Category Archives: legislature

Blood Right

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Ten years ago, I threatened to break a new law within thirty seconds of when it went into effect.   I think of that circumstance from time to time and it has come to my mind more than once of late as the number of mass shootings piles up.  And as one shooting in particular has touched me.

I was still a reporter in the Senate in 2013 when Governor Nixon vetoed a bill that would have exempted Missouri from recognizing any federal gun laws  that “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms.”  Any federal official who tried to enforce such a law could be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.  AND if made it illegal to make public the names of gun owners.

That meant that I could not publish the names of the legislators who carried guns into the House and Senate Chambers and voted for the bill.  Yes, some did carry guns in the chambers. And to be truthful, there were times when debate got overheated that I did not feel entirely secure.

I don’t know if we have lawmakers packing today. I’m not down amongst them anymore. But a sign on the entrance door to the building indicates they’re allowed to have guns inside.

The Missouri legislature from time to time has tried to say it has the power to declare particular federal laws are not effective here, the United States Constitution notwithstanding. The legislature has at times protected the Second Amendment the way a Doberman would protect his raw steak.

That might be justifiable if all federal constitutional rights are absolute. The Second Amendment is to its most ardent defenders a Doberman Amendment. Touch it and I’ll bite off your arm.

As we’ve noted before, declared rights do not erase personal responsibility.  Free speech still allows lawsuits for libel and slander.  Freedom of Religion does not allow the state to insist that any of us must follow a particular faith to live and prosper.  The right to assemble does not grant a right to smash windows and doors at the United States Capitol and interfere with a mandated role of Congress.

So it is with the Second Amendment. It assumes those with guns will use them to protect the nation’s security (in some interpretations), and that those with guns will be responsible citizens.

As with any right, or any privilege, irresponsibility has its penalties.  The responsible citizen suffers because the irresponsible citizen is allowed free reign (as others might interpret the situation).  In today’s culture, the issue is whether responsible citizens are defending the irresponsible ones to the detriment of the citizenry as a whole.

The mass shooting last weekend in Allen, Texas again raises the question that passionate Second Amendment defenders brush off.  But once again we are told that the answer to mass shootings is the same solution Archie Bunker had in the days when airline hijackings were regular things—issue every passenger  a gun. So it is in these incidents that one answer is to have more people with guns.

Or—instead of limiting access to guns originally designed with one purpose—to kill an enemy on the battlefield using a large magazine of bullets—we are told the answer is better mental health treatment.

The problem seems to be that this corner of our political universe also is one that seems to vehemently oppose providing funding that will pay for those services—-or any of the services the “advocates” say need to be improved.

One of the cable networks covering the shooting in Allen took special note that the shooter might have worn body armor and asked program commentators if there should be limits placed on the sale of body armor, making it available only to law enforcement officers and other first responders.

As this is written, there has been no howl that such a proposal infringes on somebody’s right to shoot and not be shot back.  But it is a serious issue.  The idea that our children should go off to school every morning in their cleaned and pressed body armor, or that the dress code of teachers and administrator requires coat, tie, and bulletproof vest—and a Dirty Harry pistol in the holster that’s in plain view—is absurd.

It is said that money is the life-blood of politics. It has been said that a society is measured by how well it protects its most vulnerable.  One question asked during coverage of the Allen incident is, “Is there anyplace any more where we aren’t vulnerable?”

Political life-blood.  Innocents’ life-blood.  A decision about which is more valuable seems beyond expectation. Death awaits us all but in today’s America, we face uncertainty about whether we shall die in bed surrounded by our loved ones or die on the floor of a mall or a church or a school surrounded by a growing pool of blood.

Getting back to the veto override.   After Governor Nixon vetoed that particular Missouri Secession effort, the legislature had a chance to override it.   And the House did. 109-49, exactly the number needed. It was a stunning event to many, including the person sitting in my chair at the Senate press table.

The bill came over to the Senate and it was 22-10, needing one of the two remaining Senators to vote for the override for that bill to become law.  President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey and Majority Floor Leader Ron Richard had not voted. If one of them voted “yes,” the override would be complete.

I am not taking credit for what happened next. I don’t know if they were aware of what I had told some of my colleagues at the press table. I already had written a piece for the Missourinet blog about that bill.  I had three photographs I was going to use. One was of me, standing in front of an American Flag proudly holding my Daisy BB gun.  Another showed Governor Nixon with Wayne LaPierre, the President of the NRA, and the owner of the Midway Exchange west of Columbia. They were cutting the ribbon on a new gun shop at that complex.

