(Updated to include more reaction and background with edits throughout)
Republican Party Chairman Mike Brown on Friday morning said he’s directed the party’s rules committee to reconsider a plan removing top elected officials and groups representing women, Hispanics, African Americans and young adults from key committees.
“I believe this recommendation to reconsider will allow our party to refocus on expanding our party and winning elections,” Brown said in an email sent to Republicans.
“Our party, the party of Lincoln, the party that championed woman’s suffrage and civil rights, has and will continue to support all of our GOP members’ full involvement in our party,” Brown said.
“Our members are diverse in ethnicity, background, age and beliefs but we are united in our passion for smaller government, less taxes and more freedom,” he wrote.
Brown had come under increasing criticism after the party’s rules committee agreed on an amendment to the state party’s constitution that would remove the state’s two U.S. senators, three Republican members of Congress and all of the Republican statewide office holders from the GOP state committee.
The proposal also would remove a Republican governor from serving on the state committee as well as the Senate president and the House speaker.
A separate proposal would amend the party’s bylaws to eliminate the same people, including designees of the governor, the U.S. senators and members of Congress, from serving on the party’s executive committee.
The proposals also would have cut out groups such as the Black Republican Council, the Kansas Federation of Republican Women, Kansas Young Republicans and the Kansas Hispanic Republican Council.
The proposals had been rebuked nationally, including from a national conservative talk-show host who compared them to “ethnic cleansing” and said it “smacked of racism.”
The proposed changes would have been historic since the general structure of the party and the rules have been in place since 1908, with some changes over the years.
Critics blamed Brown for the proposal, saying he was trying to consolidate power within the party. They pointed out that he appointed members of the rule committee.
Brown has said he was not involved in the development of the proposal, which still needed to be approved by the Republican state committee.
In an interview last week, Brown said he was staying out of the controversy over the rules change. Brown wouldn’t say whether he supported the proposal.
“I’m not getting involved in any of that,” he said. “I am not putting my finger on the scale.”
However, former Johnson County Republican Chair Marisel Walston said Brown should have never let the proposal emerge.
“As the party chair, it is your responsibility to make sure that proposals like this never see the light of day,” Walston posted on Facebook.
“What is there to reconsider?” she asked. “The proposal should be killed and never be brought forward again!”
Brown had already showed hints of backing off the proposal when he told Republicans last week that he would not bring the proposal forward at the committee’s summer meeting.
But since last week, the issue has continued to generate more heat, especially when it was blasted by national conservative talk-show host Todd Starnes on Wednesday.
Starnes accused Brown of “ethnically cleansing” the party.
“He’s wanting to kick out groups representing female Republicans, Black Republicans, Hispanic Republicans and young Republicans,” Starnes said.
“Who’s going to be left? A bunch of old, white guys?” he asked.
“This is just really shocking,” he said.
“Quite frankly, it smacks of racism,” he said.
“They’re targeting Black and Hispanic conservatives when at this very moment in American history, Republicans need to be bending over backward to invite minorities into the party.”
Meanwhile, the chairs of the party’s four congressional districts – Laura Francis, Eric Rucker, Wendy Bingesser and Debbie Luper – urged the party’s rules committee to back off the proposal Friday morning.
They said Brown’s promise not to bring the proposal up this summer was not sufficient.
“Removing the voting rights of these Republican organizations that are crucial to growing our ranks or ousting elected officials who have won important elections is ill-conceived, lacks justification, and shocks the conscience,” they said in a joint statement.
“It furthers division and discord and sends the wrong message at the very moment we need to be unifying, growing, and working together on behalf of our candidates in 2023 and 2024,” they said.
Republican National Committeeman Mark Kahrs and National Committeewoman Kim Borchers said they reached out to the chair of the rules committee to back off the proposal.
They said that marginalizing the voices of Republican women, young conservatives and ethnic groups such as the Kansas Black Republican Council and Kansas Republican Hispanic Assembly sends the wrong message and is a losing strategy.
“The Republican National Committee has spent vast resources to attract women, minorities, and young people to the Party over the past decade,” Kahrs and Borcher said in a joint statement.
“At a time when we are seeing these efforts bear fruit, it would be counterproductive for our party to carelessly adopt measures that undo the party’s progress in these areas and which minimize and diminish the role of these important groups in our party.”
Earlier this week, the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, which bills itself as the largest conservative Hispanic organization in the country, urged Kansas Republicans to drop the plan.
They were joined by the Black Conservative Federation, which condemned the “disgraceful actions” of Brown and his appointees to the party’s rules committee.
The federation called the committee’s recommendation a “brazen” attempt to boot the Black Republican Council out of the party’s structure.
Bryant Anderson, chair of the party’s rules committee, is one of the supporters of the proposals.
He said the elected officials and the affiliated parties have a seat on the both committees without being elected compared to other members who are elected to those committees.
Anderson said the officials who sit on the committees without being elected to the panel effectively dilute the influence of the 37 members elected to the state committee from each of the state’s four congressional districts.
“We have this group of affiliates, and this group of legislators, state elected officials that are on there but they were never elected to be on the state committee,” Anderson said in an interview on Wednesday.
“None of these groups or legislators or state elected officials were actually elected to be on the state committee,” he said. “That’s the central issue.”
In an interview earlier this week, Anderson said the proposed rule change should be allowed to be debated at the state committee, which must approve the rules change.
“The membership of the Kansas Republican Party should be concerned that the Republican National Hispanic Assembly would want to keep them from being able discuss this and vote on it,” Anderson said.
“We’ve got a group saying we don’t want this to come to the committee and the committee as a whole is everyone, and everyone should have the opportunity to discuss it and vote on it,” he said.
