Category Archives: legislature

The dangers of definition–II

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Within the lifetimes of many who read these entries, government-sanctioned entities existed in this nation that judged the sincerity and validity of individual religious beliefs.  Thousands of people were summoned to appear before them.  These agencies consisting of fellow citizens in communities bored into the basis of the claimed beliefs and ultimately determined if the sincerely held beliefs were legitimate. They were called draft boards.

They might ask, “Do you pray every day,” or “Do you read the Bible every day?”  Or the Talmud or the Book of Mormon, the Quran, the Vedas, the Pali Canon, or other sacred books of the religion you claim?  “Do you read those words as inerrant sacred texts do you believe you are free to interpret them as you please?”

Is your “religion” built on ideas from non-Biblical writings such as those from Soren Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger, Mortimer Adler, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Umberto Eco, Mahmoud Khatani, Reinhold Niebuhr, Black Elk, Paul Tillich, Mahatma Ghandi, Billy Graham, Joel Osteen or The Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch?

Would YOU be comfortable having a government board decide if your religion justifies your actions or the sincerity of your claimed sincere religious beliefs? Thousands of people, comfortable or not, put themselves in that position years ago.

Actually, we do have something of that system still before us although we don’t think of it in the manners we are discussing here.  Our criminal justice system often has to deal with those who claim they were driven to their actions by the Devil or by the Voice of God.  But that is sufficiently different from our issue today that we will put it aside.

Let’s take this one more step.   Having now written your personal definition of “sincere religious belief,” (you HAVE written it, haven’t you?) would you be willing to stand in front of the leaders of your religion and read it, knowing that they would decide if your definition is good enough for you to remain a member of that religion?  This would not be a panel of your peers drawn from the diversity of a broader community.  This would be a panel of those whose religion you profess to share. Why not—if you think your definition should be behind a part of the state constitution?

There are some religious organizations that do have such test.  There are probably a lot more that members are very glad do not.  Freedom of religion within religion, however, is not at all uniform.

Freedom of religion within religion has been an issue in this country from our earliest days.  Your correspondent has been reading Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel, the story of Anne Hutchinson, whom you might remember from school as one of founders, with Roger Williams, of the colony of Rhode Island. Beyond that, most of us don’t remember much about her.  It might be instructive to recall this story that should be uncomfortable to those who assert this country was founded as a “Christian nation” as well as those who are asserting that sincere religious belief is justification for considering some people less that complete citizens.

Anne Hutchinson was a midwife living in the Massachusetts Colony, expecting her sixteenth child when she was forty-six years old in 1637.  The colony was controlled by the Puritan clergy and was a society that severely limited women’s role in society.  Anne began to attract a following among women and eventually several men as she began discussing her own version of the Puritan religion and critiquing sermons she had heard.  Among those attracted to her discussions was the colony’s governor, Henry Vane.  She believed salvation was a matter of God’s grace and accused the colony’s ministers of preaching the misleading idea that salvation could be gained through works.

In a short time, the Puritan ministers grew alarmed that her growing following was weakening their control of the colony and hauled her before a court of forty male judges dominated by Puritan “works’ preachers.  LaPlante’s book delves heavily into the trial transcript to illustrate the charges and Anne’s defense that often confounded the judges.  In the end, though, the forty judges convicted her and banished her from the colony.  A few months later she was excommunicated from the church.

The reach of the Puritan religion was so extensive and oppressive in those times that the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was safe for her and her followers for only a few years. When Massachusetts threatened to take over Rhode Island, she moved to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, settling in an area that is now The Bronx borough of New York City, where she and five of the children who had moved there with her were killed in an Indian attack in 1643.

As Anne Hutchinson’s husband and about a dozen other men prepared to leave Boston for Providence Plantation, they signed a compact that they would honor as the proprietors of Rhode Island.  The compact, in the wording of the day, pledged the new colony would follow Jesus Christ’s “most perfect and most absolute laws of His given in his Holy Word of Truth.” While that proclamation might be seen as a Seventeenth Century antecedent for supporters of today’s Senate resolution, it would be good for those quick to use it to remember one of the first written rules composed under that compact after the group arrived in Rhode Island: “No person within said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matter of religion—so long as he keeps the peace.”   Some see that rule as the beginning of the religious freedom statement in the First Amendment and the first statement in our country’s history that church and state are separate. No questions will be raised about a citizen’s religion UNLESS it disturbs the peace of the community. Believe what you wish but respect the secular interaction necessary for an orderly society.

