Category Archives: government

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

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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.)

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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?

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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.”

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I am a lobbyist

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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

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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

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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

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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.

The value of a vote

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Newly-elected members of the Missouri legislature have been going to “legislator school” for a few days, trying to absorb what all those departments, divisions, and institutions look like and are all about;  how to make a speech; how to cast a vote; what cubbyhole office they’ll get (especially on the House side); where the bathrooms are, and so forth.  

 This is only a brief brush with the real world they wanted to join.  The pressure-cooker that is a legislative session will become all too real early next month. We imagine that most of these newbies think they are starting a career.  They are, indeed, doing that.  But they also are starting to create their legacy.  And what will that legacy be after the next two to sixteen years? 

We have come across an old poem that makes that point.

Back on September 13, 1856, the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger printed an unsigned poem in the weeks leading to that year’s general election.  Those who are in legislator school might want to read it in the context of their life to-be:

They knew that I was poor,

And they thought that I was base.

They thought I would endure

To be covered with disgrace—

They thought me of their tribe

Who in filthy lucre dote.

So they offered me a bribe

For my vote, boys, for my vote.

O, shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy!

But I’ll not wear their fetters

Not I, indeed, not I!

My vote!  It is not mine

To do with what I will;

To cast like pearl to swine

To these wallows in ill.

It is my country’s due,

And I’ll give it while I can,

To the honest and the true,

Like a man!  Like a man!

O, shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy,

But I’ll not wear their fetters,

Not I, indeed, not I!

No, no, I’ll hold my vote

As a treasure and a trust.

My dishonor none shall quote

When I’m mingled with dust;

And my children when I’m gone

Shall be strengthened by the thought

That their father was not one

To be bought! To be bought!

O, Shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy.

But I will not wear their fetters. Not I, indeed, not I!

The language is old but the sentiment remains current. Thenewbies will wrap up legislator school later this week.  The real world will await them less thanthree weeks later.   It’s always interesting to watch what happens to them.    

Grasping to retain power, regardless

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We’re watching with interest efforts in Wisconsin by Republicans to limit the power of a newly-elected Democratic governor who will replace Scott Walker.                The New York Times reported yesterday:

“The long list of proposals Republicans want to consider also includes wide efforts to shore up their strength before Tony Evers, the Democrat who beat Gov. Scott Walker last month, takes office: new limits on early voting, a shift in the timing of the 2020 presidential primary in Wisconsin, and new authority for lawmakers on state litigation. The Republican plan would also slash the power of the incoming attorney general, who is also a Democrat…In recent years, single parties have come to dominate state legislatures, allowing lawmakers to make significant policy changes in states even as Washington wrestled with gridlock. But in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats regained governor’s offices in capitals that Republicans fully controlled for years, Republicans are making last-minute efforts to weaken their powers…It is a model pioneered in North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers in 2016 tried to restrict the power of the governor after a Democrat was narrowly elected to the post. That set off a bitter court battle that continues to this day.”

There is nothing new in this.  In fact one of the most egregious examples happened here in Missouri. Only then it was Democrats who had controlled the state government including the legislature during the depression in a way that could make today’s two-thirds Republican legislature jealous. The state constitution then in effect required the Speaker of the House to make the official announcement of the election results at the start of the next legislative session so the winners could be inaugurated a few days later.

Governor Lloyd Stark, who had broken with the political boss in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast, could not succeed himself but in the process of what happened after the election he became the longest-serving single-term governor in Missouri history. With the demise of the statewide Pendergast machine, the organization run by St. Louis Mayor Bernard Dickmann became the dominant machine power within the Democratic Party.

Forrest c. Donnell (whose name was pronounced as if it was “Donald” without the “d”) campaigned heavily against Democrat machine politics and beat Lawrence McDaniel, his former Sunday School pupil, by 3,613 votes, the second-closest margin in state history. Democrats retained the other statewide offices.

Two weeks later, Democratic State Committee chairman C. Marion Hulen of Mexico proclaimed there was “an imposing array of reports, evidence of illegal use of large sums of money and of vote buying, of irregular voting and of alleged frauds.”  Another committee member claimed there was enough evidence to show McDaniel had won by 7,500 votes.

When the House convened on January 8, 1941, it passed a resolution barring Speaker Morris Osburn from announcing the results until a ten-member committee (of which six were Democrats) examined the ballots. Attorney General Roy McKittrick, one of those re-elected in November, held such an action was legal.

