Category Archives: government

Courage

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I find myself using the word “courage,” or at least thinking of the word, too often in observations about our political world at state and national levels. It takes courage on both sides to break from partisan ideology, to challenge entrenched and powerful private influences, and to take stands that benefit the benign many more than the influential few. We wonder if lack of courage by those entrusted with leadership translates into lack of trust by those who think courage to truly provide for the common good is needed.

A poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko comes to mind often these days. Yevtushenko was a Russian (and Soviet) writer, poet, novelist, and film producer whose works questioning and challenging Soviet authority led to his expulsion from the Gorky Institute for Literature, and a ban on travel. (Both of his grandfathers had been declared by Stalin to be “enemies of the people” twenty years earlier.)

In 1961, he wrote a poem he called “Conversation with an American Writer.”

“You have courage,” they tell me.

It is not true.

I was never courageous.

I simply felt it unbecoming

To stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

 

I simply mocked at pretense and inflation.

I wrote articles, scribbled no denunciations,

And tried to speak all on my mind.

 

Yes, I defended men of talent,

branding the hacks, the would-be writers.

But this, in general, we should always do,

And yet, they keep stressing my courage.

 

Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame

To remember when punishing vile acts,

That most peculiar time

When plain honesty

Was labeled “courage.”

 

We suspect many people today would appreciate that kind of courage, seeing instead only bowing to power in the interest of personal security.

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Notes from a quiet street (Autumn edition)

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It’s still warm, 90s lately, and some leaves are starting to fall. But we are reminded of a rolling snowball as we watch the developments in Washington. We seldom have observations about the national scene, but we have lived long and seen much in state and national politics. And we know that once a snowball starts rolling, it gets bigger and bigger and it starts going faster and faster.

A friend of mine once advised a roomful of public officials, “It is better to admit you have a skeleton in the closet than to try to bury a body. A skeleton doesn’t stink as much as a body when it’s dug up.”

That’s not an exact quote but it catches the idea.

The problem we have seen in politics is that the tendency is to try to heap more dirt onto the grave.   And in heaping more dirt on the grave, the person under scrutiny is only digging the hole deeper.

Richard Nixon, Bob Griffin, Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Tom Pendergrast and insurance director R. Emmett O’Malley, Eric Greitens, and now, Donald Trump. And there are a lot more.

We don’t know what the case will be against President Trump or whether it is a sustainable one meriting an impeachment action by the House. But it just feels as if there’s a snowball starting to roll. And past experience tells us snowballs don’t stop until somebody is swept away.

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Nancy and I helped some of our church friends work on a Habitat For Humanity project backed by another church last week.  After several hours of standing, carrying, holding, and scraping, we went home and promptly stiffened up as we recovered in our recliner chairs for a short time.  As I got up, I dropped the TV remote and I tried to pick it up.   I found myself wishing I had one of those button things people wear around their necks. Except mine would be wired backwards so that the emergency responders would hear me say, “Help, I’m up but I can’t get down!”

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Cardinals are playing in October.  Milwaukee got knocked out early.  The only thing better would have been if it had been the Cubs.

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And what in the world is it doing being hockey season already?

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The District

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What if Jefferson City had become like Washington, D. C.? What if it wasn’t the county seat of Cole County? What if the state capitol was not even in any county?

What if everything within a four-mile radius of the Missouri Capitol, south of the river, was the District of Jefferson?

On February 26, 1923, Representative Casper M. Edwards of Malden offered a proposed constitutional amendment to create such a district. If the legislature approved it, the matter would go to a statewide vote in November, 1924. His proposed four-mile line would have taken in almost all of the city, at the time a town of more than fifteen-thousand people (and growing fast; the population would be almost fifty percent bigger in 1930)

All laws governing the district would be decided by the General Assembly which also would appoint all local authorities.

The proposed district would have devastated Cole County’s tax base, of course, and would have required relocation of the county seat. But where would it go? The population in the farmland outside of Jefferson City at the time would have been pretty small. Russellville had 364 people in 1920; St. Thomas, probably not more than 150; Lohman had 120 in1920; St. Martins, Taos, and Wardsville had a few hundred each. Osage City was unincorporated.

We could have had one heckuva fight for the county seat! Or maybe later laws would have merged the remainder of Cole County with surrounding counties.

We haven’t found any records of what Edwards was thinking about or what prompted him to suggest the District of Jefferson. While some contemporary accounts contemplated the district as being like the District of Columbia, it’s likely Edwards did not intend his proposed district to be part of no state. Even then, Missouri had districts of various kinds.

