Foster care crisis. Donation limits. Registration tizzy. Control of Congress. Abortion bans.

By Sherman Smith | editor-in-chief

TOPEKA — Kansas’s top foster care official said the state should be “laser focused” on Wichita to improve a youth placement measure that has consistently fallen short of court-ordered standards.

Foster care contractors in Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, have continuously struggled to place children in housing instead of offices or unlicensed beds. Since 2024, numbers have deteriorated.

Laura Howard, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, told a legislative committee that in 2025 the “failure to place” metric worsened for the second year in a row in Sedgwick County. It appears on track to do the same in 2026. Failure to place refers to how often foster care contractors let kids sleep in an unlicensed environment.

TOPEKA — Attorney General Kris Kobach revised his July reelection campaign finance report after questions were raised about individual donations that appeared to violate the maximum contribution limit under Kansas law.

Requests for a formal inquiry by the Kansas Public Disclosure Commission, which is responsible for monitoring, investigating and regulating campaign finance statutes in Kansas, centered on the July report submitted by Kobach. The first point of contention was tied to two donations of $8,328 each on the same day in June by Steve Noller of Kansas. The second red flag was in regard to a pair of donations May 5 totaling $10,000 from Christopher Ruddy of Florida.

TOPEKA — Attorney General Kris Kobach sent a cease-and-desist letter Friday to the League of Women Voters to stop violations of state and federal law by offering financial incentives to high school students who registered to vote.

The issue surfaced after state Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican, complained about voter registration campaigns during May at Lansing and Leavenworth high schools. The Leavenworth County chapter of the League of Women Voters had promoted distribution of $5 Starbucks gift cards to students who registered.

In a statement, Kobach said he referred the matter to the U.S. attorney in Kansas for investigation.

By Robert Strong

The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party has the advantage in the 2026 midterm elections and could become the majority party in one, or both, chambers of Congress. The margin of that anticipated victory is more difficult to predict.

The size of a party’s majority makes a difference. To see why, it’s worth looking back to the second half of the 19th century, when two dramatic midterm election results marked the beginning of important eras in the nation’s history.

As physicians continue to navigate care for patients with complex pregnancies in states with abortion bans, a group of maternal-fetal medicine specialists has developed new guidelines to help providers in those states navigate legal risks for themselves and medical challenges for their high-risk patients.

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