The committee recommended that Osburn certify the re-election of all of the Democratic candidates but it said Donnell should not be certified because of mistakes and fraudulent voting in the governor’s race.  The Republican committee members called the report a fraud and noted nobody had presented the committee with any evidence of fraud.

Inauguration day was January 13.  But there was no parade, no big event in the rotunda (inaugurations were indoors then), no inaugural ball.  Secretary of State Dwight Brown, Auditor Forrest Smith, and Attorney General McKittrick were sworn in for their third terms at the Supreme Court.  Lieutenant Governor Frank Harris, also a third-termer, took his oath in the state senate chamber because he constitutionally was the President of the Senate. Wilson Bell was sworn in as treasurer for his first term.

Donnell could have been sworn in by a Justice of the Peace (an office later replaced by magistrate judges who were even later replaced by associate circuit judges on the government charts) or some other qualified officer but he rejected the suggestion, saying he wanted to avoid further chaos.  Instead, he went to Jefferson City and asked the Supreme Court to order Osburn to announce him as the winner.

With those actions, Lloyd Stark could not leave office. He was to serve until his successor had been elected and qualified to take over. He was, to put it politely, urinarily agitated.

In what was to have been his final State of the State speech he announced he had vetoed the joint resolution seeking an investigation and said he would not approve spending any money for any such thing. He called for Donnell to be seated as governor and for any dispute about the results to “proceed in a legal and proper manner.”

His fellow democrats, not happy with his position, started an “absolutely bipartisan” recount anyway.  In mid-February the Supreme Court ordered the legislature to declare Donnell governor.  Osborn read the official document on February 20 declaring Donnell the winner.  The Senate majority leader immediately announced that McDaniel would file a declaration contesting the results.

Newspaper editorial writers from both sides of the aisle flayed the Democrats, the Joplin Globe saying “thousands of Democrats” had been “nauseated from the stench from the original office-stealing effort.”

Donnell finally was sworn in on February 26, in the rotunda. Stark, who said he had been “living in a suitcase since January thirteenth,” quickly headed back to St. Louis and his private law practice.

McDaniel’s 226-page election contest petition claimed that a complete recount would show him the winner by 30,000 votes.  State Republican Chairman Charles Ferguson laughed, particularly at the claim that hundreds of non-residents had voted for Donnell in Newton County in southwest Missouri: “It stands to reason that five or six hundred strangers could not show up to vote in a town as small as Neosho and get away with it.”  Neosho’s population that year was 5,318.

Donnell’s response was fifty-thousand words long and accused Democrats of the things they had said his campaign did.

The chairman of the recount committee, Senator Phil M. Donnelly of Lebanon, said the recount would not start until mid-April.   When it did, it was a disaster for McDaniel and the Democrats. By late May reports indicated recounts in eighty-one counties and St. Louis City had ADDED four-thousand votes to Donnell’s total. McDaniel met with Donnelly and agreed to file a letter withdrawing his request for a recount.  He did so without consulting party leaders who had pushed him to demand the recount and who had cooked up the claims of massive Republican vote fraud. McDaniel’s statement later seemed to be a slap at Hulen and his party allies when McDaniel said he had been “misled” by those who claimed he should be declared the winner.

The House and Senate met in joint session and in ten minutes declared the recount over with Donnell the winner.  Because the recount was never completed, his official victory margin remains 3,613 votes.

Democrats paid a heavy price for this escapade.  Several saw the writing on the wall and did not run again in 1942.  Several who did run lost their primary elections and many of those who got through the primaries were whipped in November as Republicans regained control of the House and pulled into a tie in the Senate.

Donnell was succeeded by Senator Donnelly, the senator who led the aborted recount effort. Donnelly later became the first governor to serve two full terms although he had to serve them separately because he was barred from succeeding himself but not prohibited from being governor again.

While Donnell was governor, a constitutional convention was called.  The new constitution, approved after he left office, prevents another effort to “steal” the governor’s election.  It says the Secretary of State, not the Speaker of the House, will certify the winners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appointment King

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Governor Parson is making a new place in Missouri history for himself with each appointment of someone to an otherwise elective office at the top level of state government.   By the time he appoints a new state treasurer, he will have appointed three of the remaining top five state government officials and four of the top six jobs will be filled with people who were  not chosen by a public vote to fill those offices: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer.

