Charles Macheers political strategy 101: Do what you’re told

How does someone like Charles Macheers get elected?

Easy. Let a well-funded incumbent keep the seat warm until the very last minute.

But who is Macheers? That’s a tougher question.

Macheers, who represents the 39th District in the Kansas House of Representatives, had virtually no public profile before getting elected. So when people tried to learn more about this man from Shawnee last week – after Macheers got a nationwide flaying for carrying a bill that would legalize broad discrimination of gay couples in the Sunflower State – there wasn’t a lot for them to discover.

An estate-planning lawyer by day, Macheers first entered the political consciousness in 2012, with a run for Shawnee City Council. He was an unknown in that contest, too, and easily lost amid a line of conservative candidates. Jim Neighbor won that seat, and Macheers went back to a life of relative anonymity.

That is, until early on the morning of June 1, 2012. That day was the filing deadline for those seeking office as Kansas state representatives in that November’s election.

Owen Donohoe, a Shawnee Republican in the House since 2007, had filed to run for his 39th District seat again. He had stashed enough in his campaign war chest that no other Republican was keen to challenge him in the primary.

But that June morning, Donohoe withdrew from the race.

Macheers happened to be in Topeka that morning and became a candidate in Donohoe’s place – a not-very-coincidental coincidence that touched off a string of phone calls. Moderate Johnson County politicians and others now found themselves searching for someone to run against Macheers in the Republican primary. Consensus built around Stephanie Meyer, who hopped in her car and drove to Topeka in time to register as a candidate. 

Meyer proved to be too moderate for the district. Labeled by political-action-committee literature as not conservative enough, she fell to Macheers, who was by then aligned with a conservative Republican faction of western Johnson County politicians, including Mary Pilcher Cook and John Rubin. That advantage in the conservative 39th District propelled Macheers to victory in the primary and allowed him to trounce Democrat Marlys Shulda in the general election.

Donohoe-Macheers-style deadline-day switcheroos aren’t all that unusual in politics when an incumbent wants to set the table for a handpicked successor. And at first, Macheers seemed to have been chosen for his ability to stay quiet and unremarkable. He’s not anonymous anymore, though.

Macheers has been credited with pushing the Religious Liberties Protection Act – House Bill 2453 – onto the floor. It has earned him overnight name recognition. But it’s unlikely that he’s the author. H.B. 2453 has Olathe Republican Lance Kinzer’s fingerprints all over it. The language of the bill is in-sync with Kinzer’s ideology, and its contents progress logically from previous legislation he has sponsored. (Also: House Speaker Ray Merrick has told The Topeka Capital-Journal that he thinks Kinzer wrote it.)

Kinzer was one of the main representatives who assembled the Kansas Religious Freedom Caucus. He sponsored a bill in 2012 that allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense drugs which they thought could cause an abortion, such as RU-486. That bill, something of a precursor to H.B. 2453, cleared Gov. Sam Brownback’s desk.

When the bill was debated in the Kansas House, representatives from the American Religious Freedom Program showed up to testify in its favor. ARFP is an organization hellbent on eroding the separation of church and state. Among many of its policy statements is a complaint about religious employers having to provide medical benefits that included things like contraceptives – which mirrors one of the Easter eggs in H.B. 2453.

If Kinzer crafted the bill and Macheers was his mule, it’s because redistricting in 2010 made Macheers bulletproof in the 39th. His district is conservative enough that even a slipshod piece of legislation like H.B. 2453 can’t really dent his standing.

And 2453 may have gone too far. It has stirred the annoyance of major companies – the kind that Kansas’ Republican establishment covet, in order to make the math in Brownback’s tax plan add up. That dynamic alone may earn Macheers an opponent in 2014.