The third picture showed the daughter of Missourinet reporter Jessica Machetta posing with her grandfather. They were with the deer that Macy had shot with her grandfather’s gun. It was her first deer.

Dempsey and Richard both voted “no.”  The override failed by one vote.  I never got to publish that entry on that blog. I really wanted to publish it.  And then tell the legislature, “Come and get me.”

Jessica lives in the Denver area now.  A few days ago, Macy was murdered by her boyfriend, who then shot himself to death.

One dead. Two dead.  Twenty dead.

Say what you want. Make sure you sound sincere.  But don’t do anything to really look for a solution to gun violence.  Don’t mess with the Doberman.

And Down the Stretch They Come

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It’s like the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.  The big group of horses rounds the last turn, accelerating, bumping, jostling, looking for an opening, straining for the finishing line.

And then, it’s over.  Suddenly.  Done.  In the record books. The exhausted competitors head back to their barns.

The last week of this year’s regular legislative session begins today.  All of the work, the hopes, the politicking, the lobbying, the deals and compromises, the conflicts and the consensus-building comes to a merciful end at 6 p.m. Friday.

The public has no concept of what their elected representatives go through on their behalf—or at the behest of those with power to force decisions—between early January and mid-May, especially in the weeks after Easter break when the clock begins to tick more loudly and the calendar pages fall more quickly.

The greatest responsibility the legislature has each year is passage of a state budget.  This year it is $51 billion, huge, the largest budget in state history.  The state is flush with money and sometimes there’s more fighting about state spending when there’s a lot than there is when there’s a little.  With the little, lawmakers have to cover the basic services. With a lot, there are more pet projects, more promises to be fulfilled, more conflicts about what constitutes responsible fiscal policy.

Time of plenty tend to breed unnecessary discussions of policies that ultimately will make times of little even worse.  It becomes harder to defend a system that allows consistent fiscal responsibility in good times as well as bad.

This is the week when bills become Christmas Trees, as they’re called in legislative circles—bills that begin as simple measures suddenly exploding in size as lawmakers who see their bills doomed for failure find bills with better prospects on which they can hang their issues.

Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the bills finish up violating a constitutional standard that a bill can contain only one subject. Sometimes an effort to piggyback a controversial issue onto a relatively non-controversial bill kills both.

Perhaps the biggest issue involving the above scenario involves sports wagering.  Hallway talk is that gambling interests will make one last push to finally get sports wagering by tacking the bill onto a Senate-passed tax bill during House debate and sending it back to the Senate for approval with no time for negotiations. The Senate must take sports wagering, which would face certain death on its own, if it wants to finally approve a more general bill that it has already passed.

If you have trouble following that description, you are not alone.  Bills can become sacrificial lambs as well as becoming Christmas trees.  Believe it or not, the process as a certain fascination the more you watch it.  We will not try to influence your judgment about how moral or ethical that process is.

Sports wagering has at least one strong opponent in the Senate who is prepared to filibuster if the issue returns in some form from the House—and filibustering means there won’t be time for several other bills to be considered as the clock winds down.

So will the sports wagering advocates, desperate to get the issue approved after five years of previous failures, cause the death of other issues because they cannot take “no” for an answer? Again?

This is a nervous time for majority leadership in both chambers because they know every deck contains 52 wild cards at this time of year.   To their credit, they’ve run the place pretty well in 2023, particularly compared the debacle of 2022. But they know their leadership legacy might rest on what happens by 6 p.m. Friday.

Everybody is excited to be coming to Jefferson City each January.  But speed limits will become  just roadside advisories for a lot of people after the gavel falls Friday evening.

The Fido Tax 

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Every now and then somebody comes upon a law that is old, forgotten, and outdated.

Part of a bill in the Missouri legislature this year calls for discarding one such tax, approved more than eighty years ago. It was introduced in the Senate by Mike Moon.  It has two weeks to get passed.  But things are complicated by some possible political gamesmanship that might doom this and other tax reduction efforts. That’s for another day.

Most cities and counties require Fido, Spot, Lassie, etc., to have tags.  But the kind of enforcement envisioned when the law was new never has happened.

The first part of the law went into effect in the 1930s—or maybe in the 20s— and other provisions were added through several more legislative sessions.

The language is pretty clear:

273.050. Dog tax, when due. — No dog shall be permitted to be and remain within the limits of the state unless the owner thereof, or someone for said owner, shall have caused such dog to be listed and the tax imposed by sections 273.040 to 273.180 to be paid on or before the first day of February of each year hereafter.