Today, in the Capitol of the state from which she was banished for behavior “not comely for (her) sex,” Anne Hutchinson is memorialized as a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” In a time when we speak often of the values of our Founding Fathers, it is time to remember that there was a Founding Mother, the co-founder of Rhode Island, and the persecution she suffered at the hands of the righteous who countenanced no difference from their religion.

Who decides if your “sincere religious belief” is sincere enough to justify something a proposed state amendment would let you do?  And what right does the target of your actions have to force you to defend that belief before some kind of panel of peers?  Or even a panel of ministers of your own denomination? How is anyone to know that your actions are just not arbitrary unless there is a mechanism to test their foundation?

These are hard questions in a time when surveys are showing that more and more people are finding religious creeds, dogmas, or standards unwelcome.  The percentage of Americans who respond “none” to census questions about their religion is growing.  Some analysts are theorizing that religious demands for public laws and policies that fit a narrow concept are actually harming organized religion, especially among millennials.   Whether one agrees with that analysis is a personal, often political, choice.

And in Missouri today, the phrase “sincere religious belief” presents public and personal policy challenges that raise the personal comfort levels of many to levels of discomfort and could further justify the feelings of “nones.” Banishment and excommunication from the social fabric of America, in whatever form, is still alive, though, as we are seeing proposed in Missouri.

Some critics say there is less sincerity than there is politics in this effort, that it is really less a protection of religion than it is an effort to get more conservative voters to the polls in November, which means discussing the issue at a spiritual level is useless.

Nonetheless, we’ll discuss what might be done and why it can’t be done, next.

 

The dangers of definition–I

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Our scripture for this series  is from Congressman Fisher Ames: “Popular reason does not always know how to act right, nor does it always act right when it knows.”

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One of the trickier parts of writing a new law is defining who or what is the topic and who or what the target for relief or for limits is.  Our lawmakers have recognized from the beginning that specific language is necessary to avoid the infamous “unintended consequences.”   They—or, more appropriately these days, the legislative staff—recognize that danger and usually are able to tailor legislation to fit a specific circumstance.   When they are even a little off the mark, the consequences sometimes generate headlines that obscure the difficulty of making sure the application of a law is as narrow as required.

It’s a difficult job that the public seldom realizes is so much a part of developing the laws that govern our lives every second of every day. But the last thing participants in the process want to do is produce an adverse impact on those not intended to be the subject of the legislation.

Sometimes it is best for the supporters of legislation to leave some things vague. There are a lot of reasons for that.  One is that getting more specific weakens the intended broad effects of some  legislation.  Another reason is that lack of definition allows wider interpretations of the law, sometimes in the authority a law grants governmental subdivisions to enact their own policies within the law’s general framework—a latitude that sometimes exposes those subdivisions to criticism of government over-reach.

It’s a balancing act.  For those who believe in balance in the laws, it’s a tough act.

We have been seeing a phrase used increasingly in legislation in the last few years that cries for definition.  Defining it, however, is a minefield.

The phrase is “sincere religious belief,” now most prominently being the center of Senate Joint Resolution 39, the Wesboro Amendment or, for supporters, the Religious Freedom Amendment.

How do YOU define “sincere religious belief?”  Most properly, how do you define “sincere?” In fact, why don’t you stop reading and write your definitions, AND write what you consider your sincere religious belief, then come back.  Do not read ahead before you do this.

(PAUSE while you write)

Thank you for doing that.  Do you have the courage to put these statements before the public?   If you are a public official passing legislation making “sincere religious belief” part of the law for the general public, don’t you owe it to the general public to state your definition of the term and let the public whose behavior you seek to approve or disapprove and regulate know what your sincere religious beliefs are? You cannot dodge the issue by saying religion is a private matter—because you have made it a general-public issue.

