They never give up, do they?

The newest trick by the casino industry to escape any taxes on another slug of money removed from customers’ pockets has been heard by a House committee.  No action’s been taken and it’s likely too late in the session for this latest scheme to make it into the statute books. But there’s always next year.

If the bill somehow passes this year, that casinos will take another $100,000,000–plus out of Missouri in the next four years. And big boatloads annually after that.

It’s another broken promise by the industry.

Since the day casino gambling was legalized in Missouri, most of the tax on the industry’s adjusted gross receipts has been earmarked for education. For 25 years, that’s been okay with the casinos.

Not anymore.

A trend that could, in time, wipe out all of the gambling money going to education has been gaining momentum in the last four years.  The casinos are giving out coupons to customers allowing them to get free plays at machines and gaming tables. And they seem to be giving out more and more.   The legislative fiscal oversight office says the growth in taxes collected by the state in the last four years from these free play coupons has averaged 8.73%.  In Fiscal 2018, the state collected $37.8 million dollars from those taxes. Thirty-four million went to the “gaming proceeds for education” fund. The rest went to the home docking cities.  More about that later.

The casinos think there should be no tax charged on the money casinos take in from people using those free play coupons. None. They propose completely phasing out the 21% tax on money they make from these promotions in the next five years.

Some if this is kind of technical so I ran it past an accountant who gave me some help. When you read the technical stuff, that is the part from my advisor.

Here’s how it would work.

Suppose you wager $100 at the casino, twenty dollars from the coupon the casino has given you and eighty more out of your own pocket. You win $40 (half of it from the coupon and half of it from your own pocket).  You walk out of the casino sixty dollars in the hole.  The casino, by giving you a twenty-dollar coupon has made sixty dollars.

That’s how the current law works.  The state collects 21% of the sixty dollars you left behind, or $12.60.

The argument from the casino side seems to be that the $20 coupon comes from the casino’s previously-taxed adjusted gross receipts.  So it shouldn’t have to pay tax again when the $20 comes back.

The industry claims it recognizes only $80 in revenue, that it paid out $40, so its adjusted gross receipts are forty dollars, not sixty and therefore owes the state only $8.40, one-third less than the present law requires.

Whatever.

What the casinos want is to pay NO tax. The bill says, “Promotional play receipts shall not be taxed after June 30, 2023.”

Thus, the bill seems from here to say the casino that gets a business tax deduction with its promotional coupon would be excused from paying any gaming taxes on adjusted gross receipts generated by that coupon when it is gambled.

My accountant friend thinks the casinos are creating an un-level playing field (imagine that, casinos have tilted tables!) where the wagers are not taxed but the patron winnings from those wagers are still allowed to be deducted from the casino gross receipts, thus lowering the casino’s AGR taxes.

There’s an even greater hazard here.

The casinos want to pay no taxes on promotional play receipts. There is nothing in this bill that prohibits casinos from issuing promotional play coupons to every customer. And as the oversight division of fiscal research points out, the casinos’ use of promotional play has been increasing.

Fiscal research estimates the state will collect $244,650,481 under the existing 21% tax on promotional play between this fiscal year (FY2019) and FY2023.  If the present tax says in effect—as it has all this time—the state would collect an additional $62,457,772 in FY2024 and each year after that.

BUT if this bill passes this year and the tax rate is gradually reduced to zero, the state would collect only $138,624,390 during that same period, and would collect nothing in FY2024 and every year after that.  That’s a loss of $106,026,891 during that phase-in period plus the $62.4 million each year afterwards. .

But it’s not just the education fund that will get hurt with this demand from the casinos.  Ten percent of the adjusted gross receipts tax goes to the home dock cities that already are seeing their funding reduced because the dollar they get from casino admission fees isn’t worth anywhere near a dollar.  Fiscal research estimates they will lose $10,602,610 by the end of FY2023 and will lose $6,245,777 each year after that.

Many years ago the casino industry agreed that the tax on adjusted gross receipts would go for education with a little bit to the home dock cities.  At that time all of the promotional play was taxed. If this bill passes, hundreds of millions of dollars more will go to casino corporate headquarters instead of being used to underwrite a small percentage of Missouri’s school funding and meet additional costs the home dock communities have because they have welcomed a casino.

As usual, the casinos get richer and richer while the causes that are supposed to benefit from casino taxes get poorer and poorer.

Just another example of an industry that cares not one whit about the people of Missouri, its education system, or even for the communities that think they’re great corporate citizens.

They’re not.

But they never give up, do they?

The man who isn’t there (but he really is)

Some of the sports wagering bills going through the legislature’s digestive process this year bring to mind Hughes Mearns poem that begins:

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there…

Some bills establish a process by which someone can bet on sporting events remotely.  But whether in doing so they are the person who isn’t there is open to question.  So today, let’s look at the casino industry’s efforts to avoid paying admission fees for the largest segment of new gamblers it hopes to attract by legalizing sports betting, people the industry thinks should not be considered there.

This issue is important for the Missouri Gaming Commission’s worthy causes—including veterans homes and cemeteries—and for the casino industry’s home dock cities, which also rely on income from the casino admission fees. And, of course, there’s the museums proposal from Jefferson City that also asks for admissions fee money.

Reading the bills instead of just listening to the casino industry explain them raises or should raise some red flags. We will raise a few today—and we won’t even get much into the industry’s effort to direct the conversation in the direction of how much it is willing to be taxed.

Casino attendance has been declining since its peak in FY 2010-2011, dropping in fiscal year 2018 to its lowest level in twenty years. Casinos hope that opening sports books in the casinos will draw people back, particularly new people, and those new people will discover other kinds of gaming while they’re there for sports wagering.

It’s unlikely to produce a BIG turnaround in attendance, certainly nothing that will return casinos to the halcyon days when they were reporting fifty-million admissions or more (a decade ending in fiscal year 2012). But as the bills are now written, it will add millions to the casinos profits, although a relatively small amount compared to the overall adjusted gross receipts, largely because they don’t think about seventy percent of the sports bettors should be counted as casino admissions.  We’ll confront that strategy in a minute.