 273.060.  Amount of tax. — The tax on each male dog and each spayed female dog, of which the certificate of a veterinarian or the affidavit of the owner is produced, in this state shall be one dollar per year, and the tax on all other dogs in this state shall be three dollars per year, payable to the county clerk of the county in which the owner resides; provided, that any person or persons operating a licensed kennel of more than ten dogs in which all dogs kept by him or them are confined and not allowed to roam, shall pay a tax of ten dollars, which amount shall be the full amount of tax on all dogs kept by said person or persons as described above.

The fact that the tax is only a dollar, or three, is an indication that this is a really old law.

The law is still on the books.

The other sections of statute referred to in that paragraph give counties the right to vote on whether to require the licenses.

The fees would go into a fund to reimburse owners of livestock or poultry for losses incurred because of dogs—although it the dogs were theirs, they would get no money.

The town marshall was responsible for catching the delinquent pooches and holding them for a week. After that, the law required him to kill them. Humanely.  Owners could get their pets back

The assessor had to make a “diligient inquiry” of property owners about the number of dogs they had and if, upon checking the courthouse records and finding no licenses issued to that address, would have to tell owners they needed to get right with the law.

Voters had to approve the tax at the local level. If they reconsidered later, a petition signed by 100 people could order a re-vote.

The Missouri Fox Hunters Association and the Missouri Field Trial Association objected strongly.

The law did not go over well in other places either.  The Jefferson City Daily Capital News observed in its February 2, 1939 edition that “Eighteen counties north of the river voted the dog tax. Not a county south of the river voted for it. The north Missouri counties are strong for sheep. South of the river counties are partial to canines.”  Twelve days later the newspaper reported, “Monroe County has between two and three thousand dogs but only 150 of them have an owner who thnks enough of them to pay the dog tax to save their scalps.”

The Moberly Monitor Index reported on February 3 that ten Monroe County farmers had filed claims for damages to their sheep. But since only four dog owners had paid the tax, it was unlikely the tax would produce enough money to pay the damages.

The Sikeston Daily Standard on March 10 called the tax “a joke” because the city had collected only seventeen dollars from the dog tax.

The Brookfield Argus noted on March 16, “There’s gloomy days ahead for ‘poor old Rover’” because the voter-approve tax had gone into effect. But only two of the probable 3,000 dogs in the county had been licensed  and they belonged to Marceline Police Chief Rich Freeman and County Extension Agent Robert J. Hall. The tax, said the newspaper, “applies to all dogs, whether they are of the county variety or the sophisticated city type. Old Shep, Fidol Fluff, or Trixie all must wear the 1939 style of necllace or join that somber parade to the burial ground for dogs.” It does not appear much of such a parade was ever assembled.

Eventually, all of this resentment simmered down.  We are expected to get new dog tags for our versions of Jim the Wonder Dog or Old Drum each year.  We’ve never heard of a farmer getting dog tag money for replacement of dog-induced poultry or livestock death.

But we’re still supposed to get a tag and a collar for our best friend.  Senator Mike Moon doesn’t think it’s a state issue.  Or sholdn’t be.

Just thought you might find it interesting to learn how all of that started.  Our dogs went without tags and dog owners went without pooch taxes for the better part of 120 years before state government decided our dogs couldn’t live in Missouri without tags and collars.

But then, big government stuck its nose into our dog houses.

 

 

The Fido Tax

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Every now and then somebody comes upon a law that is old, forgotten, and outdated.

Part of a bill in the Missouri legislature this year calls for discarding one such tax, approved more than eighty years ago. It was introduced in the Senate by Mike Moon.  It has two weeks to get passed.  But things are complicated by some possible political gamesmanship that might doom this and other tax reduction efforts. That’s for another day.

Most cities and counties require Fido, Spot, Lassie, etc., to have tags.  But the kind of enforcement envisioned when the law was new never has happened.

The first part of the law went into effect in the 1930s—or maybe in the 20s— and other provisions were added through several more legislative sessions.

The language is pretty clear:

273.050. Dog tax, when due. — No dog shall be permitted to be and remain within the limits of the state unless the owner thereof, or someone for said owner, shall have caused such dog to be listed and the tax imposed by sections 273.040 to 273.180 to be paid on or before the first day of February of each year hereafter.

 273.060.  Amount of tax. — The tax on each male dog and each spayed female dog, of which the certificate of a veterinarian or the affidavit of the owner is produced, in this state shall be one dollar per year, and the tax on all other dogs in this state shall be three dollars per year, payable to the county clerk of the county in which the owner resides; provided, that any person or persons operating a licensed kennel of more than ten dogs in which all dogs kept by him or them are confined and not allowed to roam, shall pay a tax of ten dollars, which amount shall be the full amount of tax on all dogs kept by said person or persons as described above.