We’re not sure how much square mileage his plan would have totaled, but today, Jefferson City sprawls over almost 37.6 square miles (about 26 square miles fewer than Columbia but six more than Joplin, eight more than Cape Girardeau, eight fewer than St. Joseph) so the city would have grown far outside his circle. The Jefferson City Country Club is 5.4 miles from the Capitol, for instance. Binder Park is 3.2 miles farther west. (And it’s pronounced BIN-der, not BINE-der. It’s named for a German fellow who was a powerful civic leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

And what a mess would things be if the General Assembly was the agency that appointed local officials?

Citizens might have been offended by losing their rights to vote for members of the city council, the mayor and the municipal judge. Instead of a local police department, would there be a state police department and would it be in charge of penitentiary security and capitol safety as well as making sure the city streets were safe?

Would the appointment of local officials mean no election of school board members? Who, then, would hire teachers and on what basis. Would state taxpayers be financing the local high school football team?

Would the city have been more prosperous if state funds made up its budget? What would it be like if the legislature-appointed mayor had to go before the appropriations committees each year to ask for money for everything the city has or does now?

Good Heavens!

Fortunately for the City of Jefferson (that’s what its real name is), Edwards’ resolution was assigned to the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments and was not heard from again.

Who was this guy Edwards anyway?

He was a Representative from Dunklin County for three terms, born in Farmington in 1870, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher. Robert Sidney Douglas, in his 1912 History of Southeast Missouri, wrote that the Malden Clipper moved to Kennett in 1886 and became the Dunklin County News, a weekly paper. Several years later Casper Edwards formed Edwards Publishing Company, and took over the News. He was described as “a brilliant and forceful writer.” He finally sold the paper to the Malden Printing Company. The newspaper continued until 1931 when it became the Twice A Week Dunklin Democrat until 1956 when it became the Daily Dunklin Democrat, which continues to publish in Kennett.

Edwards died of a head injury suffered when his car overturned down an embankment near Malden in August of 1936. He appeared not seriously injured by died five hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. One newspaper report said the hemorrhage was brought on by “excitement over the accident.

Another account said he had practice law in Malden since 1900, had been an Assistant Attorney General under John Barker (1913-1917), and had published newspapers in Malden, Caruthersville, and Van Buren.

As we have noticed, from time to time, discovering a long-forgotten incident while prowling through old newspapers can lead to being involuntarily drawn down a path to other stories. This is one of those. It eventually leads to a poem saluting a legislative colleague who had died, the story of a disappearing rabbit, the discovery of a huge hoard of bat guano, and the early days of Missouri tourism.

It’s a long and winding road from the story of the Casper Edwards and the District of Jefferson and we’ll have to tell it some other time.

 

Bob

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More than forty years ago, in the months before we set up The Missourinet, when we were still in local radio in Jefferson City, a new guy showed up to cover city council meetings. He was working for a then-new FM station that hadn’t shown much in terms of news coverage but he’d been hired as the news director and he arrived determined to carve a place in this market for a new news voice.

I was impressed with this kid right away. And I was impressed with him right up to the day he died, Sunday, a third day after gall bladder removal surgery.

I liked Bob Watson’s ambition and his work ethic right away. He wanted to be part of the Missourinet when we started it and I kept putting him off through several cycles of new reporters on our staff because I didn’t want to tell him he just didn’t have the kind of voice we wanted to have on the air. I respected his commitment to reporting, his desire to be a good reporter, the persistence he brought to his work. On top of that, he was a good guy. But finally, I forced myself to break the news to him. I was sorry I had to disappoint him.

Bob left the radio station and worked for the local television station where his conscientious behind-the-scenes role shaped the content of the newscasts. Fortunately, Betty Weldon, the owner of the News-Tribune, saw in Bob Watson the kind of reporter she wanted on her newspaper staff. She hired him more than thirty years ago; Bob said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. That is where he carved his place. In years to come, when people look at the microfilms of the newspaper for the last thirty years they will find the byline of Bob Watson everywhere in the News-Tribune. I used to joke that there were times when he wrote the entire front page. While he might not have really done that, he came darned close a lot of times. His passion for reporting is reflected in the volume and the quality of solid reporting on those pages.

Mrs. Weldon died several years ago and the family sold the newspaper to an Arkansas-based company that, unlike many businesses that are buying the media today, maintains a high standard of local news coverage. A few months ago it named Bob its employee of the year.

