Democrats target an immigration warrior in Kansas


Kris Kobach helped draft the highly contentious Arizona immigration law, | AP Photo

By MANU RAJU | 10/17/14 5:06 AM EDT Updated: 10/17/14 5:08 PM EDT

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — The Kansas Republican Party’s infighting has not only put the governor’s mansion and a Senate seat in play this year — it’s also offered Democrats a tantalizing shot at ousting one of the GOP’s leading immigration and voter ID hard-liners.

Kris Kobach, the 48-year-old Kansas secretary of state, helped draft the highly contentious Arizona immigration law, urged Mitt Romney to advocate for “self-deportation” and has been the driving force behind Kansas’ far-reaching voter ID law, which requires not just identification but also proof of citizenship. When Democrats tried to remove their struggling Senate candidate’s name from the ballot here to help Greg Orman, the independent in the race, Kobach turned to the courts to try to block them.

Conservatives admire Kobach’s willingness to tackle divisive social issues and take on the left, even if it has landed him in court battles with the Justice Department. Liberals revile him for policies and links to groups they say are hostile to minorities; they also accuse him of using his nonpartisan office for political purposes, including interfering in the Senate race.

Kobach apologizes for nothing and says he’s simply pushing the government to follow the “rule of law.” “Absolutely,” he says when asked if he still favors stringent policies that encourage undocumented immigrants to self-deport. “And it works.”

But it’s that conservative warrior image that has made Kobach yet another Republican at risk of being booted out in Kansas, which has emerged as the most unpredictable state of the 2014 election cycle.

After years of being sidelined by the tea party, moderate Republicans in Kansas are leading a backlash against GOP Gov. Sam Brownback and Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, and Kobach may not escape their wrath, either. He is facing a surprisingly tough race against former state Sen. Jean Schodorf, a Republican-turned-Democrat who is casting Kobach as more concerned with ideological crusades than properly executing his official duties.

In a state that President Barack Obama lost in 2012 by a whopping 22 points, Nov. 4 may yield a Democratic governor (Paul Davis), an independent senator who could help Democrats keep the majority (Orman) and a Democratic secretary of state. In recent days, House Republican leaders have also had to move to shore up Rep. Lynn Jenkins, who is suddenly in a dogfight for her Topeka-area House seat.

Polls have varied in the secretary of state’s race, at times putting Schodorf up or finding a tie; a survey this week by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, however, found Kobach holding a 6-point lead. Still, while he can rally the base like few others, some Republicans fear he could turn off middle-of-the-road independents ahead of Election Day.

Many voters barely know who the down-ballot candidates are, but “Kris is different,” said Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party. “He’s kind of a lightning rod; the liberal side really dislikes him on a personal level.”

Although immigration has nothing to do with his job as Kansas secretary of state, it’s his ongoing work in the field that in many ways defines Kobach, an even-keeled Yale-educated lawyer who also attended Harvard and Oxford.

As a chief aide to Bush-era U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Kobach led a post-Sept. 11 effort to toughen security and registration for foreigners entering the United States — a controversial, now-defunct program that required many Muslims and Middle Easterners to be fingerprinted and which critics said amounted to racial profiling. In 2004, he lost a House bid in which he made cracking down on illegal immigrants a central issue.

Kobach has since served as a counsel for a legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a hard-line group that calls for reducing immigration to the U.S. and which the pro-immigration Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “hate group.” (Dan Stein, president of FAIR, said his group’s positions are “nondiscriminatory” and dubs such attacks as “smears” from opponents of tougher border control.)

Kobach also was a key player in drafting the 2010 Arizona immigration law, a sweeping measure that went to the Supreme Court but that requires law enforcement officers to check if a person they’ve stopped is in the country illegally if they have reason to believe so.
Even when he’s not performing his secretary of state duties, Kobach regularly finds himself leading court battles over liberal policies for undocumented immigrants. “I virtually never golf now,” Kobach said while in a donor’s kitchen in the Kansas City suburbs. “Since becoming secretary of state, virtually all my spare time is consumed with litigating these outside [immigration] cases.”