Most people probably never define their belief.  “Whatever my church says is good enough for me,” many will think.  Do you really know what your church says as a condition of being a member?  And have you ever wondered if you really do believe its creed or its dogma or its principles?   Or have the lessons of life moved you in a different direction?  Have you become less religious in terms of what your church’s standards for religion are? And who is to judge the sufficiency within the law of your belief and the sincerity of it?   We’ll talk about that in our next entry.

A shield, not a sword

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Backers of the Wesboro Amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 39, defend it as “a shield, not a sword,” a protection of religious freedom rather than an attack on a segment of our population. But bumper sticker mottos such as “a shield, not a sword” are often purely political efforts to avoid having to intelligently address an issue and personally justify a position.  And the symbolism behind such mottos has a tendency to undermine the cause the motto purports to defend. 

Hiding behind a shield enables one to avoid seeing the other person.  All the other person might see is the sword that is being pointed at him from behind that shield.  The shield/sword analogy, therefore, emphasizes the greatest weakness of the proposal.  Hiding behind a shield does not mean the other side will or should go away.  The desire not to see the other side does not mean it does not deserve to exist.  And if the only thing the other side perceives is a sword pointed its way, it is increasingly likely to press its case even harder.

So it is that legislation using the shield and sword analogy weakens, not strengthens, the argument for the legislation and increases the skepticism of those who see no reason to hide behind one and wave the other.   

Defining the key words of a public policy that is this important and this divisive deserves more thought than is embodied in a slogan.  In the next few entries in this series (we haven’t decided how many), let’s explore the dangers of definition.

Equality: an inconvenient concept

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One of our state lawmakers has argued that “our First Amendment rights to religion, speech, assembly, and association, endowed by our Creator, are not subject to government approval.  The First Amendment is designed not just to protect popular or politically correct religious beliefs or speech. It is designed to protect all religious beliefs and speech—even repulsive ones.”

This lawmaker buttressed his idea that our First Amendment rights are “endowed by our Creator” by citing the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Combining statements made in two distinctly separate documents written for two distinctly separate purposes in this way can lead to mental and political mischief of the kind we have seen in our legislature for several sessions.

Missouri spends tens of millions of dollars every year so people like this lawmaker and his colleagues can, indeed, determine what our rights are.  Missouri has volume after volume of books that define our rights, some of which were favored by lawmakers such as this one who has argued that “Our country was founded on the belief that there are some areas into which government must not intrude.”

Anybody want to read through twenty volumes of Missouri statutes (plus the sixteen annual supplements published since the last statute books were put between hard covers) to find some areas in which the legislature has NOT passed some kind of intrusive law?

The unfortunately biggest flaw in the lawmaker’s reasoning comes from his citation of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (which, by the way, does NOT establish Freedom of Speech, Religion, Press, and Peaceful Assembly): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The same lawmaker who once accused opponents of the campus religious freedom bill of pretzeling the debate to say the bill sanctions discrimination didn’t do such a bad job of pretzel-making himself by leaving out a critical qualification in that sentence. You remember from school, don’t you, that the sentence really begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men ARE CREATED EQUAL, AND THAT THEY are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”

Equality.  What an inconvenient concept. It’s so much more convenient to leave out that part of the sentence to make this argument.

Equality gets in the way of so many things. Recognizing the idea that everybody is equally entitled to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness could cause massive problems for those who are well-paid to make sure their clients enjoy those rights more than others or to those who think government-sanctioned privilege is something for them to buy for their own purposes. Government would be so much easier and so much more convenient to some people if it were not for that troublesome requirement that equality be part of the equation.  But ignoring it is easy.

And there’s another flaw in the use of the quotation in this discussion.  It stops with “happiness.”   Let’s look at the entire sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”

There’s a comma after “happiness,” not a period. But look at what the Declaration really says: that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”   The founding fathers sanctioned government as the means to balance those natural rights.  Our lawmaker correctly says the Declaration does not say certain rights are “afforded” us by government.  What the Declaration says is that governments are created to SECURE those rights in which all have an equal opportunity to share.

Gosh, this document is a whole lot more inconvenient than some would like us to think, isn’t it?