He was the statehouse reporter for the newspaper and was a tenacious questioner of governors and lawmakers—-there were times when some of his colleagues had to force themselves to interrupt him to get OUR questions in. He, as all good reporters, hated vagueness and contradictions from the newsmakers. He never backed down in questioning their statements or their intentions. I knew when I read a Bob Watson story that it was accurate, balanced, and thoroughly-developed.

We sat at the Senate press table for many years, both of us at times going into what I call “screen saver mode,” Bob because he dealt with a sleep disorder and me because my work day had passed the eight-hour mark by 1 p.m. most of the time. Both of us always had our recorders running so we didn’t miss anything.

Bob’s coat pockets always bulged with pens of multiple colors. He had a color-coded system of note-taking of some kind that I never asked him to explain. His notes were always neat, his handwriting always clear—while most of us at the table filled notebooks with scrawls that only we could read.

One of his last stories was published on the anniversary of the first moon landing. It was about the reunion of the Apollo 11 astronauts with their space capsule that happened to be at the state capitol on July 20, 1970. Bob knew that I had broadcast the event and he tracked me down at a family gathering in Colorado for an interview. He wasn’t feeling well and had taken a rare day off from work the day before and still wasn’t back up to snuff but he had to get the story, had to find the person he wanted to interview, wanted to tell the tale.

That’s a good reporter for you. As long as you can drag yourself to the keyboard, there’s reporting to be done, a story to be told.

One thing Bob did that I never have done—-a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reporterbob

You’ll find a lot of his own words and informal photos that capture the spirit we’ll remember, his joy of being a journalist, his love of his family (official and unofficial families), a bit of his self-deprecating humor, and a face that says kindness, steadfastness, and  “character” in both senses of the word.

We have lost invaluable institutional memory. We have lost a good friend, a man who committed his life to good journalism, a newsroom mentor. His church has lost a willing worker, a good soul. His children have lost a proud parent, his grandchildren a proud grandfather. All of us have richer lives because God gave us Bob.

When I dropped in at his room at St. Mary’s hospital Saturday, the day after his surgery and shortly after the nurses had gotten him up for his a post-surgery shuffle to the end of the hall and back, I asked him, “Watson, what’s a good Presbyterian boy like you doing in a place like this?” He took it in all good humor. We talked for a few minutes but just before I left I said, “You know, people are going to start asking, ‘How can you have the gall to ask that question?’ after this.”

“You don’t have to have a gall bladder to have gall,” he answered with a weak smile.

That was Bob Watson.

(The photo is from the News Tribune “contact” page)

 

Where was it?

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When the permanent seat of state government was moved from St. Charles to Jefferson City on October 1, 1826, it was headquartered in a building known as The Governor’s House. Not the capitol.

It was called the Governor’s House because it contained a couple of rooms for the lodging of the Governor and his office. The House of Representatives chamber was on the first floor. The Senate was on the second floor, an appropriate positioning for the body known at state and federal levels as “the upper house.’   Rooms for other state officers were in the building.

That was fine for Governor John Miller, a bachelor. But his successor, Daniel Dunklin, had a family, a situation that led to construction of an executive mansion nearby.

There were plans for a specific capitol but they didn’t come about until the Governor’s House burned in 1837 with a terrible loss of early records. The historical record is sketchy about what happened after the fire. How long did the gutted walls of the brick building remain? How was that area used between then and 1871 when the Governor’s Mansion was built?

Just where was the first seat of government on that lot?

Two conjectural drawings exist of that first building. One appears to show the building near the corner of Madison Street and Capitol Avenue. The other places the building closer to the bluff where it would be more visible to people traveling on the Missouri River.

We know it must have been fairly close because contemporary accounts say wet blankets were used to keep the mansion roof from catching fire from sparks blown from the burning original Governor’s House and a map from about 1843 indicates the 1826 building was near the present Executive Mansion site and the first Executive Mansion was built at the northwest corner of Madison Street at Capitol Avenue (which was Main Street then). We know from written records that the house was used during the Civil War by the officer in charge of the federal force that occupied the capital of Missouri.

How much of the current mansion, if any, is on or in the footprint of the first government building in the City of Jefferson?

There are some issues, often small ones, that get wrapped around a historian’s mind and won’t let go. Where were those buildings?