The fact that the tax is only a dollar, or three, is an indication that this is a really old law.

The law is still on the books.

The other sections of statute referred to in that paragraph give counties the right to vote on whether to require the licenses.

The fees would go into a fund to reimburse owners of livestock or poultry for losses incurred because of dogs—although it the dogs were theirs, they would get no money.

The town marshall was responsible for catching the delinquent pooches and holding them for a week. After that, the law required him to kill them. Humanely.  Owners could get their pets back

The assessor had to make a “diligient inquiry” of property owners about the number of dogs they had and if, upon checking the courthouse records and finding no licenses issued to that address, would have to tell owners they needed to get right with the law.

Voters had to approve the tax at the local level. If they reconsidered later, a petition signed by 100 people could order a re-vote.

The Missouri Fox Hunters Association and the Missouri Field Trial Association objected strongly.

The law did not go over well in other places either.  The Jefferson City Daily Capital News observed in its February 2, 1939 edition that “Eighteen counties north of the river voted the dog tax. Not a county south of the river voted for it. The north Missouri counties are strong for sheep. South of the river counties are partial to canines.”  Twelve days later the newspaper reported, “Monroe County has between two and three thousand dogs but only 150 of them have an owner who thnks enough of them to pay the dog tax to save their scalps.”

The Moberly Monitor Index reported on February 3 that ten Monroe County farmers had filed claims for damages to their sheep. But since only four dog owners had paid the tax, it was unlikely the tax would produce enough money to pay the damages.

The Sikeston Daily Standard on March 10 called the tax “a joke” because the city had collected only seventeen dollars from the dog tax.

The Brookfield Argus noted on March 16, “There’s gloomy days ahead for ‘poor old Rover’” because the voter-approve tax had gone into effect. But only two of the probable 3,000 dogs in the county had been licensed  and they belonged to Marceline Police Chief Rich Freeman and County Extension Agent Robert J. Hall. The tax, said the newspaper, “applies to all dogs, whether they are of the county variety or the sophisticated city type. Old Shep, Fidol Fluff, or Trixie all must wear the 1939 style of necllace or join that somber parade to the burial ground for dogs.” It does not appear much of such a parade was ever assembled.

Eventually, all of this resentment simmered down.  We are expected to get new dog tags for our versions of Jim the Wonder Dog or Old Drum each year.  We’ve never heard of a farmer getting dog tag money for replacement of dog-induced poultry or livestock death.

But we’re still supposed to get a tag and a collar for our best friend.  Senator Mike Moon doesn’t think it’s a state issue.  Or sholdn’t be.

Just thought you might find it interesting to learn how all of that started.  Our dogs went without tags and dog owners went without pooch taxes for the better part of 120 years before state government decided our dogs couldn’t live in Missouri without tags and collars.

But then, big government stuck its nose into our dog houses.

Who Are We?   

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The Missouri Senate left early for spring break, hung up on the latest proposal that is part of the constant process of trying to determine who we are.

Senators had been locked in a two-day filibuster on a bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

It’s never easy to classify people and people’s rights as we learn that human beings are more varied and more complicated than we think. The issue has been summed up by Catholics for Choice:

The Catholic hierarchy teaches that God created a binary system of male and female bodies that are supposed to complement each other. They believe that women and men are equal in worth and dignity, yet their physical and anatomical differences are evidence that God intends different roles and purposes for them in church, society and the family. This system not only reinforces women’s suffering but oversimplifies the complexity of gender identity, erasing whole communities of people made in God’s image.

Men are always awarded power, authority and dominance, women are relegated to the roles of service, nurturing and adoration, and non-binary or gender non-conforming people are not even recognized.

Catholics for Choice believes that God’s creation is far more complex. We do not accept that an individual’s purpose is bound by biology or anatomy, and the notion that sex is a binary of male and female is scientifically inaccurate. We work towards a world that treats all people equally regardless of sex, gender identity, or gender expression.

 It’s not just the Catholic Church that is divided by this issue philosophically. Several Protestant fath organizations divided on the issue of slavery. Another split on the issue of instrumental music in worship. Today’s divisions, philosophically as well as structurally, seem to be on issues of gay marriage or other gay rights.

This is not new to our nation. What’s happening is that we again are at a point where we are re-defining human beings. We have never been able to see each other—as Catholics for Choice put it—as a whole community of people made in God’s image.

African Americans got the 14th Amendment in 1868 saying they were equal citizens under law.  The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote. Native Americans were declared American citizens in 1924. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled black and white children could go to school together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in hiring because of religion. Inter-racial marriage became legal in 1967. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 eliminated race-based real estate covenants. Gay marriage became legal in 2015.