After that, the second sentence says, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

There’s a lot more after the first “happiness.”   But it’s more convenient to discuss only the first part, and certainly more convenient to be selective in what part of the sentence is used to justify a position. But it’s time to think about what the Declaration of Independence says.  Really says.  All of it.

Professor Danielle Allen of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study has a book out called Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence on Defense of Equality.   In the prologue, she wrote, “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality.  It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows—a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination.  If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality.”

There it is.  The inconvenient concept.   Equality.

“Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other, “she wrote. “As a public we have swallowed this argument whole.  We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality.  Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom…Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.”

Professor Allen spends 282 highly-readable pages taking the Declaration sentence by sentence and sometimes wordy by word to emphasize the care with which it was written and the purposes for each element.  It’s not just something to read quickly on July 4tth.

From its beginning when it states that the time has come for the colonies to be considered an independent nation of equal standing with other nations to the last sentence that says the signers who come from a variety of economic, social, and religious backgrounds “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” the Declaration is about equality.

It was signed by wealthy delegates such as John Hancock and Charles Carroll as well as by Button Gwinnett, whose life is described by one source as “one of economic and political disappointment,”  and James Wilson, who later spent time in a debtor’s prison. They were equals as delegates. They were equals in what they dreamed of.  They were equals in the risk they knew they were taking.

The Declaration of Independence is so important it should be studied carefully by voters and those they elect.  Only by doing that, Professor Allen argues, can its true importance be understood and the descendants of those who risked everything by writing it, adopting it, and signing it be free.

And freedom is not freedom if it is not equally shared and is not an equally-borne responsibility.

A matter of degrees

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Forgive us—or don’t; we don’t care—if we return to this matter from time to time, for it is so troubling.  Some of these thoughts came to us while we were in church and if they are antagonistic to you, too bad. We do not profess to have the certainty in our faith journey that others seem to have.  And in that, we are unrepentant.

Senate Joint Resolution 39, sent to the House by the Senate, provides—if voters approve the proposed constitutional amendment—protection from state penalties for any religious organization that refuses to perform same sex marriages or allow same sex marriages to be performed on its property.  It also protects individuals such as florists and cake-makers who refuse to provide flowers or cakes for same sex weddings or same sex wedding receptions if they have sincere religious beliefs about same sex marriage.

Surprisingly, though, this bill protecting religious liberty does not rule out the imposition of the mysterious “state penalties” against religious organizations that refuse to allow homosexuals to be members of their congregations.

Backers say it’s a “religious liberty” bill.  Whose “religious liberty?”

Suppose I am a florist, a follower of the Christ, as you can tell that I am by the decal of the icthys, the Christian fish symbol, on the front door of my shop. And suppose I am a homosexual florist.  And suppose a straight couple asks me to provide flowers for their wedding and weddings of other people like them.  And I tell them I have a sincere religious belief that allows me to refuse to serve them.  And further, my partner who runs the local bakery, shares my sincere religious belief and will refuse to provide their cake, or cakes to others, like them.

Where is my protection, our protection, under this amendment?   Why doesn’t this protection of religion cut both ways?  Or does this profession of religion only protect the straight segment of the population and by inference proclaim that members of the LGBT community aren’t religious enough to merit those special protections, too?  Do they not deserve protection for their religious liberty?

To the degree that this proposition lets you set me apart from others, you persecute me by making me less of a person than you and they are.

To the degree that this proposition lets you deny me the protections under the law you reserve for yourself, you diminish my status as a citizen of this country.

To the degree you do not allow me to do unto you what you do unto me—

To the degree that you exempt yourself from following the commandment that you love your neighbor as you love yourself—

To the degree that your legislation dismisses Paul’s admonition that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for we are all one in Christ”—

You are not Christian.

Seven weeks

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Spring break is ending for the legislature. 

From now until 6 p.m., Friday, May 13th, there will be only increasing pressure, increasing tension, increasing opportunities for the train to go off the tracks again.  Only seven weeks remain.  Only seven weeks.

They are a special seven weeks for many lawmakers. This is the last time they will live in this arena, this place where many of them feel they are only now learning how things work or can work or should work. This is the last seven weeks they will be somebody.