For several administrations this dabbler in archaeology (Nancy and I have spent several weeks in southwest Colorado mapping and finding pueblos either in the cliffs or on the ground of the Mancos River valley area near Mesa Verde) has wished somebody would be allowed to peel back the grass (in one way or another) at the Governor’s Mansion and in the process peel back the historical record to find the remains of the buildings that have occupied that space. Maybe there’s equipment that can survey the area without disturbing the lawn and pinpoint places to investigate without wiping out tent space. With the state’s first family in temporary quarters while major repairs and restorations are done at the old house, this might be a time to electronically see what’s under the yard.

The problem is that the lawn is often used for entertainment. Big tents are pitched and gatherings are held and digging up the lawn would disrupt those. But my goodness, what might we learn about the place where government began at its permanent location?

What’s under there?   Where was that first building in Jefferson City where some of Missouri’s greatest citizens of the first half of the Nineteenth Century walked, negotiated, and thundered?

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Sponsorships

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State government never has enough money to fix the roads, educate our kids, take care of those of us in our declining years, pay our prison guards and state employees  enough to get off of food stamps, maintain hundreds of buildings it owns, keep our air and water safe, and a lot of other things.

I woke up on a Monday morning a few weeks ago with the solution.  I think it was the day after I’d watched the Indianapolis 500 in person and the NASCAR 600-mile race at Charlotte that evening on the telly.  It came to me that state government could make millions if it followed an economic model based on racing.

A few years ago the stock car race at Indianapolis was called something like the Your Name Here Crown Royal Brickyard 400 Powered by Big Machine Records.  Each year the name of some citizen—a private citizen who was a veteran or someone who had voluntarily done something of public benefit would be picked to fill in the “Your Name Here” part of the event name—a nice thing to do to recognize the importance of people like most of us who do good stuff just because we do good stuff.

And if you watch any of these events, you know that the first thing the winners do in the post-race interview is thank all the sponsors whose logos adorned their cars and are sewn onto their fire-resistant driving suits. “You know, Goodyear (Firestone) gave us an awesome tire today and our (Chevrolet, Honda, Toyota, Ford) had awesome power.  I’d like to thank Bass Pro, M&Ms, Budweiser, Coke, Monster Energy, Gainbridge, NAPA, and all my other sponsors who make this possible—and the fans, you’re the BEST!!!”

Suppose state government was run like that.

At the end of a legislative session, the Speaker and the President Pro Tem, in their joint news conference, began with “We have had an awesome, productive session here at the Anheuser-Busch Capitol powered by Ameren.”

“The Monsanto Department of Agriculture driven by the Missouri Farm Bureau will be better equipped than ever to regulate corporate farming through the Tyson CAFO Division.

“The Master Lock Department of Corrections employees are getting a significant pay increase; The Depends Division of Aging is expanding its services significantly; the Tracker Marine Water Patrol is able to hire more officers; and the Dollar General Department of Revenue is going to install new computers to get our H&R Block tax refunds out faster.

“The Cabela’s Department of Conservation sales tax renewal has been put on the ballot next year.  The Wikipedia Department of Higher Education driven by Nike has been given more authority to approve such programs as the Shook, Hardy & Bacon Law School at UMKC, the Wal-Mart Business School in Columbia, the Eagle Forum Liberal Studies program at UMSL, and technology developed at the Hewlett-Packard 3-D Missouri University of Science and Technology will now be capable of building new football facilities on our campuses for pennies..  And we found additional funding for the Cologuard Department of Health and its Purdue Pharma Division of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

We also were able to put a proposal on the ballot next year to increase funding for the Quikcrete Department of Transportation.

“We couldn’t do all of the great things we’ve done in the 101st Session of the Citizens United General Assembly fueled by Laffer Economics without the support of all of our state’s other great sponsors.

“And we appreciate the participation of you citizens out there.  We couldn’t do this without all of you. You’re the BEST!!!”

And the confetti made from 1,994 un-passed bills would rain down and the legislative leaders would spray champagne (or, more likely, shaken-up Bud) all over each other in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Legislative Victory Circle (previously known as the rotunda) and the legislative mascot dressed as the Official State Dessert would dance to a celebratory song performed by Sheryl Crowe, who next year will be chosen as a project by a third-grade class studying state government to be the subject of a bill designating her as the Official State Country Singer.

This would never work, of course.  We can’t see members of the legislature in uniforms that have state government sponsors’ patches all over them during the sessions or campaigning in outfits that have the logos of their donors.  And the Senate would just flat out refuse to tolerate anything that would eliminate Seersucker Wednesdays.

