Kansas GOP senators snub new Leawood resident Travis Kelce, girlfriend Taylor Swift | Opinion

Kansas Sen. Cindy Holscher, a progressive Democrat from Overland Park, sponsors a lot of bills and resolutions that don’t stand a chance of passing our conservative and veto-proof Republican state Legislature.

This year, she’s signed on to measures to abolish the death penalty, raise the minimum wage, allow voters to register on election day and demanding accountability for the illegal police raid on journalists at the Marion County Record.

In my view, those are all causes worth discussing, but that’s not what this column’s about.

What has Republicans who dominate the Statehouse hot and bothered today is Holscher’s unvarnished support for the storybook romance of Travis Kelce, the superstar tight end of the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs, and Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop music megastar.

On Tuesday, the only official action on the Senate floor was an emergency vote “commending the National Conference of State Legislatures on its 50th anniversary in 2025.”

And then Holscher stood up during “announcements” and announced that she had two resolutions:

“The first resolution is support for statehood for Washington D.C., the second resolution is welcoming Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to Johnson County,” Holscher said. “He recently bought a house in Johnson County and this resolution is to welcome Travis and his girlfriend Taylor Swift to our great state and recognize the huge economic impact they have in the K.C. metro area and the positive light they shed on Kansas.”

Holscher said she heard audible gasps from the Republican side of the chamber. And they weren’t over D.C. statehood.

Rage from the right

Swift, the winner of the Grammy for Album of the Year and Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year,” has become a lightning rod for the far right.

Her cardinal sins, in the eyes of MAGA World, are that she urges young people to register to vote and has, in the past, criticized Donald Trump. The first one is basic civics and the second is common sense, but there you go.

Kelce, meanwhile, has not escaped MAGA’s ire, because he’s currently starring in a funny Pfizer commercial urging people to get a COVID vaccine and a flu shot at the same doctor visit — “two things at once!” That’s got him sideways with the large and noisy anti-science faction of the GOP.

The situation has gone so far that Fox News and other right-wing media have floated the bizarre conspiracy theory that the Kelce-Swift romance is a sham, maybe even a Pentagon psychological operation to boost President Joe Biden’s odds of beating Trump again in their upcoming November rematch.

The Washington Post made a hilarious video showing Fox host after Fox host throwing shade on the happy couple and urging Swift to stay out of politics for her own good.

My wife Kathy and I got an even stronger dose of anti-Swift venom while listening to talk radio in the Oklahoma night, driving home from a vacation in Galveston on New Year’s Eve.

The host asserted that Swift was a bad influence on young girls, who might get the wild idea that they could have careers and income of their own, instead of staying home and having babies. He suggested that if Swift wanted to be involved in politics, she should emulate the late Phyllis Schlafly, who rescued America’s women from the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

I wish I could tell you who the host was, but we were laughing too hard and the station faded out before we heard whose show it was.

I guess, if anything, it’s possible Swift’s romance with Kelce will influence millions of young girls to want to date football players.

Oh wait, they already do.

No love from GOP Statehouse

On Tuesday, Holscher invited her fellow Kansas senators to come by her desk or office and join her in co-sponsoring her resolution by noon Thursday.

Well, noon Thursday came and went, and here’s who’s signed on to welcome Travis and Taylor to JoCo:

▪ Every Senate Democrat except two who’ve been out ill for the session.

▪ Not one Republican, not even Sen. Kellie Warren, R-Leawood, who lives in the same city and represents the Senate district where Kelce bought his $6 million mansion in October.

The thing I find most interesting in the Kelce-Swift romance is not that it’s so unusual, but it’s so, well, normal.

Strip this relationship of the massive amounts of money and media surrounding it and it’s a scenario you see in every high school in America:

Boy sees pretty, talented girl perform at a concert. Boy wants to meet girl. Boy tries to give girl a friendship bracelet with his phone number. He initially fails to get her attention, later succeeds. They date. He introduces her to his mom, and they hit it off. Boy and girl become a couple — the star athlete and the star stage performer. If the Super Bowl had a homecoming king and queen, it’d be Travis and Taylor by a landslide.

I don’t always (to be honest, even regularly) agree with Kansas Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall — a conservative’s conservative who carried the ball for Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election, just hours after he and the rest of the senators were chased out of their chamber by the Jan. 6 MAGA mob.

But even Marshall thinks the Kelce-Swift stuff circulating in the alt-right universe is, in his words, “all nonsense.”

“Everyone should embrace the Travis and Tay-Tay story,” he told Politico. “I think it’s a great story, an American love story, something that Walt Disney wrote. So we just wish them the best.”

So not only did Marshall embrace the Kelce-Swift romance, he even gave a shout-out to Disney, another whipping boy of the far right because of the company’s opposition to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t say gay” law.

Attaboy, Senator. Maybe you can talk some sense into your counterparts in the Kansas Senate.

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