The Kansas City Star has had a pretty good year for their investigative journalists. Honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, their team of investigative journalists, along with ProPublica, issued out an incredible deep dive in to the rise of Kris Kobach. The story by Star Journalists Hunter Woodall, Bryan Lowry is joined by ProPublica authors Blake Paterson and Jessica Huseman, and paragraph by paragraph, it offers a frightening look at how Kris Kobach worked not to benefit the communities he was hired by, but instead, to help propel his political career by selling people on buying into their own racism.
Kansas City Star:
Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Mo. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hardline anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.
But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them.
After two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.
What happened in communities like Valley Park, and cities all over America, small towns that bought into Kris Kobach’s services, thinking they would get things accomplished?
“It was a sham,” Phelps said of Kobach’s pitch, which ultimately ended in a resounding defeat for Farmers Branch. He “kept telling us, ‘We can win this. We’ll just keep appealing it,’ which I felt was very misleading. It was just a sad situation that we had to go through, and everybody now regrets it.”
The piece, which should be read in full by every single person who wonders about the dangerous nature of Kris Kobach, shows city after city recounting the impact of the expensive and ultimately futile lawsuits that only went to fuel Kris Kobach’s rise, and allow him — and conservative Republicans — to rail at the US court system, demanding that it be undone.
Kobach is now running for Governor, and working to sell the people the same medicine: “We can get through this”, “We can win”.
Kansas Republicans early vote this week, with the primary on August 7th.