Even if government tried something like this, the Supreme Court would be tied up for years in lawsuits determining whether sponsorships should be calculated as Total State Revenue under the Hancock Amendment, thereby triggering tax refunds that would undermine the entire idea.  And Clean Missouri would get another ballot proposal approved by voters that would tie the Missouri Ethics Commission into knots trying to define whether sponsors constitute campaign donors.

Hate to say it folks.  In the real world, if we want better services or more services or better roads or prison guards who don’t have to hold two other jobs, it’s us taxpayers who will have to be the sponsors of state government.    And after all, shouldn’t we want to be

THE BEST?

Food for thought

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We stopped in Terre Haute, Indiana on our annual trip to cover the Indianapolis 500 for the Missourinet and as we nibbled on our bad-for-us hamburger and fries, we found an article in the local newspaper, the Tribune-Star, by Morton J. Marcus that we know will upset the Missouri Farm Bureau and other farm-advocacy organizations, Governor Parson, our friends at the Brownfield network, and numerous other people who continue to advocate for something Marcus thinks is an anachronism: agriculture as an important part of Missouri’s (and Indiana’s) economy.

We offer this as food for thought in a changing world—which has an unchanging reliance on the subject on which Marcus’ appears to have some relevant points. You are welcome to add your grains of thought to his observations in our “comments” section.

The article appeared in the Tribune-Star on May 22. It was published in the Indianapolis Business Journal the next day.

Last week, the governor of Missouri was interviewed on NPR and stated that farming was the number one industry in his state. I’ve heard the same claim from Indiana politicians. In fact, one Hoosier solon claimed farming was “the backbone of Indiana’s economy.” I responded, “Every corpse has a backbone.”

Why do people in Missouri and Indiana believe such exaggeration? Perhaps, at one time (in the 19th century) it was true. Farming does take up a lot of the land we see when traveling from one place to another. Plus, the farm lobby is still disproportionately strong.

How important is farming? Folks from Purdue love to say, “If you eat, you’re are part of farming.” Oh, so true! Plus, if you eat, you’re part of trucking, dentistry, and waste disposal.

Let’s look at three different measures not provided by the biggest farm lobby of all, the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

First, value added, the part of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), our basic measure of economic activity, attributed to Agriculture nationally (including farming, forestry, fisheries and hunting) is 0.8%, or 19th of 19 private sector industries. Number one is (drum roll… ) real estate, rental and leasing at 13.3%, followed by manufacturing at 11.4% of GDP.

To be blunt, total value added from farming is less than 0.8% of the U.S. economy. What will the farm lobby say? “Well, you’ve got to remember farmers buy lots of stuff and lots of money passes through their hands that wouldn’t be spent if we didn’t have farming.”

No one is talking about not having farming! That’s the argument of a child, not an industry. We measure economic activity as the value of the goods sold less the value of goods purchased. That’s what we call value added. And the sum of value added by all economic activity in the marketplace is GDP.

For Missouri, agriculture (Ag) is 1.1% of the state’s GDP. For Indiana, Ag is 0.9% of the state’s GDP. In each of those two states, Ag is 19th of the 19 major private sector economic activities in GDP. Only in South Dakota does Ag exceed 5% of the state’s GDP.

Second, personal income, the sum of earnings, rent, dividends, interest, and transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, etc.) are received by — guess who? — persons. Farm earnings are net of the expenses of farmers, but include government subsidies. How many carpenters, janitors, teachers, surgeons can say the same?

In the nation, farming accounts for 0.4% of total personal income. In Missouri, the figure is 0.46%, in Indiana 0.33%.

Third, jobs. Farming, fishing and forestry account for a lofty 0.34% of jobs in the U.S., 0.18% in Missouri, and 0.12% in the Hoosier Holyland.

These are data for 2018. Not 1820, which might have been the source for the governor of Missouri. They are from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, not the fake news agents working in the speech-writing cubicle of every statehouse.

A couple of observations from your, uh, loyal observer:  I grew up in a farming community, on a five-acre farm. We rented our pasture to people with horses. I spent summers baling hay and cutting weeds out of Illinois bean fields in the days before pre-emergent herbicides.  Today, it seems, the phrase “small family farm” is a phrase for a time long gone.  HOWEVER, there is no doubt that the people who farm, whether they are a dwindling number of individuals or operations that have become corporations for various reasons, raise the food that feeds a growing population.  But whether agriculture is the “backbone” of our state’s economy in the 21st Century is an issue that Morton Marcus has rightfully raised.  Perhaps it is time to find a new defining phrase for the importance of agriculture.  But in doing so, we cannot forget that this industry that is a shrinking part of our total GDP is the source of our food.