Now we are wrestling with how to recognize a different kind of identity, the non-binary individual.  Once again, some of the arguments are based on religion and doctrine versus science, society, and self-identity.

We are more complicated as a species than we sometimes want to admit.  Always have been.  As a society we’ve always had problems dealing with those who are different and reconciling ourselves that even different people have unalienable rights, too.

A generation from now, maybe two, some of our descendants will look at our times and ask, “What were they thinking?” in the same way we look at our previous generations and wonder about the race and gender issues that bedeviled them.

Will they still be fighting about what rights people have who are in some way different from the majority of them?

Utopia will always be far away as long as we find ways to define ourselves by our differences

The Quote Behind the Quote

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A few days ago, Kansas City District Federal Judge Brian Rimes threw out the so-called Second Amendment Preservation Act, passed by the General Assembly in 2021. The act allowed gun owners to sue local police and sheriff’s officers for as much as $50,000 if those officers enforced federal gun laws perceived as conflicting with Second Amendment Rights.

The Justice Department had filed suit a year ago saying the law violates the supremacy clause of the U. S. Constitution. That’s the one that says states cannot override federal statutes. The SAPA is only the latest incident in which the Missouri legislature has said it can pick and choose what parts of the Constitution are valid in this state.

A special agent in the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives field office in Kansas City reported soon after the law went into effect that 12 of 53 local officers that had worked jointly with ATF had withdrawn their cooperation. He also reported that restrictions on federal access to state investigative resources had been put in place.

Judge Wimes agreed with some critics in 2021 who argued the law was an open effort to circumvent the federal government’s right to enforce federal laws. His 24-page ruling has ordered local and state law enforcement officers to “lawfully participate in joint federal task forces” and to share information with federal agents without being afraid of being sued.

Our new Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, says the state expects better luck on appeal.

And then he trotted out the old bromide, “The Second Amendment is what makes the rest of the amendments possible.”

One would think that someone who is an Attorney General would have a greater appreciation of the law and the courts and a better understanding of the fallacy of the bumper-sticker shorthand that he has cited.  He might think it sounds good to the Right Wing, but it actually sounds horribly Leftist.

Making a bumper stick out of this issue and ignoring its origin is misleading and potentially dangerous even if it is effective in cultivating a needed political base in the year before an election campaign.

Let’s look at the origin of the philosophy that guns, not courts, are the greatest defenses of all of our rights. A popular military leader many years ago put it clearly and then added important contextual details:

“All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war”. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic… Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the laboring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”

Chairman Mao, in his Selected Works, V2, pp 224-225, suggesting that all other rights are achieved by those who have the unchallenged right to have guns.

An Army is needed to protect the nation’s rights from external attack.  But the courts are the preferred process for maintaining civil order internally.  The day that a domestic Army is in charge of protecting our rights is not something we should ever wish for.

Whether in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, or hundreds of documents before, during, and since those times, it has been repeated that government in this country derives from the people not from the barrel of the gun.

It is long past time to leave the simplistic bumper sticker politics on the back bumper where they belong and instead to have an intelligent discussion on the law rather than a brief and erroneous reiteration of a despot’s musing on a democracy that he never delivered to his nation.

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The VLT Problem

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One of the biggest hurdles that casino gambling has not been able to clear in Missouri as it tries to legitimize sports wagering is the VLT.

That’s not a sandwich. It’s one of those gambling machines that are proliferating throughout the convenience stores of Missouri.  Video Lottery Terminals. Are they slot machines or something else. Are they legal or illegal? Is there an age limit for using them?  Should they be hidden from general public view or should they be right next to the door, on the aisles next to the snacks.

Is Missouri starting to look like Las Vegas, at least in our convenience stores?

Your correspondent likes to say that he has been to Las Vegas about twenty times, which is about 19½ times more than he ever wanted to go.  If the gambling industry could figure out how to put slot machines on those accordion-like jetways between the terminal and the front hatch of the plane, they would.  But you can hear the slot machines in the gate areas almost as soon as ou get off the plane.

Several people have opined they will not buy gas at a convenience store that has these infernal machines.

The casino industry trying to get sports wagering approved by the legislature has found itself in the clutches of the video lottery terminal people. And vice-versa. A sports wagering bill hits the floor for debate and somebody tries to amend a VLT-licensing bill onto it.  It’s especially frustrating to the sports wagering folks in the Senate where an attempt to attach a VLT bill to a sports wagering bill can generate a filibuster at the drop of a chip—by a VLT Senator who wants it to be added or a sports wagering Senator who doesn’t want it be adopted.