The proposed legislation gives our thirteen casinos a monopoly on sports betting. The bills require casinos to have a specific area set aside and staffed within the casino to handle those bets. A person who enters the casino wanting to bet that the Cardinals will beat the Cubs by more than fifteen runs must go to that specifically defined area where that person will offer to make a wager.  The casino will accept that offer and, when the final score is St. Louis 19, Chicago 3, the bettor will be paid.  If the score is 19-4, the casino keeps the bettor’s money.  The acceptance, handling, processing and final resolution of the bet is handled within that prescribed area of the casino.

But the casinos also want to allow betting through use of computer, whether it’s a big desktop tower or a cell phone or maybe the increasingly sophisticated things people put on their wrists these days. And that is likely to be most of the sports bettors.  They call it “remote” betting although some definitions of “remote” are debatable.

A webpage that keeps track of gaming trends in Nevada and elsewhere, playnevada.com, reports that 70 percent of all sports wagering in New Jersey, the first state to legalize online sports betting after last year’s Supreme Court ruling, were placed online.  It also reported Nevada, which seemingly has video gambling machines in every supermarket, business, bathroom, airport terminal, and anywhere else that people go, reports mobile sports wagering is used from twenty-five percent to more than fifty percent of the betting in Nevada’s many sportsbooks.  It’s difficult in Nevada’s case to be more specific because—and this is something we might come back to in a later post for a different reason—Nevada does not separate mobile and on-site wagering. That’s why it’s harder in Nevada than it is in New Jersey to determine what percent of sports wagering is done outside casinos.

Missouri’s proposed legislation would separate on-site wagering from remote wagering, which could be detrimental to veterans services or to home-dock communities that rely on in-person wagering in the sports book area but also could provide a major increase in casino profits. Missouri’s casinos want it that way and expect the legislature to rubber-stamp the idea.

As we compose this, we don’t know the final form sports wagering legislation will have if it makes it to the governor this year.  So we’re going to construct a scenario based on common provisions in the bills and a few differing provisions in some bills.

Missouri’s proposals don’t let just anybody dial a casino, and bet on sports. A bettor first has to go to the casino (where that person presumably will have to enter, thus triggering a two-dollar admission fee for the state) and register, open a betting account, and get a password.  That person then can leave and bet from anywhere in Missouri.  At least one proposal allows betting from other states if the other state lets Missourians place bets there.  It’s called reciprocity. On the other hand is a proposal that allows betting a few feet from the gambling area—-which doesn’t sound very “remote.”

If those provisions are in the bill that gets passed, the way will be clear for Betting Bertie to place a bet in say, Boonville, even if he is in Bevier.  He does. And he loses. Since he was not in the casino personally there is no admission fee paid to the state.  The bucks Betting Bertie of Bevier bet at Boonville go straight to the boat’s bottom line. The casino gets richer. The veterans and the home dock community get no benefit at all from this increased business because Betting Bernie doesn’t set his boots inside the Boonville boat.  At least that’s the way things are proposed.

Now comes the part likely to get the casino industry lathered up.

We argue, and we would bet that a number of members of the legislature might agree, that requiring Betting Bertie to physically go to Boonville to register as a bettor constitutes the creation of a presence within the sports book area. The bills require casinos to keep detailed records in the casino of Bertie’s betting.

If Betting Bertie does not place a bet, it’s as if he’s not present that day. But if he does put down a bet that is accepted by the casino, processed by the casino, and paid off by the casino in the sports book area as required, he has activated that established presence and has electronically entered that casino.  And because the casino has accepted the bet, processed it, and paid it, it has acknowledged that he has had that presence in that casino.

Because the casino has decided to admit him to the sportsbook area with his bet, the two-dollar admission fee should apply as surely to him as it would apply to someone who walked in. A bet is a bet whether it is made by someone sitting in a comfortable chair staring at all the big screen teevees or whether it is made by someone sitting in an office chair in Bevier.  Both parties have entered the casino, one physically and the other electronically. Admission is admission—at least if the casino wants either bettor’s money. It cannot get Bertie’s money if it does not acknowledge the presence it as established for him by accepting his application and giving him his password.

Casinos will argue that physical and electronic admissions are different. But the end result is the same—the casino is most likely to win and the principle of winning is the same whether that person walks in or phones in. There is no bet if there is no acknowledged presence.

To put it more directly: The casino recognizes the arrival of the electronic bettor because it maintains a space for that person’s arrival thanks to the required registration and subsequent password issuance.  The password is the equivalent of the turnstile the on-site bettor has to go through to place a bet.

By making the password the electronic equivalent of the turnstile, the legislature can make sure that casinos don’t game the system further than they already do by claiming seventy percent of sports betting is different from the on-site betting, thus benefitting only the casino and not improving funding for veterans (and others) and home dock cities. The casino industry likes to cite Las Vegas practices in advocating a part of this bill and remember: Nevada does not separate mobile and on-site betting.

There is precedent within existing law that argues for our point.

If free passes or complimentary admission tickets are issued, the excursion boat licensee shall pay to the commission the same fee upon these passes or complimentary tickets as if they were sold at the regular and usual admission rate.

The provision kept casinos in the early days when real excursions were anticipated from declaring that everyone entering the gaming floor had been given a free pass or complimentary ticket.  As proposed statutes are written now, electronic entrance to the gaming floor and remote placement of bets is the equivalent of a free pass or complimentary ticket that, without existing law, would be treated as a non-admission. A strong argument can be made that it should not be considered as any kind of a free pass or complimentary ticket. And we suspect there are people who would support the concept—veterans groups and home-dock communities for example—who would be losers because the casinos are proposing an end-run around the admissions issue.  Why shouldn’t these bills consider remotely-placed bets to be “admissions” when the bets are received, processed, and (if necessary) paid in the casino or on behalf of the casino by a third party that conducts the wagering at the casino?