A modern assessment of the economic value of agriculture in the greater scheme of the nation’s economy does not violate the old bumper sticker that says, “Don’t criticize agriculture with your mouth full.”  If anything, the comments from Marcus should make us appreciate, on a personal level, the importance to our well-being of agriculture in whatever business model its participants follow.

(Who is this Morton J. Marcus fellow?  He writes entertaining, informative, and sometimes provocative columns, a compilation of which you can find at https://howeypolitics.com/Content/Columns/Morton-Marcus/10/23.  He is director emeritus of the Business Research Center at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.  He taught economics there for more than thirty years and was an advisor on economic development and taxation to a half-dozen Indiana governors. One of his degrees in economics is from Washington University in St. Louis.  He has a bunch of other qualifications.  One write-up of his qualifications for his columns notes, however, “None of his advice has been taken.”)

 

Notes from a quiet (and perhaps flooded) street

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Might one offer an observation about the extensive coverage of rainfall by the television weatherfolk?    They do an excellent job when weather is awful except for one thing.

What does it mean when they say the Missouri River is expected to crest at—for example—32.3 feet at Jefferson City?   Will there be 32 feet of water over the Jefferson City Airport?  Or in the River Bottom area west of the Capitol?  Will the community garden in what once was Cedar City (and the nearby Highway 63) have 32 feet of water over it?

Uh, no.

When we did flood stories at the Missourinet, we never used numbers like that.  Here’s why.

Flood stage at Jefferson City is 23 feet.   That means that a Corps of Engineers river gauge is someplace that measures the bank of the Missouri River at 723 feet above sea level.  The altitude changes as the river flows east or downhill. (Bank full at Washington is only 720 feet, or “20 feet” as is commonly said.)  Any water higher than that means the river is out of its banks.

So, 32 feet means the river is nine feet above bank full at Jefferson City.  It always seemed to us to be more meaningful to report the river was expected to crest nine feet over flood stage.  And a flood stage at 30.2 feet at Washington means the river will be about ten feet above bank full there.  Nine feet and ten feet are more meaningful to people who are five-feet-ten inches tall than thirty-two feet.

The record flood crest at Jefferson City in 1993, by the way was 38.65 feet, or as we reported it, 15.65 feet over flood stage.   There’s a graphic example of the accuracy of reporting flooding using the 15.65 feet standard we used.  Go to the restaurant at the airport and look at the markings on the door which record the levels of various floods.  The mark for the 1993 flood is almost at the ceiling level of the restaurant, about sixteen feet up, not thirty-two.

Having gotten that out of my craw—-

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A few days before the end of the legislative session, your observer watched some of the debate in the House about whether undocumented immigrants living in Missouri should be denied in-state tuition and financial aid when attending our state colleges and universities.

Among those banned from paying in-state tuition and financial assistance using tax dollars were the DACA people, children brought here at a young age by their undocumented parents.  The legislation says the state universities can use their own resources to provide that assistance or to make up the difference between in-state tuition and international student tuition.

The Columbia Daily Tribune had a story about then noting there were 6,000 people in Missouri approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or eligible for it.

 

A thought occurred during the discussion: Why couldn’t our universities, state or private, offer a course for those students that would lead to American citizenship, online for adults and especially for DACA high school students and current college students?  Might solve a few problems.

Might not be a bad idea to have a lot of our non-DACA students enroll, too.

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Come to think of it:  The capitol is awash in third-graders each spring, students who are taking their courses in Missouri government.   They sit in the visitors’ galleries for a few minutes and are introduced by their legislator and given a round of applause and then go downstairs to look at the old stage coach and the mammoth tooth.

It will be nine years before they graduate, months ahead of casting their first vote.  That’s a long time to remember what they saw and learned as third-graders.

I THINK I can remember the name of my teacher and the building I attended in third grade.  But that didn’t make me qualified to cast a learned vote the first time I had the chance to do so.

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I was driven out of retirement this year to lobby for the steamboat museum bill in the legislature.  The opportunity to help do something great for my town and my state forced me back into coat and tie more times in the last four months than I have worn them in the last four years. I found that I was regularly turning the wrong way to get to a meeting with a legislator in the most efficient way.  I had forgotten my way around the Capitol.

