TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) – Several dozen protesters chanted, laid down on the floor and blocked the Kansas Senate’s main entrance Tuesday, hoping to pressure it into taking a vote on a bipartisan plan to expand Medicaid.
About 50 people protested at the Statehouse for almost three hours. Capitol police removed 23 protesters from in front of the Senate chamber in an attempt to clear the area. Their cases will be forwarded to the local district attorney for potential prosecution on criminal trespassing or disorderly conduct charges, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol, which oversees the police.
The protesters began by gathering around the rail of the third-floor rotunda and chanting “What do we want? Healthcare! When do want it? Now!” Some of them banged big inflatable sticks together to make a drumming sound that could be heard throughout the building.
“It’s frustration with a broken process,” said Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of the pro-expansion Kansas Interfaith Alliance. “When the process doesn’t work, sometimes you have to go outside the process a little bit.”
Outside the Senate, protesters chanted, “People are dying! Shame on you!” The people on the floor wore sashes with the names of diseases on them, such as “COVID-19.” Protesters included disabled rights advocates and members of the liberal populist Poor People’s Campaign.
“I don’t think it helps their cause,” said Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, a Galena Republican. “It’s not the way to get people to change their opinion.”
Abortion opponents are blocking consideration of the expansion plan until lawmakers put a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution on the ballot. The amendment would overturn a Kansas Supreme Court decision last year protecting abortion rights, and they contend expanding Medicaid would lead otherwise to taxpayer-funded abortions.
“This is the people’s house, where every opinion is heard, and the opinion I have heard loud and clear is that Kansans do not want their tax dollars to pay for abortion,” said Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, who is leading the anti-abortion effort.
Mike Oxford, an disabled-rights activist, dismissed the argument as a purely political one, calling it “grossly unfair.”
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