But this is not the first time most top state offices have been filled by people not elected to those positions. But the only other time involved war/

As Missouri was being sucked into the Civil War, pro-South Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called a convention of 99 men to decide if Missouri should join the confederacy.  He was shocked to find that not a single secessionist was elected.  When he fled the capitol in the face of advancing Union troops in June, 1861, twenty members of the convention went with him.

The executive committee of the Convention of 99 met in Jefferson City in late July and called for remaining members of the convention to reassemble.  On July 30 the remaining convention members declared all existing state offices vacant.  It then installed former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Hamilton Gamble as the provisional governor and appointed other Union loyalists to other state offices.  All seats in the legislature were declared vacant and the convention members became the acting government.  The constitutional propriety of all of these actions has been a matter of speculation from that time to this but as historian Duane Meyer, the author of the standard Missouri history book used for decades has noted, when the U. S. Army is present to make sure the actions of the governing group are carried out, the niceties of the law or the constitution are secondary. Meyer wrote that the state convention

obviously …had no authority to take such actions (as vacating offices), since Governor Jackson was the popularly-elected chief of state. However, in the time of war, legality is frequently supplanted by expediency, and in so acting, these Missouri politicians established an illegal provisional government to fill the breach left by the secessionist exiles…In retrospect, we must admit that the actions of the state convention were unprecedented, brash, and illegal. However, since federal troops in Missouri upheld the actions of the convention, no one could argue.

Former Congressman Willard P. Hall of St. Joseph was appointed Lt. Governor and succeeded Gamble when he died at the end of 1864.  The office, incidentally, remained vacant until Lt. Governor George Smith was elected in the election of 1865.  Former Congressman Mordecai Oliver of Richmond became Secretary of State until ‘65’s elections.  When Treasurer Alfred W. Morrison refused to take a loyalty oath after being caught by federal troops while he was fleeing with thousands of state dollars in his pockets, he was replaced by artist George Caleb Bingham.  When Attorney General J. Proctor Knott refused to take the loyalty oath he was replaced by Aikman Welch of Johnson County.

William S. Moseley of New Madrid County took the loyalty oath and remained as state auditor.

So during the Civil War when the remains of the Convention of 99 replaced the legislature, FIVE  of  our six state officers were not elected by the people to their positions.

We’re waiting for the Missouri Supreme Court to rule on whether Mike Kehoe can continue to occupy the Lt. Governor’s office and Eric Schmitt won’t be the new Attorney General until January.  But it appears Governor Parson will be remembered as the governor who appointed three top state leaders and this will be a time when four state leaders are serving in offices they were not elected to fill.

The nice thing about the current situation is that it hasn’t taken a war to create it.

“Two roads diverged—”

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“In a yellow wood,” wrote Robert Frost

“And sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth.”

Two years ago, Missourians elected a charismatic young man who promised to make his state office something special, something different, something clean.

Two years ago, Missourians elected another charismatic young man who promised to make his state office something special, something different, something clean.

One of those young men took a road that has led him downhill into the darkness of the undergrowth, out of sight, and probably away from his dream of much bigger things—although there have been reports of some sounds coming out of that darkness that he’d like to come back for another trip.

The second young man last Tuesday took a road that is leading him up, to a sunny future, and perhaps an opportunity to reach the destination the first man thought he was going toward.

Poetry can take some interesting political turns.

—

Two roads.  One paved, one gravel.  One that would have been important to maintaining and bringing jobs.  One that is paved now but facing reduction to gravel in the future. Missourians have chosen the gravel road into uncertainty’s undergrowth with their rejection of the latest gas tax increase.  Our state legislators and other state leaders who have made economic development a constant theme of their work have failed to convince voters that a tax increase would result in the good roads necessary to encourage economic growth.

They have sewn the wind by preaching the evils of taxes and the blessings of tax cuts and tax breaks, particularly for businesses that presumably will create more jobs.  But industry wants good roads to ship in manufacturing materials and equipment and good roads to ship products out.

“The people know better how to spend their money than government does,” we have heard them say repeatedly.  Again, the people have decided to keep their money and spend it for things better than building roads and bridges and interchanges to companies that might have provided jobs to those same people and their relatives and friends.

The people have decided they want a higher minimum wage, meaning many of those who might benefit from better roads and the better jobs they could help create will have more money for themselves.

Two roads.  Two men.  Two political philosophies.  But we travel with them and we are the ones who often decide which road they, and we, take—a road rising to the future or a gravel road descending into the dark undergrowth.

“And that has made all the difference.”

—or will, perhaps.