning things he owned, he lied about being in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, and exaggerated his role during 9/11. He said he had been cured of blindness and had raised the dead. And, worst of all, KYCIR had a woman accuse Johnson on the record of sexually assaulting her while she was a minor.
The story was primarily about Johnson, but also brought to light serious issues with LMPD, the Democratic party and former Representative Linda Belcher, as well as the media.
The story is worth your time to read and listen to, so you should do that. But, the aftermath is very tragic. Two days after the story was released, Dan Johnson had a defiant press conference where he denied everything and attacked the media for publishing the story. He refused to resign.
The next day, he posted a message to facebook claiming he had PTSD, and then apparently committed suicide by shooting himself.
The KYCIR report had an audio component that was being released day by day, and Johnson’s suicide occurred in the middle of it. After his suicide, WFPL, the radio station affiliated with KYCIR, opted not to run any more of the audio on the radio, but did later release the entire program. The will be doing a final follow up.
There will now be a special session to fill the vacant seat. Two GOP candidates have expressed interest in the race: the first is Jennifer Baird Faith, a teacher from Shepherdsville. Faith filed only hours after Johnson’s death, but stated that she had planned on challenging him in the primary already, and already had a substitute teacher lined up for the day (she’s a teacher). The other GOP candidate is Rebecca Johnson, Rep. Dan Johnson’s wife. She has made several media appearances blaming the media for her husband’s suicide. Former Democratic Representative Linda Belcher is widely expected to run in the race as well. The election will be held Feb. 20.

The Blocked By Bevin case

In an opinion that was released Monday, the attorney general’s office ruled that Matt Bevin violated open records law by failing to disclose certain keywords his office uses to filter obscene, profane, or off topic comments to delete from Facebook.
This appeal was from the ACLU and comes out of the lawsuit that we have talked about on the pod before. Bevin has been sued for blocking people on Facebook and Twitter.
Bevin’s office said they have the right to block obscene, profane, and off-topic comments and the ACLU is saying “okay, well what are you using to filter those out?”
Bevin’s attorney argued that if the public knew the keywords used to filter comments, people would know how to bypass them
The ACLU sued on behalf of two plaintiffs who allege that being blocked by the governor is unconstitutional
The governor’s spokesman said that the attorney general is “politicizing the Open Records Act”
So remember, this is just an A.G. opinion, so it can be appealed to the circuit court
The same day that the decision was released, Representative Attica Scott said she was blocked by the governor on Twitter
Makes her the first lawmaker to be blocked
Bevin spokesman said that Attica Scott was not knowingly blocked, and they restored her access once they learned of the situation

Resources

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2017/12/18/matt-bevin-facebook-broke-law-aclu-beshear/960501001/

Who is the Speaker of the House?

Jeff Hoover held a press conference after news broke that he settled a sexual harassment claim and resigned from his leadership position as Speaker of the House
That sounds simple enough. But the Kentucky Constitution contains provisions about resigning outside of a session
Must resign during session
Republican caucus members are apparently calling for Hoover to be reinstated as Speaker
Representative Richard Heath from Mayfield is one of them and he believes Hoover is still officially the Speaker
Says he doesn’t believe Hoover would have resigned but for pressure from the Governor
Says there’s a split. Some think he should still be Speaker, some think he should resign altogether, and some don’t know what to think
Other reps have said Constitution is murky on this issue
Jeff Hoover has not commented about this, but basically right now, it’s Heath doing this on his own, but said it’s Hoover’s decision.

Resources

The Shortfall Blues

Several months ago, we talked about proposed 17% cuts to agencies which were requested by Gov. Bevin. He made that request because a preliminary projection showed a $200M shortfall in this year’s budget.
It turns out that the actual dollar amount will be smaller — about $156MM. That’s still really bad!
This means that Governor Bevin will have to make a “budget reduction” order, which will cut the amount of money that goes to different agencies. We talked about this last year! Ronnie Ellis of CHNI reported this week that one of these orders is “imminent”
The Consensus Forecast Group, the body in charge of estimating revenues for the state, says that state revenue will probably rise over the next 2 years between 2–3% — which sounds good, but isn’t anywhere near enough to cover the increases that the GOP seems to want to put towards the pension.
Based on what we’ve seen, it appears that the GOP wants to put about $1B of additional budget into the pension — some, including KCEP, say that funding increases on that order are overkill and not worth the crowd-out of funding to other agencies, but, the GOP runs things in Frankfort.
So, the budget next year will likely include massive cuts from previous funding levels. Perhaps even to K-12 education, which has normally been spared these kinds of cuts.
As for the revenue side: with the GOP in charge, and especially with Rep. Damon Thayer in leadership, do not expect to see any new revenue to offset these cuts. Ryland Barton of Louisville Public Media has a report saying that Thayer doesn’t think there will be time for tax reform in this session (but he generally opposes that anyway)
So, it looks like massive cuts that have already happened to human services will only get worse. Things like Kinship Care, which pay guardians of children who’ve been removed from their parents care and has been closed to new applicants since 2013, will remain closed off, and it’s likely big cuts to education, Medicaid, and other social services will also be coming next year.
That sucks!

References

Quick Hits

http://wfpl.org/lawsuit-planned-parenthood-sent-back-lower-court/
The Kentucky Court of Appeals has said that the lower court wrongly dismissed a suit alleging that PP was performing illegal abortions. This doesn’t mean that PP loses, but it means there was enough to bring the claim, so the case has been remanded back to the lower court
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2017/12/20/republican-tax-bill-kentucky-berea-college/968977001/
Berea College has been caught up in the federal politics of the tax bill. The tax bill, which awaits President Trump’s signature, removes a tax exemption for colleges and universities with big endowments. Most of the schools that qualify for that exemption are the Harvards and Yales of the world, but Berea, too. The House tried to sneak in an exemption for Berea, but the exemption was not allowed under Senate rules, so the bill passed Congress with Berea being taxed. Mitch McConnell and Andy Barr, who both voted for the bill, have pledged to fix this situation.

12/22/17 — Rep. Dan Johnson, Bevin’s Blocks, Who’s Speaker?, and the Shortfall Blues

Written by Robert Kahne