Now there’s another question fogging the discussion.  Should the legislature be discussing legalizing VLTs while a class action lawsuit accuses the company that supplies many of those machines with violations of state consumer protection and federal racketeering laws (the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act).

Our former colleague in the press corps, Rudi Keller of Missouri Independent, reports the federal court lawsuit accuses Torch Electronics of putting hundreds of machines—the lawsuit says they’re illegal gambling devices—in locations all over the state. Critics of VLTs also say there are no protections that will keep children from using the machines, and to rid Missouri of machines that the suit says entice people who already have gambling problems to play them.

Torch, in previous criminal and civil cases has claimed the machines don’t violate state gambling laws.  And it claims they’re not gambling machines because players are offered a chance to know the outcome before they put in their money.

If you want to know the difference between slot machines and VLTs (the casino people say they’re the same animal but dressed differently. The VLT people say they’re  more like lottery machines), you might to go to VLTs vs Slots (The Different between VLT and Slot Machine 2023) (slotsguy.com)

The casino industry sees them as competition for their slot machines, particularly because these machines are anywhere in the state and the casinos are restricted to just 13 locations on our two great rivers.

The casinos are under the Missouri Gaming Commission. The VLTs would be regulated by these state lottery.

We’ve already seen an early dustup on this issue in the Senate where Senator Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg, a longtime supporter of VLTs, saw his bill combining both issues killed in committee while a stand-alone sports wagering bill was voted out for debate. He locked down the senate for a couple of hours a week before spring break and he had friends helping him.

While that fight will continue at the capitol, another fight is shaping up in the courts.

Rudi recalls that Torch put its first machines in Missouri five years ago. Complaints led the Highway Patrol to investigate them and recommend to prosecutors about 200 cases complaining the VLTs violate state gaming laws.

But only one prosecutor has gone after VLTs.  Machines in a convenience store in Platte County were destroyed after a judge found they violated the law. Other prosecutors seem to think they have bigger fish to fry than prosecuting people who run convenience stores with these machines in them.

One interesting issue in the class action lawsuit claims that Torch and a co-defendant, Warrenton Oil have combined to make more than $955 thousand in political donations in the last five years.  We haven’t checked to see how much the casinos have made in political donations but they do stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars in sports wagering and they have invested a lot of time and manpower in the effort for about six years.

But so far all of the various pressure campaigns and campaign finance issues, neither sports wagering nor legal VLTs has passed the legislature.

The legislature returns from its spring break in a few days. The sports wagering legislation is waiting for debate in both the House and the Senate.  The discussions are likely to be lengthy, even in the House where there are rules against interminable talking by members.  But in the Senate there are no debate limits.

Another factor enters in.  Last year, the six major sports teams in Missouri started making noises about a petition campaign to put sports wagering on a 2024 ballot if the legislature did not enact it.  That has raised the stakes on the issue in the legislature this year.

Officials with the sports teams have testified this year that they are “agnostic” about VLTs, an indication the devices won’t be part of a ballot issue as far as they’re concerned.

The last time we ran some traps at the capitol, the sentiment was that sports wagering might not make it to the governor for his signature this year, again. But nothing is dead until the gavel drops at 6 p.m. May 12.

Wanna bet how this mess turns out?

 

Just About When You Think You’ve Heard It All—

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You know for sure you never will.

The St. Louis County Council got into a recent snit because some members wanted to go behind closed doors to discuss, brace yourself:

Missouri’s open meetings law.

The agenda also included rules for public comment at council meetings and learning more about the Sunshine Law itself.

Things bogged down when Council Chairwoman Shalonda Webb began to read from a handbook on the Sunshine Law published by the Attorney General’s office.  One council member accused her of filibustering.  Eventually enough council members walked out that there was no longer a quorum and the meeting could not continue.

The meeting represents the eternal conflict between a government of the people and a government in spite of the people.

Government, even in this great land of so many kinds of freedom, thinks it can operate best away from public view or later public scrutiny.  That’s speaking generally, of course.  But since Missouri’s Sunshine law was engaged fifty years ago, various individuals and groups have tried to carve out secrecy gaps for themselves.

Our campaign finance laws, for example, let us learn far less than an informed citizenry would find helpful in understanding who is buying what, or trying to buy what in our statutes and our bureaucracy.

Five years ago, voters changed the Missouri Constitution to require greater obedience of our sunshine law by the legislature.  But now the people you and I elected to represent our interest are pushing a bill that closes more records that reveal how our laws are shaped.

