TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Gov. Laura Kelly informed fellow Kansas residents Tuesday night time that her typical yearly name for bipartisanship isn’t sufficient in gentle of final week’s mob violence in Washington and stated the state’s leaders “should commit ourselves to set an instance.”
Kelly centered a lot of the annual State of the State deal with on the COVID-19 pandemic and averted outlining broad new initiatives outdoors of promising to push once more for enlargement of the state’s Medicaid well being protection for the needy. However the Democratic governor turned close to the top of her speech to the failed rebellion final week by extremist supporters of President Donald Trump, who stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress for certifying Trump’s election loss.
Her feedback got here a day after the FBI warned of potential armed protests in Washington and plenty of states by Trump loyalists forward of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20. Trump carried Kansas by a large margin in final 12 months’s election, and Kelly averted mentioning the outgoing president by title as she decried “the violence, destruction and sedition” in Washington.
“This is not like every other second,” Kelly stated within the ready textual content of her speech. “We’re being examined like by no means earlier than.”
She added: “We should commit ourselves to set an instance, in how we conduct ourselves, within the issues we are saying to one another, what we submit on social media, in what we inform individuals again dwelling in our communities.”