Kobach’s views on immigration appear to have affected his approach to his current job. While most Republican-led states have been fighting with Democrats over simply requiring voters to have IDs at the polls, Kobach went some giant steps further: Pushing for new voters to prove they’re citizens as well and ensuring mailed-in ballots include photocopies of voters’ IDs. Other states are replicating some of these measures, though Kobach is now embroiled in a legal battle with the Justice Department over the issue.


Even though a hard-line against illegal immigration has been the GOP position this midterm election year, it is not a clean-cut issue in Kansas, where Big Business and agriculture groups are advocating for a softer approach in order to attract foreign workers. More broadly, Democrats and many Republicans believe such hard-ball approaches to immigration and voter ID have cost the GOP dearly with Latinos and other minorities and put them in a poor position to take back the White House.

“Well, they’re wrong,” Kobach, a former Romney adviser, said when asked about the belief that the Republican nominee’s law-and-order position on immigration doomed his 2012 shot at the White House. And he took a shot at Republicans who have backed bills with a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, dubbing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for instance, as “Mr. Amnesty.”

Kobach also has justified Kansas’ aggressive ID law partly by saying it would help ensure undocumented immigrants and non-citizens couldn’t vote, something opponents of the law say is extremely rare.

Schodorf voted for the 2011 voter ID law, but now she says Kobach and Brownback “broke every promise” made to state legislators about how they would implement it. As a result, she said, “22,000 voters have had their voting rights taken away,” including senior citizens and others who can’t produce such documentation.

“That’s un-American,” she said. “Nothing has been done to help these people get back on the voter rolls.”

“Jean Schodorf does not know what she’s talking about,” Kobach fired back, arguing that the roughly 22,000 people at issue are ones who have incomplete registration forms and have never been registered to vote. “She often makes statements that have no basis in reality.”

Kobach also insisted his fight on all these issues has nothing to do with antipathy toward minorities as his critics claim.
“The interesting thing is the Democrat Party has done a much better job of painting Republican motivations as racist or impure or unacceptable,” Kobach said. “The motivations are the rule of law, the fiscal health of the country and national security.”
But Schodorf said Kobach has stained the Sunflower State’s reputation.

“People are tired of being embarrassed for Kansas,” she said. “There are 600 duties assigned to the secretary of state: Immigration is not mentioned in one of those duties.”

Kobach, who plans to begin a TV ad campaign in the next week, doesn’t deny that he’s in a tough fight, something he blames on the state’s newspaper editorial boards lashing out against his voter ID efforts and the down-ticket effect from the problems engulfing Brownback and Roberts. The state Republican Party is so consumed with helping save Brownback and Roberts that Kobach is having to largely fend for himself.

Through the end of July, Kobach had about $200,000 in his campaign account, including a $2,000 check from Ashcroft’s wife, Janet. Schodorf had just $9,000 in cash during the same time period.

The race “appears to be closer than I would have guessed,” Kobach said. “Those two top-of-the-ticket races can create a sort of an anti-incumbent sentiment.”

His polarizing image even creates problems for state party officials who want to promote his candidacy.

“There are some candidates, maybe statehouse candidates, that are more moderate that don’t want to be associated with his name — not that they are so much against him but they feel like he hurts them if it’s a close race,” said Barker, the state GOP official. “And then there are others who love having him around because maybe their base is more conservative.”

Despite his hard-line views, Kobach hardly comes across as a fire-breathing conservative. Wearing a gray suit and drinking a glass of wine at an evening fundraiser for a GOP legislative candidate, a laid-back Kobach chatted amicably with some two dozen donors in the crowd, cracking jokes.

And when he addressed the audience during an 18-minute speech, the former constitutional law professor didn’t offer up red meat or seek applause lines. Instead, he methodically broke down the legal reasoning behind some of his positions.

He argued, for instance, that the state statute said plainly that Chad Taylor, the Democratic Senate nominee in Kansas, could not withdraw from the race unless he proved he was incapable of serving. (He lost that case.)

He also defended his legal work representing 10 federal immigration agents whom he says are being illegally ordered by President Barack Obama’s administration not to enforce deportation laws against certain undocumented immigrants who came to the country illegally as children. (That case is now before a federal appeals court.)

And if Democrats despise him for this work, then so be it, he says.
“The open borders left does not like me,” he said plainly in the interview. “To an extent, it’s a rational reaction because I’m doing things that are making a difference.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/1...#ixzz3GcVCURSY