Politics

Kansas lawmakers: Sebelius tarnished her family’s political legacy

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ disastrous Obamacare rollout has disgraced her family’s vaunted political legacy in her home state of Kansas, lawmakers told The Daily Caller.

“The joke around the capitol is that the rollout on Obamacare is so bad that even Keith Sebelius would be calling for her resignation,” Kansas state Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce told TheDC, referring to Sebelius’ late Republican congressman father-in-law, whose last name she shares.

Sebelius, a former Democratic Kansas governor who oversaw the launch of the glitch-ridden Healthcare.gov website and an enrollment period that has led to numerous Kansans and other Americans losing their existing health insurance plans, even lost the confidence of her father-in-law’s closest protege.

Republican U.S. Senator Pat Roberts recently called for Sebelius to resign, even requesting as much to Sebelius’ face in a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week while Sebelius sat “stony-faced.” The move shocked many Kansas insiders who remember Roberts’ decade-long tenure as an aide to his mentor Rep. Keith Sebelius.

Roberts, 77, served as administrative assistant to popular West Kansas congressman Sebelius from 1969 to 1980, when he was elected to fill Sebelius’ seat after his boss’ retirement.

“Each year, they would go around on a tour of the entire district and Pat was by [Keith]’s side the entire time during those tours. That’s how Pat built up his name,” Bruce said.

“Personally there was always a respectful relationship” between Roberts and the Sebelius family, including Kathleen, “and this has obviously put strains on that and made the relationship a lot more distant,” Bruce said.

Kathleen Sebelius, daughter of a former Ohio governor, is married to federal magistrate judge K. Gary Sebelius, son of the late congressman. The judge’s position in Kansas discourages many people from talking publicly about his wife’s disgrace.

Fort Hays State University in Kansas recently launched the latest semester of its Sebelius Lecture Series, named for Keith Sebelius, but the program’s name is rumored to be encountering some raised eyebrows.

“I get the indication that whenever they talk about the Sebelius Lecture Series they have to qualify it now. The daughter-in-law’s popularity has taken a hit,” Bruce said.

“Obviously her reputation has been tarnished because she has been so close to this implementation,” Bruce said.

“It makes you hope that Bob Dole’s children never marry Democrats,” Kansas state Rep. Scott Schwab told TheDC. “The scars that she caused cut so deep that it caused her father-in-law’s great friend to ask for her resignation. You’ve got to be trying to be incompetent to have Pat Roberts call for your resignation when he has that much love for your father-in-law. It’s sad.”

“Pat had a lot of loyalty to Keith Sebelius, and that relationship even transcended his relationship with Dole. For him in his last term in the Senate to have to call for Keith’s daughter-in-law’s resignation, it’s sad,” Schwab said.

The Daily Caller previously revealed that Kathleen Sebelius oversaw several failed government website projects as governor of Kansas, prior to overseeing the more than $600 million Obamacare website in the Obama administration.

“In Kansas if you have a 40 or 50 million dollar project, that’s a lot of money,” said former Kansas state senator and labor secretary Karin Brownlee, who was tasked with cleaning up Sebelius’ technical messes when she took over governor Sam Brownback’s labor department in 2011. “When I walked in the door at Labor [the computer update] was half-done. There were about 240 errors in work-around. It was not functional.”

“The agency was spending more than $1 million per month on contractors and other things. So as soon as we found out how much was going out per month we had to shut that down. That wasn’t workable. In the private sector, that would never be acceptable,” Brownlee said.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not return a request for comment.

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