Bureau Chief Jason Hancock of Missouri Independent, a respected colleague in our active reporting days, whose agency is an important addition to a capitol press corps that has been greatly diminished in recent years, summed up Senator Andrew Koenig’s bill a few days ago: “Any record of a state lawmaker or their staff pertaining to ‘legislation or the legislative process’ would be closed off to public scrutiny, except for those offered during a public meeting or involving a lobbyist…The bill also closes records held by the government pertaining to a constituent, though lobbyists wouldn’t be covered under this provision. Koenig deended the proposal at a legislative hearing…arguing that sometimes lawmakers “need to be able to think out loud with your staff and before you get a finished product.” But to government transparency advocates, the push represents lawmakers trying to carve themselves out of a constitutional mandate imposed on them by the voters of Missouri.”

The concept of having secret time so candid policy discussions can be held is a constant excuse for closing doors. The idea is understandable on matters of national security.  But it is garbage most of the time.

Jason also quoted Litigation Director David Roland of the Freedom Center of Missouri, who said, ““The legislature really doesn’t like the fact that the people amended the Constitution to say that they had to provide a greater level of transparency than a lot of these legislators are comfortable with. But that’s what the people decided. And now legislators are trying to insulate themselves from oversight by the public.”

Some in government argue that extensive demands for records or copies of records that are supposed to be public constitute “abuse.”

Does anybody else think it is absurd that a citizen has a right to get supposedly public records without being hassled or without having to get a second mortgage to pay for cophing or—as has been proposed—the time spent REDACTING INFORMATION THE CITIZEN CAN’T KNOW?

Who’s the abuser here?

It is a mistake to think that the only people who care about this issue are members of the press. Yes, open meetings and open records laws are important for those who believe they work as trusees for the public. But “the public” needs to understand that there are all kinds of records about it and the public has a right to see those records.

That right is enshrined in one of the sacred documents of our nation—“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

“The governed” should be wary of lawmakers who decide the people do not need to know or are incapable of understanding how their government is run or who really runs some of it.

Too many of those we entrust to govern us do not trust us to know what they do.

By, for, and of the people?

Let’s not kid ourselves to often.

 

 

But What About Jenae?

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The recent traffic crash in St. Louis that has cost a 17-year old volleyball player her legs has triggered outrage focused on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner—who has been something of a political lightning rod throughout her career.

The Missouri Senate is considering a remonstrance—a word describing a severe grievance or protest against a person or institution, usually demanding corrective action—against Gardner, who is accused of letting the driver of the car remain on the streets despite having a revoked driver’s license and having violated his bond in a robbery case at least fifty times.

The remonstrance is signed by every Republican in the Senate.  Gardner is a black Democrat and her defenders say the remonstrance and the Attorney General’s ouster petition filed against her are politically partisan and racist.

We will leave that fight to be waged in the political arena. We hope, however, that those who are and who will be focused on Gardner do no harm to Jenae Edmondson, the young volleyball player from Tennessee, for it can be too easy for them to use her as an instrument of their political rage at a time when she might desperately need support and hope.

What will they say to her?   What should they say to her?  What should you and I, most of us along in years with legs that carry us in the halls of power, on the playing fields and hiking and biking trails, and even on walks with our grandchildren?

Legs are part of our identity, particularly when we’re young. They’re part of running through life, part of our future, part of our social involvement—we dance with them; we jump to our feet when our team scores in a close game; we begin to drive a car with them.

If you and I—and the senators and the Attorney General—were to send her a letter, what would we tell a 17-year old girl who is dealing with the terrible question double-amputee Drake McHugh asks in King’s Row, “Where’s the rest of me?”

She is not the first person to suffer such a tragedy. But she’s the first person in her own body and in her own mind to go through it. And those who become immersed in the political fallout of this disaster should remember that and not victimize her additionally.

There are others, too, who intimately share her tragedy.  Her parents are doubly affected because they must deal with her injuries and with sustaining her character while they deal with suddenly becoming parents of a disabled teenager and the costs of her care now and in the future.

They are getting help from the Middle Tennessee Volleyball Club that has set up a GoFundMe account that is about halfway to meeting its one-million dollar goal to help pay medical and other bills.

There are many who can give her hope, who can inspire her at the right time to live through this, who can teach by their examples that there will be bikes to ride, trails to hike, games to be played, life to be lived.  Thousands of those who returned alive but damaged from Afghanistan are the ones we hope she will focus on.  At some point, Paralympians can provide inspiration. At some point, the remarkable U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois can become an inspiration—a woman who lost her legs in a military helicopter crash and who told Vogue magazine that when he sees her artificial legs, painted to match her skin tones, she sees “loss.”  But when she sees her steel and titanium prosthesis, “I see strength.”

