Elected in 2020, Jewish Kansas State Senator Ethan Corson represents the seventh district, which includes Fairway, Mission, Mission Hills, Mission Woods, Prairie Village, Roland Park, Westwood, Westwood Hills and parts of Leawood and Overland Park.
Corson is a Johnson County native who graduated from Shawnee Mission South.
This article is an abridged transcript from the May 19 episode of The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle’s Getting to Know Jew podcast.
As the legislative session wraps up, what do you see as being the big-ticket things left to accomplish in the session?
The big thing that we need to finalize before adjournment are our maps. We're in a redistricting cycle - this is going on all across the country. We've got to finalize our congressional and our legislative maps. Our congressional maps were challenged in court, the district court judge struck down those maps. That has been appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, the Kansas Supreme Court is going to be weighing in on those maps. So depending on what they say, we may need to go back and work on the congressional maps. Also, the way it works in Kansas is the Kansas Supreme Court has to also approve the state legislative maps for the State House and State Senate. So we still need to hear from them on whether the initial maps pass muster. If not, we may need to go back and work on those as well.
Looking back on the legislative session, up to this point, what are you most proud of what you've accomplished legislatively?
We were able to get the legislature to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism. We were able to do that with broad bipartisan support from the State House and State Senate to help us adopt that resolution. We've obviously seen a huge increase in antisemitism across the country and I think having that definition in place in Kansas is going to go a long way in helping us combat antisemitism because you really can't combat something if you can't first define it. I think having that definition in place is going to go a long way.
Another thing, we were able to cut the food sales tax in Kansas. We're going to actually phase it out over a period of three years. But look, I'll be candid about this, I sponsored a bill that would just eliminate the food sales tax starting July 1 of this year completely. That's what I would have preferred. What we ended up doing was ratcheting it down over three years, but we will eventually eliminate the state sales tax on food, which is going to save working families, hundreds of dollars a year. Kansas right now has the second-highest sales tax on food of any state in the country. We're only behind Mississippi when it comes to taxing food, so I was really excited that we were able to bring this relief. Again, not as quickly as I would like to see but getting rid of that is really going to, I think, help Kansas families in a big way.
The average family of four is going to save about $500 a year. It can put money in people's pockets, working families, especially with kids in the house, and the amount that they're spending on grocery bills, it is going to be a real difference. Being able to provide that tax relief, I think, is really meaningful.
After graduate school, you worked for two of the bigger names in Democratic politics, Richard Gephardt and Claire McCaskill. What was it that got you involved in politics in the first place?
It's interesting, my parents were regular voters but I wouldn't say we grew up in a super political household. We were sort of engaged but it wasn't like we were going to campaign rallies and knocking on doors every weekend growing up. I really got interested in college because I started to realize that so many of the things that I cared about were being affected by politics. It’s like ‘Okay, so I'm in school and taking out student loans,’ and ‘Okay, so who figured out what this interest rate is and how I'm paying that back and how does this all work?’ And the more I became curious, the more it kind of came back to that there were all these decisions that were being made through politics.
Do you see your politics and Jewish values being intertwined?
I don't want to say I was the most engaged Hebrew school student, but I do think that you kind of, by almost osmosis, the things that you continue to hear, they really sink in. And it may not be until later in life that you fully realize ... that those have actually become core values.
For me, being part of the religious minority, I think it really increases your empathy... And I read a lot of history, so I think the combination (makes you) realize that at different points in history, Jews have often been the quote-unquote outward or marginalized group. And now as somebody who's in an elected position, in a leadership position, I think I'm hypersensitive to any policies that I think are trying to make another community and our group.
I think that's why I'm interested in voting rights because I think a lot of these voting bills tend to single out communities, tend to single out people of color, tend to single out poor people. We've had some policies in the legislature around transgender kids that I felt like were really attacks on the transgender community. And I'm not all at all comparing my experience of being Jewish to being transgender, I don't know what that is like, but I just immediately felt the goal of this policy is really to try to marginalize a particular community. And so that was a policy I fought back against pretty hard. So I think (my Judaism) does play a big role in what I do in ways that would be surprising to a younger version of myself.
What do you love most about the KC Jewish community?
I grew up in Kansas City, I was bar mitzvahed at Beth Shalom, and I didn't fully appreciate the Jewish community until I left. And then it was when I moved back and my wife and I were engaged and we were thinking about really settling down here and building a life together. I didn't realize just how wonderful it is to have a community and how invested the community was in helping my wife and me and just the number of people … who were so concerned about my job prospects and how that was going and helping me out and making sure I was meeting people.
And people would say, ‘Oh, my goodness, your wife's, not from here. She needs to meet this person. She needs to get involved with this. She needs to be engaged with this.’ It's just been really a wonderful welcome back that we got when we moved back here. And it's just meant so much to us and it's just been such a wonderful caring community. And certainly - we have a three-year-old son - raising him in that community, it has just been truly a joy and something that as an adult I appreciate so much more than I ever did as a kid growing up.