The answer is simple: the casinos don’t want them treated that way because if remote betting is not considered an “admission” there is no admission fee obligation to the state and to the host communities.  The casino thus increases its gross receipts without increasing any payments for veterans homes and cemeteries or home-dock communities and other causes. As we’ve noted before, they’re already getting tens of millions of dollars in windfalls because the admission fees are not inflation-adjusted each year and they fight aggressively if anyone suggests they should be.  By not considering remotely-placed but in-house processed bets as “admissions” their windfall will get windier.

Some additional proposed language that on first blush seems to be fairly benign appears on second blush to be much less than that.  Here’s how that works:

One of the bills appears to make that point when it says, “All sports wagers…shall be deemed initiated, received, and otherwise made on the property of an excursion gambling boat within this state.”  While that language would appear to support the points just made, please note the phrase “on the property.” Another bill seems to clarify that wording by saying sports bettors can wager on sports at “a hotel, restaurant, or other amenity that is operated by the certificate holder and subject to the supervision of the (gaming) commission.” A restaurant twenty feet from the turnstile to the gaming floor is an okay place “on the property” from which to place a bet. We suspect there are some folks who don’t think that quite qualifies as “remote.”

The definition of “on the property” is troublesome.  On one hand, the casino must establish a specific area where sports wagering is done and processed by the casino. On the other hand are suggestions that someone can be anywhere, even right outside the turnstile leading to the casino, or in a room of a hotel owned by the casino. These provisions seem to sanction avoidance of physically entering the specified area or of even entering the broader casino betting floor while on casino property, thus avoiding an “admission” and thus avoiding the two-dollar admission fee..

That is why it is important that the use of the password—from wherever—should constitute entrance to (or admission to) the specific area set aside for sports wagering and thus trigger the admission fee.

We hope the General Assembly’s final version of a sports wagering bill does not allow the casinos to ignore existing standards that require admission fees—that help veterans, home-dock communities and others—for seventy-percent of those the industry hopes to lure inside its specified sports betting areas physically as well as electronically.

—because the man who isn’t there

really will be there.

Casino abuse

Missouri’s casino industry is feeling abused.

And those of us who want to do something great in Jefferson City are the apparent chief abusers.

Takes one to know one.

We’ve now had committee hearings in both the House and the Senate on the Steamboat Legacy Fund bill that suggests Missouri’s casino industry be the main funding source for the creation of a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, the construction of a Missouri State Museum that has been needed for ninety years, and the conversion of the present state museum space into a Capitol Museum/Visitor Center that focuses on the history of the capitol and the function of state government.  Our goal is to do all of this without state funds and without any general tax increase.

In each hearing, the casino industry has complained that it’s being picked on because we (a small group of Jefferson City residents who have been working on these goals for more than a year) think the industry has capitalized on—–no, the proper phrase is “taken advantage of”—Missouri’s steamboat heritage for more than a quarter-century.

The casino industry thinks we’re picking on it by telling the truth about it.  We think the casino industry has earned the right to provide the financial base to accomplish these goals. 

We’ll start showing you why today.

The attempt to portray yourself as the victim when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar is as old as cookies and jars.

The casinos aren’t victims. But there are victims—Missouri’s veterans and the home communities of the casinos in particular.  We’re going to show you how it happens by using numbers from three sources: Missouri Gaming Commission annual reports for the last 25 years, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  And one other source: the casino industry itself.

Let’s begin this explanation with the parable of the 1994 pickup truck.  That was the year the first two casinos opened in Missouri. It was near the end of fiscal 1993-1994.  During that year, legislation went into effect establishing the two-dollar admission fee for casinos.

It’s important to understand that casino patrons do not pay that fee.  The casinos do, based on the number of people who gamble.

We won’t go into detail about how that number was established except to note that it goes back to the time when the industry convinced Missourians to allow casino gambling here by selling the image of steamboats cruising our great rivers on two-hour cruises while people could gamble (but lose no more than $500 per cruise). Each time someone went on a cruise, they would pay two dollars. One of those dollars was for the Missouri Gaming Commission and it’s “worthy causes” (more about those in a minute).  The other dollar went to the city and county that had a casino to offset the extra costs of public services because of the presence of a casino.  Leftover funds were used for capital improvements in those towns.  When the image of steamboats on our great rivers turned rather quickly into so-called boats in so-called moats the casinos decided not to charge patrons to enter the gambling floor. Instead the casinos counted noses and wrote checks to the state, probably making up that expense in charges for food and beverage, hotel rooms and the like, which is how the industry says it would make up for the dollar we are seeking for the museums project.

There is no doubt the host cities have made good use of that money.  But in the process they have become victims of their casino.

If the city street department in one of the first two casino towns bought a Ford F-150 four-wheel drive extended cab long-bed pickup truck in 1994, it might have paid the MSRP of $18,607.  By 2018 the truck badly needed to be replaced. But the price of a new Ford F-150 four-wheel drive, extended cab, long-bed truck, was $40,010.

The price of pickup trucks has doubled, and more.  But the city is still getting a dollar.  And it’s not a 2018 dollar.  It’s still 1993 dollar. And it’s not worth a dollar any more

The legislature in 1993 didn’t think to include an inflation adjustment clause when it set that two-dollar fee and the casino industry has successfully insisted the legislature not correct that shortcoming.

The inflation calculators at the BLS and the Minneapolis Fed tell us that the equivalent of $2 in 1993 was $3.41 in 2018.  The host city in 2018 got a dollar per admission at its casino.  Had there been an inflation clause built into that 1993 law they would have gotten a dollar-seventy.  Plus another half cent.

And the situation is worse for the city because those webpage inflation calculators show the dollar they DID get in FY18 had the purchasing power of only 58 ½ cents.