They will get a day, or two, in September for the veto session, a footnote to this part of their lives.  But in terms of the meaningful struggle, these seven weeks are all that remain for them.

For many of them, this is the last time they will know the intensity, the heat, the adrenaline rush that builds and builds and builds until the last gavel falls.  

For many of them, they will never feel this important again, or be this important again. And they will spend the rest of their lives among fellow citizens who have not known how it is to have been what they were, and don’t really care.  And when January rolls around again, this seven-week world will only be an echo in their memories.  

When the gavel falls on that Friday night, they are done.  They can never come back.  Term limits will never let them sit at that desk and never let them again be part of the passionate process of defining how they and their fellow citizens will live.  Or die. 

Seven weeks, and then those who are their friends, their comrades in the hallways, will no longer pay them attention for they will no longer be useful to them.  After the thunder and lightning of their last legislative session, the place where once they were somebody will be cold and distant.   

They will be able to return and only sit on a side bench or stand in a side gallery and get up and wave when they’re introduced while others quickly turn away to fill their time in the pressure cooker.  Their desk, their chair, their office will be occupied by someone else until those people, too, hear the gavel fall for the last time.    

They are seven weeks away from being only pictures on the walls in the hallways, pictures that thousands of people pass by every day—and will pass by every day for generations to come– without looking, or, if looking, find no meaning in the images. 

Seven weeks.  And then they’re gone.

John T.

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John T. Russell died Friday.  He was 84.  

He was from Lebanon, Missouri and the people sent him to Jefferson City to represent them in the House and in the Senate for 42 years because they could.  And they probably would have kept electing him if he wanted to keep running, but they were among the Missourians who approved term limits in 1992, giving up their right to end him back to the Senate in 2004 elections.

Russell, a Republican, and Wayne Goode, a Democrat from the St. Louis area, served together in the General Assembly for 42 years.  Only Michael Kinney served longer—56 years, all in the Senate.  For a brief time, Russell, a conservative, and Goode, a liberal, were co-chairmen of the Senate Appropriations Committee.  It was during the switch from Democratic to Republican control of the Senate and although Russell finished out his career as the committee chairman, he and Goode worked closely together. 

We watched him for most of his career, first in the House and then in the Senate. He never left any doubt about his political leanings but he also left no doubt that he could work with the other side, and did.  He honored the title of “Senator” with his service.  His generation, now only a memory in the minds of many who are themselves close to being only memories in the Capitol, understood words like honor and courtesy, respect, and decorum, words that in recent days or even in recent years increasingly have become just words. 

He represented Laclede County, the place where he was born and grew up on a farm and went to a one-room country school.  He was not a man who felt he was bigger than the place he came from. And the place he came from knew it.  John T. Russell was elected to seven terms in the House and seven terms in the Senate.  In half of those elections, he had no opponent in November. 

He was a successful businessman in Lebanon for decades, an Air Force veteran from the Korean War, not given to hyperbole and only occasionally did his firmness give way to anger.  But when John T. Russell thundered, the Senate understood he had been pushed beyond his line of reasonableness—and that took quite a bit of pushing.

John Russell looked like a Senator, with his dark hair, gray at the temples, his deep, authoritative voice, and his confident demeanor. 

john t. russell

He was firm but not unalterable in his positions, understood the value of respecting the other side and—when necessary—yielding on some points so he could achieve others. 

He is the third member of his generation of Missouri politicians to leave the scene in recent months.  We lost Senator Harold Caskey of Butler last October and Senator Emory Melton of Cassville in December.   Caskey, like Russell, served 28 years in the Senate. Melton served 24.  No members of today’s Senate ever served with them—and the Senate is a poorer chamber in spirit because there is no one there to remember three men who knew how to be Senators.

Senator Russell’s funeral will be Wednesday morning at the First Baptist Church in Lebanon. 

Spring break

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This is the traditional time to assess how the General Assembly is doing and is likely to do this year.  Spring break for lawmakers always produces proclamations from the majority party that things are going well and proclamations from the minority party that the legislature has failed to do its job.

Both sides are right.  And they’ll be right in May, too.

