[Excerpt] ... In 1996, after Brownback won the Senate seat vacated by Dole, he quickly turned his position on the Judiciary Committee into "a platform for a high-profile war against gay marriage, porn and abortion," wrote Jeff Sharlet in the 2006 Rolling Stone profile. But while his willingness to deny evolution and hold up drawings by seven-year-olds of embryos during debates about stem-cell research tended to attract the most attention from reporters, it also proved a handy distraction.
From the beginning, Brownback, who married into one of the most prominent families in Kansas, had received support not just from "values voters" but also from the moneyed, quasi-libertarian side of the conservative movement – in particular, Wichita-based Koch Industries. A Koch-linked firm called Triad Management Services pumped $400,000 into his campaign for senator, helping him defeat former Lt. Gov. Sheila Frahm, a pro-choice moderate backed by the Kansas GOP establishment. Since then, no one has donated more to Brownback than the Koch brothers, and Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity provided vociferous endorsements of his tax plan.
Once Brownback was elected governor in 2010, the biggest obstacle to his fiscal agenda turned out, surprisingly, to be a group of senators from his own party, who recoiled from the most extreme of Brownback's proposals. The tax plan he had worked up eliminated most state income taxes on nearly 200,000 businesses and sharply reduced taxes on the wealthy. ... [End of Excerpt]
Read more at Rolling Stone Magazine.
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