Does the casino industry give a hoot?  Suggesting this avaricious industry should care about making sure its thirteen host communities receive a dollar that is worth a dollar will bring forth claims that such suggestions make the industry a victim somehow.

The other half of the two-dollar admission fee goes to the Missouri Gaming Commission which takes its annual operating costs out and then distributes the rest to a list of “worthy causes.”  Those causes have varied through the years but the biggest beneficiary in 2018 was the Missouri Veterans Commission Capital Improvement Trust Fund, which funds veterans’ homes and cemeteries.  Last year it got about $22 million.   In 1993 dollars.  While the casinos were hauling in 2018 dollars from people who thought they could go to a casino and win, the veterans homes and cemeteries were getting dollars worth 58 ½ cents in purchasing power..

In fiscal year 2018, the difference between a 1993 two-dollar admission fee and its 2018 equivalent value ($3.41) was more than $56 million dollars.

Where did that money go?  Not to veterans’ programs.  Not to the home dock cities.  That $56 million dollars in windfall profits left Missouri and went to casino corporate headquarters in Nevada and in Pennsylvania.

And each year, because there’s no inflation adjustment in that two dollar admission fee, the windfall gets bigger and bigger.  In the twenty-five years that Missouri has had casinos, the industry has had windfall profits of more than $830,000,000.  That’s as of last June 30.

That’s $830-million that has not gone to programs for veterans, early childhood education, college tuition assistance programs, programs for problem gamblers—and to the host cities.

And when representatives of Jefferson City suggest that about two-thirds of the windfall going forward remain in Missouri to keep a treasure trove of American history from being purchased by a museum in Pennsylvania and moved there, and to satisfy a 90-year need for a state museum that can REALLY tell the story of Missouri and its people and its resources, the casinos whine that we are abusing them.

The casinos will attack any proposal to make two-dollar admission fees worth two dollars.  And anybody who suggests it, or who suggests (as we have) that using part of the huge annual windfall profit casinos realize for something benefitting Missourians is making the casinos victims somehow, and we should be ashamed to suggest it. .

Reviewing every annual report of the Missouri Gaming Commission makes this clear: The casinos get richer ever year by paying the state in 1993 money.  The state gets poorer because the programs and services that admission fee goes for cost 2018 dollars to operate.

We know that casinos are not built because their patrons have an even chance of winning.  The tables are always tilted in the casinos’ favor.  The tables tilt even more with each passing year that they pay the state two dollars in admission fees.

An industry spokesman has accused those of us supporting this measure of suggesting the casinos make too much money.  As is often the case with statements from the industry, it’s less than truthful and is intended to deflect attention away from the issues. It’s not the amount of money the casinos make, it’s how much they KEEP, how they keep it, and how they are adamantly opposed to any idea that the two-dollar admission fee should be changed so that veterans and home dock communities get dollars that are worth dollars.

Now, having beaten up on these “victims,” let’s acknowledge some important things.

The casinos have broken no laws. They are paying what the law requires them to pay.  Whether they are keeping faith with Missourians who voted to have majestic steamboats cruising our rivers or keeping faith with those who thought two dollars was going to be worth two dollars is another issue.  But they have not broken any laws.

They have said in the committee hearings that they have met every obligation the state has put on them.  And they have. And they sure don’t want the state to update any laws that make one of their obligations be that dollars be worth dollars.

They say they provide thousands of Missourians with jobs.  And they do.  Not nearly as many as they used to—which they don’t talk about publicly—but they do provide thousands of jobs that pay millions and millions of dollars in wages and benefits.

They pay a lot of property taxes and in some places they pay for leases of city or county land for their boats in moats. Not much to sympathize about there. Those are costs of doing business.

Here’s another indication that the casinos don’t much care about anything but how many dollars they can take out of Missouri:

Last year, Missouri’s casinos had almost one-and-three quarters BILLION dollars in adjusted gross receipts (income minus payouts for the minority of customers who won anything).  And by the time they deducted the expenses the gaming commission forces them to report, the industry still had about $820-million left, including the $56-million in windfall profits from the admission fees.

Here’s another example of how our casinos don’t really care for much more than taking as many dollars out of Missouri pockets as they can:

The gaming commission requires the casinos to report their charitable giving each year.   Last year the thirteen casinos donated about $940,000 to charities.  If asked, they’d probably point to that number with a lot of emphasis and pride.  They like to do that kind of thing.

But it’s not what they say. It’s what they DON’T say that is important in understanding their avarice.

The charitable contributions last year were just .00054% of their adjusted gross receipts.  Remember than .01 percent represents one penny per dollar.

One casino with more than $70-million in adjusted gross receipts in FY2018 reported charitable giving of $915.

Your observer seems to be the chief casino abuser, I guess, because I came back from a meeting at the Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City a year ago with the idea that Jefferson City would be a great place for the museum’s new home when the museum’s lease runs out on its city-owned building in Kansas City in 2026. And our working group thinks an industry that has taken advantage of our steamboat heritage to make billions and billions of dollars should help preserve the heritage of the steamboats.

If the plan that our working group has developed in the last year constitutes casino abuse, all of us willingly plead guilty.

So the casinos accuse of abusing them, of making them some kind of victims.  Read the numbers again. And think about who is—and wants to remain—an abuser.

The question then becomes: Who really is abusing the system: a citizens group that wants to use casino money to create something good—great—for our state or the group that wants to truck as much money as it can out of the state for its own enrichment?

The problem can be corrected.  All it takes is 82 courageous members of the Missouri House and eighteen courageous members of the Missouri Senate who will vote for boats that are not in moats but whose cargoes are instead in museums or are waiting under farm fields for their stories to be brought to the surface.

The casinos have made billions of dollars from the heritage of those boats.  Giving back a relative few million to honor the importance of steamboats to America—and to casino development in Missouri—isn’t going to make any casino executives jump off the top floor of Wynn’s in Las Vegas.

More later.

