Friends: This entry was programmed to go up on the website at 1:01 Wednesday morning. For some reason, the computer failed to post it.
We normally would just try to re-post it without comment. But an event today surprised (and to be honest, gratified) your loyal observer. The House elected Representative Jon Patterson the new Speaker of the House. He is starting his fourth and final term in the House, which means he was part of the freshman class of 2018. He told House members, “It is the people that we serve; it is the areas that we represent that supersede us, long after we’re gone and we’re but pictures on a wall,.”
You will learn why this statement was especially meaningful to this observer when you read what we wrote last weekend and posted on Monday for release early this morning—that didn’t go out on time.
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The 2025 legislative session begins this week. There are more than fifty new members of the House of Representatives. The Senate will gain ten new people, only two of whom have not been in the House. The Senate will have a President who has had no elective office experience.
For a long time, I have been asked to speak to the incoming class of new state representatives. Whether it has been a briefing on the history of the Capitol or an hour explaining the Thomas Hart Benton Mural in the House Lounge, I always try to work in some points that, I have been told, takes some of the air of importance out of their balloon.
I tell them that one of the messages of the mural is that the greatness of a state depends on the greatness of its people and less on what 197 of them do each year. You are just temporary, I say, but the people are forever.
I tell them that if they ever start feeling self-important, they should go out in the halls and look at the composite photographs of members of past sessions, and look at one from as recently as ten or twelve years back and see how many of the names and faces they recognize and whether they know of anything those people said or did. “With luck, eight years from now you will only be pictures on the wall,” I tell them, “and someday someone will point to your picture and say, ‘there’s great grandma or grandpa; he served in the House of Representatives,’ and the child will look at the picture for a couple of seconds and then want to go downstairs to see the stagecoach again.”
I also tell them, “Do not do anything here that would be an embarrassment to your family at home, that will lead to your children or grandchildren being asked at school, ’Why are people saying those things about your dad or mom, or grandpa or grandma?’ You can be as crooked as you want but you never want to face a day when a reporter walks into your office and starts asking questions you don’t want to answer.”
But there’s always at least one that doesn’t get the message.
The newbies will find their personal values and ethics challenged from the beginning; some might already have been contacted by people with political action committees and big checking accounts. And they’ll have to decide who they listen to the most—the people in the hallways or the people in the coffee shops at home.
But they need to understand this; no lobbyist can give them as much money as the people of Missouri do—about $37,500 a year, guaranteed for two years.
They will leave their normal lives each Monday and walk into a bubble that is a completely different culture from what they have at home. How will they handle it? How will they keep up because things move awfully fast—although the general public thinks it doesn’t move at all.
It’s a pressure cooker few of them have experienced in normal life. It might be hard for them to realize, but it is easy to be a different person in the bubble than they are at home. The challenge each will face is how much different they will be.
Citizens have a responsibility in this game of politics. They have to understand that what a district wants is not necessarily the best thing for the state as a whole and their people in the House and Senate might be represent District X, but their title is STATE Representative and STATE Senator.
Watch how they deal with those pressures, those scenarios, those responsibilities. Care enough about your state and your community that you don’t just read their press releases and newspaper columns—check on their voting records, especially on bills that are important to more than you.
Of course, citizens can adopt the position that it doesn’t really matter; they’ll be gone in eight years because of term limits anyway—that’s why voters saddled Missouri government with them.
That’s exactly the wrong way to go about being a citizen.
What’s the correct way to serve in the legislature? Read the top half of this entry. The people will outlast those who represent them in Jefferson City. The important people in shaping the greatness of a state, or limiting the greatness of a state, are—in the long run—the people who are on the wall of the House Lounge in the Benton mural, the hard-working, struggling people.
A lot of pictures have been hung in the Capitol hallways since Benton painted people who have always been there when all of those in the pictures have come and gone.
So for those who will take or re-take their oaths of office this week—don’t think you are more important than your neighbors at home just because you have been given a temporary title.
And for he folks back home:
You are the ones who have to hold those who will be here temporarily to account—and to make their terms are limited to less than eight years, if necessary. Voters still have the power to limit their representatives to two, three, or four years. Voters still have the power to limit their senator to four years. After that, the law—unfortunately approved by the voters—takes away the citizen right to determine who their legislators will be.
We hope those beginning their service, whether for the first term or for an additional term heed the advice. And we hope those who sent them here meet their responsibilities.
Rep. Patterson’s remarks are at:
Jon Patterson becomes Missouri House speaker
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