But that is in the future.  Jenae and her family are living very much in the present with its present challenges.  We hope she does not become a pawn in a developing political battle.

She and her family have more important things to do.

 

 

Gambling Addiction? Don’t Blame Us

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The big push is underway in the legislature to let Missourians bet on sports.  A House committee has held a perfunctory hearing on two bills that have a tax structure in which the state will LOSE money.  An industry that profits from tilting the tables against its customers is about to tilt the tables against the state. And it’s likely the legislature will let them get away with it.

An article last week in The Hill, a D.C. publication that reports on government, says gambling addiction is going to be “the next opioid crisis.”

And the casino industry does not seem to care. At least not in Missouri.

Nationwide legal sports wagering will be five years old this year.  The Supreme Court threw out the national ban on it in 2018.  The growth of this betting has been nothing short of explosive. Missouri legislative fiscal experts say profits from sports wagering will exceed profits from all table games in all of our thirteen casinos in just three years.

The gambling industry has spent, and is spending, huge amounts of money wooing state legislatures. Last year The New York Times investigation detailed how it was done in Kansas. The newspaper also had a reporter in Missouri but when the issue died in a completely dysfunctional Senate, the investigation focused elsewhere.

It’s coming to Missouri—on the gaming industry’s terms.  A bill in the House that would allow sports wagering on the state’s terms will get a hearing this year but will go nowhere. That’s the official word.

The industry-backed bills set aside up to one-half million dollars for dealing with people who are affected by gambling addictions. If you think the casinos are being noble and responsible in doing this, you are wrong. They want nothing to do with that funding.

The money, instead, will come from the fund underwritten by fees the casinos pay for each person who enters the gambling area—fees that have been rendered woefully inadequate because of inflation since they were put in place n 1993.  The industry has fought, successfully, every attempt to bring the two dollars up to contemporary values.

One result of that resistance is that funding for our veterans homes is about one-third what it was a decade ago and it’s going to get worse.  Even the host cities of our casinos have seen their casino payments decline by about half, a circumstance their association doesn’t seem to think is worth discussing.

The bills in the House that set aside that half million dollars take it from the programs that draw support from that admission fee fund, meaning taking funding away from the veterans homes, the host cities, a state college scholarship program and a National Guard funeral escort program.

The industry doesn’t care. It accepts no financial responsibility for those who develop problems by over-participation in its offerings.

The Hill article says, “Most Americans ignored the opioid crisis, a staggering increase in overdose deaths in the 1990s and 2000s, until the government and news media processed the data and tendered a response.”  Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told the publication, “We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture, down to kindergarten.”

“You have exactly the same players you had with opioids. You have government. You have industry. You have civilians, a lot of whom will benefit from this. And then you have a population who will develop an addiction, let’s say one [to] one-point-five percent of the population.  It’s a hidden addiction. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it.”

We’ve looked at a lot of studies in this country and others of gambling addiction.  All of them point to gambling addiction at least tripling with the advent of sports wagering.

Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, told The Hill, “Gambling is a very different addition from drugs or alcohol. If I’m drunk or high, at some point my family is going to figure it out. With gambling, I can be sitting with my kids, watching cartoons, and gambling away my house, my car, everything I own, on my mobile phone. How would you know?”

Nower says New Jersey, the first state to have newly-legal sports wagering studied the issue of problem gambling BEFORE it allowed sports wagering. But she says most states “are just legalizing this stuff without any idea of the effects.” Missouri seems to be in that category.

We have yet to hear anybody outside of those with special interests in the topic, even so much as mention this coming potential public health crisis. Passing a bill with a pick-a-number amount set aside—subject to appropriation by the legislature—is not addressing the problem.  And having the industry that causes the problem directly take responsibility for it seems to be out of the question.

The Missouri Gaming Association once proclaimed, “As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than a fair share for military veterans…We honor and support our military veterans and will continue to do so…”

Just don’t trouble us to adjust outdated admission fees to stop the financial bleeding of Missouri’s nursing homes for veterans. And certainly don’t expect us to have any financial responsibility for veterans or anyone else who become the victims of our enterprise.

Just remember, we’re good corporate citizens. And we expect the people you elected to represent you and to protect your citizens’ interests to do what we want.

“I do think there are watershed moments in all public health crises. Unfortunately, it usually takes some kind of crisis or tragedy to turn the tide,” says Nower.

The “next opioid crisis” and accompanying tragedies is developing at the state capitol. Does your legislator care?