 

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

Notes from a quiet street (composed on a cold and dreary March day)

Think the “me too” movement is new?   Consider this report from the Union Franklin County Tribune of December 12, 1913:

“Because Mike Kincannon of Joplin, a patrolman on the police force, told the wife of a prominent railroad man to ‘go home and get some clothes on’ when he saw her on the street wearing a slit skirt, his resignation was demanded by Chief of Police J. H. Myers.  Complaint of the patrolman’s orders to the woman were filed by the woman’s husband.”

(Isn’t that a little intriguing? Some creative writer could take that story and structure various narratives stemming from at least two questions: Why was the woman (especially a married woman) wearing a “slit skirt” on the street in those days?  Why did the husband complain? And what happened to Kincannon after that? What did HIS wife tell him after hearing of the comment? This, my friends, is a potential short story on the hoof.)

000

By now we all should have learned to consider March with suspicion.  December was a plunge into the darkness and cold of winter. January was the depths but that faint light in the distance was February which, while still not pleasant, at least raise hopes with the realization that it was a short month and by the end of it men would be playing baseball and racing cars again. Then comes March and we inevitably expect more of it than it deserves. Even the spring solstice on March 21 does not bring lasting relief.  Although April is considered the “cruelest month,” it nonetheless brings us greening grass and budding trees and the promise of May. Let us be patient and tolerant of March.  It cannot help itself.

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We were talking to a friend the other day who has heard confident predictions that President Trump could be elected for four more years in 2020. “The chances are good that he’ll get the nomination as long as political parties have ‘Winner Take All’ or ‘Winner Take Most’ primaries in which someone with thirty percent of the vote gets one-hundred percent of the delegates,” she said.  “If political parties had proportional primaries, conventions might be worth paying attention to again. The 2016 Republican convention sure would have been if the primaries had been proportional in awarding delegates.”

I didn’t ask her when she’d start wearing a MCGA hat—Make Conventions Great Again.

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Governor Parson knows that we can’t keep letting our roads and bridges turn to rust and rubble.  That’s why he’s out banging the drum for his bond issue proposal.  He really doesn’t have much of a choice, given voter resistance to any kind of a fuel tax increase that might keep a school bus or two from winding up in a creek.  But there’s a cost that does with issuing bonds.

All of us who ever borrowed money—whether it was to buy a car, a house, a daughter’s wedding, or to pay some backed-up bills—knows that we’ll have to pay off those loans.  And making payments on loans reduces the amount of money in our general bank account, limiting our choices in buying food, taking vacations, buying some nice things from time to time.

Because we as citizens refuse to pay for it now, we’ll pay for it later.  A long time later.

But somebody has to do something to keep school buses out of creeks.

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The city council in Jefferson City passed a resolution Monday night urging every citizen of the town who comes in contact with members of the legislature to tell them how much it would mean to the city to build a national steamboat museum here. Legislative employees, landlords who rent space to lawmakers, businesses that serve them food and libations, stores that sell them clothes or tires—anybody who sees a legislator needs to get in their ears about passing the bills financing this museum project, says the resolution in so many words.

Yes, I instigated it.  Not sure how the Missouri Ethics Commission will handle registering an entire city as a lobbyist but if it does figure it out, I’ll pay the ten dollar registration fee.

 

How long?

Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged.  A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean.  There are limits.  Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged.  A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years.  The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.

At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?”  The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever.  But the new law offers new opportunities for many.

We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.

Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term.  Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust.   But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.

Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.

We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature.  He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001.  Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison.  We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.

At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.

One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”

Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”

A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.”  Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.

But Griffin did have his contemporary critics.  One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”

And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”

It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership.  It got two new state prisons.

Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians.  After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there.  Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.

And that brings us to this:  While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian.  But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians.  A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office.  But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.

Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory.  Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.

Bob Griffin was no saint.  But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters?  Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness?  Ever.

Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”

?

 

 

 

 

I am a lobbyist

I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.

For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to.  But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.

I have become one of “them.”

No pay is involved.  This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.

The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.

I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about.  I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.

Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me.  Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever,  are represented in the halls of government.  Old person?  AARP has someone.  Concerned about justice for yourself and others?  The ACLU is there.  Want good education in Missouri?  Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in?  Transportation interests have lobbyists.

Against something?  There are lobbyists for that, too.

They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle.  There is room in the hallway for the little guy.  It’s kind of intimidating to be one.  But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.

I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years.  And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock.  It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.

But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.

I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying.  ARE THERE ethics in lobbying?   Well, of course there are.  The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.

It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists.  And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.

A lobbyist shall:

  • Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
  • Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
  • Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
  • Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
  • Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
  • Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
  • Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
  • Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
  • Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
  • Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.

As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult.  Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic.  Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations.  Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.

I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue.  I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ.  I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views.  Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.

Not that it matters to me, really.  I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest.   I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.

So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist.  Didn’t want to.  But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.

I have to file my first monthly expenditure report.  Zero.

But I’m in trouble.   I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.

Bob Priddy, Lobbyist.  Never in my wildest dreams…..

 

Josh and Bill

Some capitol graybeards are watching the developing investigation of suspicions that Attorney General Josh Hawley used public money to further his successful campaign to oust Senator Claire McCaskill. We’re watching because we remember when another young, charismatic Missouri Attorney General who seemed to be a Republican shooting star crashed and burned.

Can it happen again? Let’s just wait and see.

The fact that it’s another Republican statewide office holder who has triggered this investigation adds some heft to the issue. And Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s successful involvement of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, in the investigation because she has subpoena powers adds more.

Hawley proclaims innocence—just as Bill Webster did throughout the long federal investigation against him while he was successfully winning the Republican nomination for governor in 1992, beating State Treasurer Wendell Bailey and Secretary of State Roy Blunt in the primary.

Circumstances will show whether Hawley’s “innocence” is genuine or whether it’s as flimsy in the end as Webster’s often-claimed “innocence” was all those years ago.