I confess there are some things I liked about being a lobbyist and being back in the capitol while the legal sausage was being made.  In all of my years as a reporter, my contacts with legislators were arms-length business arrangements.  As a lobbyist I got to spend a half-hour or more—sometimes less—in the office talking to lawmakers. And I met some REALLY interesting people, particularly the members of this year’s freshman class.

But, boy, did I miss my guilt-free naps. (A few times I hid behind a column in a side gallery of the House and snatched a doze—but those instances sometimes ran afoul of a school group that came in to see five minutes of debate that I’m sure didn’t teach them a darned thing about their government in action.  Or inaction.) And living by my own clock.  And going around in tennis shoes all day.  And going to the Y three days a week for the fellowship there that replaced the relationships I had while I was working.

But the chambers are dark and cool now.  And my naps have returned.  Until January when we take a stronger, better organized run at building a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City.  You’re welcome to join the effort.

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It was interesting to know that some things haven’t changed at all.  About three weeks before the end of the session, the place starts to get kind of squirrelly.  That’s about when the House gets all huffy because the Senate hasn’t turned fully to debating House-passed bills. And the Senate gets in a snit because the House hasn’t switched to Senate-passed bills.  And the budget isn’t done with the deadline looming.

 

In the second week, a purported compromise budget comes out and the chambers start and stop on no particular schedule depending on who’s filibustering what bill or which chamber thinks its conferees didn’t stand up for their chamber’s priorities, and whether to stop the entire process to have more conferences on a small part of a multi-billion dollar budget, and the Senate decides a “day” can actually last until sunrise the next morning or longer.

And the last week when legislators are like desert-crossing cattle who catch a whiff of water in the distance and scramble to get a bill dead a month ago resurrected and added to something moderately akin to the topic, thereby adding to the legend that “nothing is dead in the Senate until the gavel falls at 6 p.m. on the last Friday.”   And, oh, what a blessing that falling gavel is.

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The end of a session today is nothing compared to the days when the odd-year sessions ended at MIDNIGHT on June 15, usually with a “midnight special” appropriations bill just before adjournment that created funding for new programs approved during the session. The only people who knew what was in it likely were the people who hay-baled it together in the closing hours. Pandemonium hardly describes those nights when everybody was beyond exhaustion and more than a few were seriously—shall we say “impaired?”—because of social visits to numerous offices which were well-equipped with adult liquids.

 

And at midnight, many lawmakers went out to the Ramada Inn to celebrate surviving another session.  The Capitol press corps would start writing stories about the session, a process that was not nearly as much fun as falling in the swimming pool at the Ramada. Both groups would pack it in about sunrise—except for those of us who had newscasts all day Saturday.

One of the best things the legislature ever did was change the adjournment time to 6 p.m. on a Friday night.

Now—-

If we could only get rid of term limits now—–

 

Adjournment!

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The sound of a gavel at 6 p.m. on the last day of a legislative session is the sound of freedom, of welcome relief for lawmakers, lobbyists, staff members, reporters, and others who for weeks have been under growing pressure to grasp success in the face of rapidly shrinking time. Within minutes after the gavel falls, the roads out of Jefferson City will be occupied by cars with license places beginning with the letters S and R, followed by their district numbers, speeding homeward and back to real life.

The members of the first session of the 100th General Assembly of the State of Missouri will repeat actions hundreds of their legislative ancestors knew well long ago. The capitol press corps will have a few hours to recap the day for it can go home, also exhausted but buoyed by the relief that adjournment brings them to.

The correspondent for the Liberty Tribune wrote at the end of a very long March 2, 1855, “As it is late at night and I am worn down with fatigue, and constant application, I beg leave to do as the Dutchman’s team did in the sands of the Mexican desert—just quit.”  His column was published in the March 16 edition.