Public officials under investigation are right to maintain their innocence for two reasons. First, our justice system operates on the proposition that all of us are innocent until proven guilty.  Second, it’s important that those who supported the office holder with their money and their votes continue to believe that person is above the suspicion swirling around him or her. While confession might be good for the soul, it’s disastrous for the career.  People have survived close scrutiny, even charges and trials, and gone on to useful political careers.

But here’s something about investigations of public officials.  Once one gets started, there’s no   telling where it’s going to go.

We told friends about  a year ago that the suggestions of sexual impropriety against Eric Greitens were a she-said-he-said matter.  But, we suggested, if a prosecutor stepped in, things were suddenly much more serious.  And if a grand jury was convened, all of the cards would be wild and who knows where the story would go. The Greitens story escalated pretty rapidly and Greitens left office to keep things from becoming even more serious, particularly on issues not connected with the first suspicions, and before light was shined on his dark money supporters.

So it was with Bill Webster, son of a powerful state senator; some said he was more powerful than some governors although he was a Republican, which then was the minority party.  Some analysts thought that Dick Webster, who lost a shot at the being attorney general in 1952 and a chance to run for governor four years later, groomed Bill to reach political levels the father never could.  He provided a good part of the money for Bill’s campaigns for state representative in 1980 and ’82. And in 1984 the elder Webster called in a lot of political IOU’s from various special interests for Bill’s attorney general campaign account. Bill was elected to a second term in 1988.  He had his eyes on the governorship in 1992 as a successor to John Ashcroft (Jay’s father).

But Dick Webster did not survive heart surgery in March of 1990.  State Senator Gary Nodler, who took the elder Webster’s seat in the Missouri Senate, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years later that the death of the father made the son “more driven to succeed.”

The early news stories by investigative reporter Terry Ganey in the Post-Dispatch centered on the Second Injury Fund which compensated employees whose job-related injuries make an earlier health situation worse.  The early suggestions were that a second-injury fund lawyer in the attorney general’s office also was collecting campaign money for Webster’s run for the governor nomination and that private lawyers hired by Webster were getting bigger judgments for their clients than non-Webster friends.  Webster survived the primary election but his reputation took a hit when his former deputy attorney general and a resort developer who had bought some Webster property pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Voters took notice and made Webster a big loser in the race with Mel Carnahan in November.

The investigation shifted to Webster’s use of Attorney General employees and equipment for campaign purposes. A corruption charge was dropped against him in return for a guilty plea on two charges using state resources for political campaign purposes. Almost until the unavoidable end, Webster claimed his innocence.  In fact the federal judge in his case, who ran a multiple-day sentencing hearing, gave Webster an hour at the end to consider whether he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea or whether he wanted to accept his sentence.

He went to prison for 21 months, getting out three months early for good conduct.  When he got out, he went to work for Bartlett and Company, a Kansas City agribusiness firm.  As far as we know, he’s still a Vice-President.  Life didn’t take him where once he wanted to go, but he’s done well.

Today, one of his political descendants is being investigated for using public funds while attorney general to support his senatorial campaign.

Josh Hawley, young, charismatic, is seen by some as a shooting star in the Republican Party.  He’s entitled to proclaim his innocence. It’s unfair to assume that he is another Bill Webster despite circumstances reminiscent of twenty-five years ago.  He has his protectors who say the investigation is baseless and shouldn’t go forward, just as Webster had his protectors.  He has his critics who say smoke equals fire, as Webster did.

Time will answer enough questions, one way or another, as it did in 1992 and ‘93. We can wait.

Convening the session

Almost 200 men and women you and I have chosen to represent us in writing the laws that govern our lives begin their work today at the Capitol.  Some are rookies with high ideals and others are weather-beaten veterans facing the last of their eight or sixteen years making those decisions.

Governor John S. Phelps speaking to the General Assembly on February 8, 1877, said: “I trust we are assembled, not as partisans, but as patriots, with a sincere determination to support the right and to condemn the wrong. We are assembled not to carry out our own wishes, but to respect and speak the voice of the people, restrained within constitutional limits. For a time the destinies of the people of this State have been confided in us, and it is to be hoped our deliberations will be characterized by wisdom, patriotism and justice.”

It would be interesting for this year’s rookies to write down their goals and ambitions, their ethical standards that they hope to carry into their service, and their thoughts about who they represent and seal them into an envelope that will not be opened for, say, twenty years.

Then, as they start their final year in the capitol—whether it be their eighth or their sixteenth—they write their accomplishments, the ethical standards they have at the end and the challengers to them they have faced and the alterations in them they are brave enough to acknowledge, and who they really represented in the end.  Those statements should be sealed in an envelope and not opened until they open the first envelope, enough time having passed that they have a perspective on their years in office that they might have lacked when they closed that second envelope.

We have a lot of documents at the State Historical Society of Missouri.  It would be interesting for future generations of Missourians wanting to study Missouri’s political system to read the contents of those two envelopes.

A year ago a young State Representative facing his last year in the House and with no plans to try to move to the Senate did something like that and what he wrote, published in his constituent newsletter is worth saving. And it’s worth reading every two years by rookies.

Ten years ago, a former State Senator who was seen as a rising star in his party wrote of how his political ambition cost him a career.

We offer these two reflections for consideration by those who begin the 100th session of the General Assembly of the state of Missouri.

Representative Jay Barnes of Jefferson City will be most remembered as the chairman of the committee that investigated the machinations of Governor Eric Greitens and his earlier investigation of the Mamtech scandal in Moberly.  In his newsletter of January 5, 2018, he wrote, in part:

There have been great moments of satisfaction from feeling of a job well done – and moments of gloom from failure. Such is life. Sometimes when I think of the things I’ve learned over these eight years, I think of Bob Seger – “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

As I reflect on my eight years, I noticed something on the House website that puts things in perspective – this week we are beginning the second regular session of the 99th General Assembly. It is the 198th time in our state’s history that this has happened. For those nearly 200 years, our statehouse has been filled with men and women of goodwill – and also a fair share of opportunists, con men, and people whose ambition you could see through a brick wall.