Yet, before I take my final leave of you, Mr. Editor, I would like to picture to your mind’s eye the scene of the last day of the session.  The day was bright and balmy—a lovely spring day with its light and shade—its sun and its showers—gay groups of ladies in and about the Capitol—Old Nature was loosing the bands of winter, and the tide of the mighty stream that sweeps the base of the capitol was rapidly increasing in strength. The shrill whistle of the steamboat at the wharf called away one-third of the members, with hearts buoyant to see their long-absent wives, sweet-hearts and little ones. The stage coaches were all filled and crammed with departing members and their trunks and sacks of public documents to enlighten the dear people. Private vehicles were rattling along the streets loaded to the guards with absconding legislators. All was bustle, hurry, confusion, mixture and disorder. The confusion of tongues at Babel, or the cloven tongues on the day of Pentecost, could scarcely have been more wonderful or picturesque. The Speaker’s hammer, the very symbol of authority, was as little heeded as the woodpecker’s tattoo, on the hollow tree.  Several ineffectual efforts were made to introduce bills—to call up bills—to make reports—to pass resolutions &c.  A member would rise at his desk and at the top of his voice cry out Mr. Speaker! A dozen voices at the same time, still a little louder. Mr. Speaker! Rap, rap, rap goes the Speaker’s gavel. Another member shouts out Mr. Speaker, I move to have the St. Louis riot act read, as this appears to be “an unlawful assemblage of persons!” At length, after many attempts to do business, within a thin and disorderly house, a resolution was passed deferring all the business on the clerk’s table and in the hands of the committees, until the first Monday in November next. Resolutions were then passed by both houses, notifying his excellency, Gov. Sterling Price, that they had completed their business for the present sitting, and appointing a committee to wait upon him with a copy of the resolutions.—In a short time the committee returned stating that the Governor had no further communications to make with either house of the General Assembly. A motion was then put and carried to adjourn over to the first Monday of November next.  Then, sir, scatterment took place which I shall not further attempt to describe.

Yours respectively, Publius.

The legislature in those days met in the winter months after the crops were in and before the next planting season.  It was allowed to carry over unpassed bills from one year to the next within the two-year session.  A lot of things have changed in the 164 years since “Publius” filed his report. But one thing remains.

When the gavel falls at 6 p.m. today, scatterment will take place once again.

 

Why wait to become a victim?

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We have talked to about 115 members of the legislature about the bill to build a national steamboat museum in Jefferson City that will house the holdings of the Arabia Steamboat Museum when its lease runs out in Kansas City in 2026

A few of them have told us casino interests have talked to them, too. That’s not unexpected because the primary financing for the museum projects we’re talking about comes from increasing the casinos’ admission fee by a dollar—which would eat into the annual windfall casinos get because the fee has not changed since it was established in law a quarter-century ago although the value of the dollar has.

We’ve been told of a couple of the messages given to some of these lawmakers.

First: that the casinos will come after them in 2020 if they vote for our bill.

Second: for those with casinos in their districts, that they’ll be blamed for any employee layoffs at their casinos if they vote to increase the admission fee.

As far as the second issue goes: That’s so much dishwater.  And we have the numbers to prove that casino employment has nothing to do with admission fees; it’s a function of the number of people playing casino games—-and that number hit its lowest level in twenty years in the last fiscal year, leaving casinos with about 25% fewer employees than they had a few years ago—something we’re pretty sure they’ve never mentioned to their home communities.

And that gets us to—-

Some advice for legislators who have gotten these messages or will get them—or some other message intended to influence their votes on our issue. And it holds true any time someone threatens retaliation for your vote—on whatever issue.

Go after THEM. First.

Don’t keep it a secret.  Don’t wait to become their victim.

Remember who you are.  You are the one who writes the laws, not them.  You are the one charged by your constituents with watching out for their broader interests, which might not be the best interests of a smaller but influential interest.

You are the one who supports something good for all Missourians rather than bowing to pressure from a few very well-to-do special interests whose only concern is how much money they can take out of the state.

You are the one who goes home for long weekends during the legislative session. You are the one who is in your district every day seven months of the year.  You are the one who talks to folks at the coffee shop or the restaurant.  You are the ones who speak to the civic clubs. You are the ones who send out a newsletter to your constituents. You are the ones likely to be interviewed on the hometown radio station or by the local newspaper—which might print your newsletters.

You are the one who can tell the folks at home the things the industry won’t.

You control the message every day, every week, not just at campaign time. You are the one who has every opportunity to explain why you have supported the broad public interest in the face of the narrower interests that think they can force you to let them write the laws that govern their operations.

Opponents of legislation such as our steamboat museum bill hope you won’t tell your constituents what they’ve said to you.  But you have every opportunity to do it.  And we can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t.

A few years ago, several legislators were told that if they didn’t vote the way a powerful private citizen wanted them to vote, they would find themselves facing well-financed opponents backed by the private citizen’s checkbook.  All of them won—after telling their constituents about the effort to bully them.

Let’s also be clear that there is nothing wrong with someone supporting a candidate that has views different from your own, views that might be more favorable to those who differ with you politically and philosophically. You should have to defend yourself in the competition of ideas.

But you don’t have to wait silently for someone to make you the victim they say you will become because you cast your vote for a greater public good than theirs.

Remember who you are.

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