 …Governments are inherently prone to corruption — both the criminal kind and the softer corruption that settles in over time. Soft corruption happens when a legislator sponsors a piece of legislation just because a lobbyist asked, without knowing anything about the subject or asking any questions. It happens when a legislator grows lazy and makes decisions about votes without reading the actual bill or considering what it does, but just asking who’s for it and against it.  

It also happens when their heart or head tells them a vote is wrong, but they do it anyway because of pressure, inertia, an unwillingness to stick their neck out, or for some favor to be traded later. Instead of doing what is right, the path of convenience and personal advantage is taken instead.  Of course, it’s human nature to avoid confrontation and to have ambition. The question is not whether it will happen, but how often and whether it will happen on votes that have serious impact on the lives of people beyond the Capitol’s marble halls.  

A colleague once explained the “favor to be named later” idea to me when he tried to flip my vote on a bill. “I disagree with your no vote, but even you can’t say this is a huge deal,” he said. “And, you know, you may have a bill that comes along where someone else might be on the fence, and you’re gonna need their vote. Why don’t you just throw a vote here, and then when your bill comes up, the favor will get returned?”

This is legislative utilitarianism: the idea that good ends justify bad means to get there. It may help clear a legislator’s conscience if they don’t think too hard about it, but it’s just as flawed as utilitarianism anywhere else. Doing something you believe to be wrong (even if it’s just a little wrong) under the belief that it will have a good result on an unrelated issue can justify nearly anything so long as you are an optimist about that potential good result in the future. And it’s addictive. Once you do it once, it’s all the more difficult to resist the logic the next time around.  I feel that I have resisted the temptation more than most, but I speak from experience: these trades are not worth it. Not even the little ones. They whittle away at your soul, and, as Jesus said in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

There’s no legislative cure for human nature. So, what is to be done? I think the answer for the individual legislator is no different from the answer in the real world: when delusions of grandeur tempt, where ambition or fear of political consequences threaten, it’s time to take a step back and consider the larger picture. Individually, we are insignificant. Legislators do not have legacies. (Nor do governors for that matter.) As a general rule, people do not remember politicians other than the president. The realization of one’s own insignificance and the humility that emanates is a better antidote to corruption than any law ever passed. Instead of serving oneself and ambition, better to serve the Lord, our families, and our communities.

In my eight years, I’ve seen the worst and the best aspects of human nature: greed, pride, vanity, laziness, and vindictiveness are here every day. And so are diligence, humility, sacrifice, charity, and compassion. The Missouri state legislature, is a place where, in spite of our human weaknesses, when things go right — paraphrasing Gov. Nixon —people of goodwill can work together in service to make great differences in the lives of people who will never meet, who will never know our name, and who will never know we ever did anything to help them.

The second document is from another young lawmaker who entered office with high ideals but who found his career far shorter than he thought it would be—-because he failed his own principles. The Post-Dispatch ran an op-ed piece on September 8, 2009 from former State Senator Jeff Smith under the headline “I was stupid and wrong.”   It complements Jay Barnes’ reflection. And it’s from someone who buckled to political utilitarianism.

I once held a position of public trust. I write today as a felon, having broken that trust, and I don’t want anyone to make the terrible mistakes I made.

I thought I could get away with it. If anyone learned of what happened, it would be my word and the word of my friends and staffers against that of a loner with a shady past.

It was easy to think this way. I had arrived on the political scene.

When I decided to run for Congress in 2004, I was a nobody. It was a familiar role. As a boy I was the smallest kid on the court, scrappy and hypercompetitive, and I tried to overcome my political weaknesses with the same drive. Eventually I went from a non-entity to a contender.

As Election Day drew near, I authorized a close friend and two aides to help an outside consultant send out a mailer about my opponent but without disclosing my campaign’s connection.

Fiercely competitive, I was seeking any advantage I could get. I knew that hiding my campaign’s involvement was against the law. I was raised better than that, but I thought the ends justified the means. I was stupid and wrong.

When my opponent filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against me, I wanted to preserve my political future and concealed the misconduct. Instead of taking the hit, I stonewalled, assuming the FEC would not connect the dots.

I was elected to the Missouri Senate in 2006 and was honored to serve my constituents. My dream was fulfilled, and I had a platform to effect social change and fight for the city I love.

In 2007, the FEC cleared my campaign of wrongdoing. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened to me.

Because the lesson I took wasn’t that “I got lucky. What I did was reckless, illegal, and wrong. I won’t break the law again.” My takeaway was, “Whew. I’m home free.”

Wrong again.

In 2009, the FBI obtained new information indicating a cover-up of the original misconduct. They approached me, and I stuck with my earlier account. It was easier for me to lie than to face the scrutiny and embarrassment that would come with accepting responsibility.

I was terrified of admitting anything. My nightmare was for all this to come out: my betrayal of what I thought I stood for and wanted to achieve; my betrayal of supporters and constituents; my parents’ embarrassment reading about my actions in the newspaper, and their shame as friends and neighbors searched for what to say to them and how to say it.

Well, it all came out, and it is worse than I had feared.

I’ve lost what I loved most: serving my district and teaching political science. I have lost the respect of others I cherished and my self-respect — even the ability to look strangers in the eye. And I haven’t even been sentenced yet.

I apologize to my constituents, my Senate colleagues, my family and friends and to anyone who has lost faith in government because of my actions. Telling the truth is the basis of public trust: the minimum I owed my constituents, my family and myself. I am a reminder of the obligation to always be truthful, particularly for those honored to serve the public.

(Jeff Smith resigned from the Missouri Senate effective August 25, 2009 and was sentenced to one year and a day of prison. He also was fined $50,000. Smith was sent to the federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky. He was released early in November, 2010.

Since his release, he’s written a couple of books, lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York, and co-founded Confluence Academies, an organization of charter schools in the St. Louis area.  And he’s done a lot of other stuff.

Jay Barnes has been promoted to private citizenship (as Harry Truman once said after his presidency) and is a lawyer in Jefferson City.  He said in last weekend’s Jefferson City newspaper that he has no interest in returning to politics.

It might be useful every now and then for those who will sit behind the century-old desks the lawmakers first sat behind in January, 1919 to re-read these two reflections, especially toward the session’s end when the challenges are greatest—and think about how the four-and-a-half months they are starting today will have changed them.

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Christmas: Just another working day

Merry Christmas from the Missouri Capitol.
Governor Mike Parson’s office is fully involved in the Christmas season. We don’t recall anything like this in all the years we have covered the capitol. Don’t expect to see him at his desk on Christmas day, however, although there were many times when a lot of people were at their capitol desks at Christmas.
The governor’s office often has been on display during this Christmas season because of something else Governor Parson has done that we’ve never seen done before. The double doors between the capitol hallway and the big oval office are open often with a glass barrier that people can walk up to and look into the office. The doors are closed when he’s doing governor business but at other times they’ve been opened so the visiting public can see the office and its Christmas decorations.
We’ve often thought it’s a shame that capitol visitors don’t get to see that magnificent room.
History tells us that Christmas has been through a lot of changes through the decades. For decades, it was just another day. Not until Victorian times did it begin to assume the secular commercial bonanza it is.
When the state legislature moved from its temporary home in St. Charles to the City of Jefferson, the fourth session of the General Assembly convened on Monday, November 20. Christmas day was just another regular business day, as was New Year’s Day. A reading of the House Journal for December 25, 1826 sounds similar to the House Journals today. It is—as it is now—pretty dry stuff.

MONDAY MORING, DECEMBER 25, 1826
The house met pursuant to adjournment.
Mr. Speaker appointed Messrs., O’Bryan, Grant, Thornton, Jewell, Canole, Bollinger, Nash, Johnson, Bruer, Brinker and Brock as a select committee on an engrossed bill from the senate, entitled an act supplementary to an act to organize, govern and, discipline the militia, approved 11th Feb. l825.
Mr. Grant of the committee of ways and means introduced bill appropriating money for defraying the expenses of government, which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading. On motion of Mr. Watkins, the rules of this house requiring a bill to be read three several times [sic] on-three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on to-day.
On motion, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house. Mr. Harris of the select committee to whom was referred the petition of sundry inhabitants of the counties of Chariton and Ralls, praying for the formation of a new county, reported a bill to establish the new county of Marion which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading.
On motion of Mr. Burckhartt, the rules of this house requiring bills to be read three several times on three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on jo-day,
On motion of Mr. Cook, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house.

The journal continues for several more paragraphs of routine business before the House adjourned until the next day. Representative Jewell, by the way as Dr. William Jewell of Boone County, a founder of Columbia for whom William Jewell College was named. Bollinger was George F. Bollinger, who represented Cape Girardeau in the territorial and state legislatures from 1812 until 1840. When a new county was formed of Cape Girardeau County, it was named for him.
Working on Christmas was not all that unusual in those times. It was seventeen years yet before Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published or that Sir Henry Cole, an Englishman, printed a couple thousand Christmas cards that sold for a shilling each. Christmas would not be declared a federal holiday for forty-four more years.
In 1828, the second general assembly to meet in Jefferson City took December 25 off but was back at work the next day. The practice was common for several years. In 1840, the House took the day off but the Senate did meet on Christmas day, a Friday, and on Saturday the 26th but adjourned both days because it could not achieve a quorum. Business as usual resumed in both chambers on Tuesday the 29th.
The House met on Saturday, December 21, 1844 and transacted business before adjourning until Monday the 23rd. But not enough people showed up to make a quorum again until the afternoon of December 30. The Senate met on Christmas day but only five members answered the roll call. It tried to meet each day after that but didn’t get enough members in the chamber to do official business until the 30th.
Then we get to this entry:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, At the First Session of the Fifteenth General Assembly, begun and held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, the Twenty-Fifth day of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight.
The Senate was called to order by the Hon. JAMES YOUNG, Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate, and FALKLAND H. Martin, Esq., acted as Secretary pro tem.

That’s right. The 1848 legislative session began on Christmas Day. And it happened again just six years later:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, AT THE FIRST SESSION, BEING THE REGULAR SESSION, OF THE EIGHTEENTH GENERAI ASSEMBLY, BEGUN AND HELD AT THE CITY OF JEFFERSON, ON MONDAY THE 25TH DAY OF DECEMBER, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR, THAT BEING THE DAY FIXED BY LAW FOR THE MEETING OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI.

The Senators were called to order at 11 o’clock, A. M., by the Hon. Wilson Brown, Lieutenant Governor, and President of the Senate.

Lt. Governor Brown was one of about thirty people killed in the Gasconade bridge disaster on Nov. 1, 1855, the day the first passenger train was to have arrived from St. Louis.


In this building, long ago, Christmas was just another day for many years. There were times, though, when it appears some members of the general assembly left town for a few days, leaving the House and Senate without enough members to transact business although a few members who lived too far from home in those pre-highway, pre-bridge, pre-railroad days when the rivers were too icy to travel by boat stayed in Jefferson City, a town of no paved streets, few amenities, and fewer than three-thousand people before 1860.
The new Missouri Constitution adopted in 1865 established the January start date for the legislature, ending the winter sessions. Although the observance of Christmas had been slowly building, it was not until the Reconstruction years that December became the biggest month of the year for retail sales.
In a couple of weeks, today’s legislators will start a new session in today’s capitol. By then the Christmas decorations will be gone and the present capitol will feel, as the old one undoubtedly felt, the quickening pulse within it. Christmas and the old year are gone. A new year and new careers soon will begin to take shape. And so will the new journals that somebody else might read 170 years hence.