The heady enthusiasm of January has worn off and the slogging through a muddy legislative battlefield is in full slog.  Some trench warfare has developed.  Some verbal bombs have burst in the air.  It’s about eight weeks before adjournment (seven when the legislature returns on Tuesday).  Eight loooonnnnnng weeks.

The rush to pass meaningful ethics laws has lost momentum.  Photo Voter ID and the latest efforts to make a legal medical procedure too difficult to obtain are a game in process.  The state budget and its accompanying intimidation, sandbagging, and sniping festival still has a lot of innings to play.

The majority leader of the Senate says people are working together, “for the most part.”  Ah, but that other part promises to enliven these last seven weeks.  Seven weeks is a long time to slow a slog to a crawl but nothing is unexpected in the General Assembly these days.

It’s a campaign year so don’t look for anything significant in the field of campaign reform to happen.  It’s a campaign year so do look for the majority party to do all it can to satisfy its base so it can keep its supermajority.  Look for the minority party to try to appeal to its base by stopping the majority from appealing to its base. The pressure to satisfy both sides only increases from here on.

Every session creates interesting bed fellows and this one has just created one. In this case, it’s one special interest trying to find a comfortable place under the covers for itself.

The Missouri Chamber of Commerce, which has fought efforts to pass laws banning businesses from firing people because they are gay, is now opposed to a proposed constitutional amendment protecting those of its members who don’t want to sell things to gay people—because the amendment would be bad for business.  What an interesting conundrum for the majority party: Do you side with the state’s biggest business organization that traditionally favors your party or do you side with the evangelical voting bloc that has embraced your party?  It’s the House’s problem now.

And the legislative dance floor has the potential for some other interesting moves in the last seven weeks.  Perhaps some will be humming Chubby Checker’s great hit as they twist their way around the issue of transportation funding.  One idea would keep the Highway Patrol from using gas tax money to enforce laws on the highways by having the patrol’s funding come out of general tax collections which already are inadequate for numerous programs and services, most glaringly education, and which some legislators want to reduce even further with tax cuts.

This long-time observer always had the feeling that the legislature should leave when Daylight Savings Time arrives.  Being cooped up at the Capitol while the days are dark and cold is okay.  But, oh man! When there’s warm temperatures and daylight and the session drones on and on for seven more weeks—that’s cruel and unusual punishment.

But we know how it will turn out. The majority party will proclaim this a great session.  The minority party will maintain it was a disaster.

And then they’ll go home for a longer break.

Notes from a quiet street

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(The second  of 2016’s random observations far from the front lines of our past, and not worthy of full bloghood).

He was talking about the special interests that influence government, including banks and protected industries.

We want prosperity, but not at the expense of liberty.

Poverty is not as great a danger to liberty as wealth, with its corrupting, demoralizing influences.  Suppose all the influences I have just reviewed were to take their hands off instead of supporting the Republican Party, would it have a ghost of a chance of success?

Let us have prosperity, but never at the expense of liberty, never at the expense of self-government, and let us never have a government…owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than the will of the millions.” 

That’s not Democratic Party rhetoric this year.  It’s from a speech given by Joseph Pulitzer in Indianapolis in 1880.

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We got a press release from the St. Louis Archdiocese a few days ago announcing churches throughout the Archdiocese would be taking part in a “Reconciliation Initiative” March 4-5.  The press release arrived about a week after the Bishop said churches should consider dropping sponsorship of the Girl Scouts because the Scouts might lead girls to think of things beyond what the church thinks they should think.

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Nancy’s downstairs listening to the John Denver Channel on Pandora. It’s an internet site that plays whatever music you want to hear.  John Denver would be 72 years old now.  He died more than eighteen years ago.  72.  Kind of hard to envision.  But then James Taylor turned 68 a few days ago and still sounds like James Taylor is supposed to sound.  But still, John Denver would be 72—-

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A sample of legislative efficiency:  The state senate has restored the chamber’s mezzanine beautifully.  But to do it, it had to destroy the offices of its senate information staff.  It moved them into a first-floor hearing room for a while, then into some vacant space in the capitol basement.  Then it moved the capitol press corps out of its spaces on the first floor across the hall from the hearing room up to some offices on the fifth floor that are not handicapped accessible. Then it moved its information staff from the basement into the spaces on the first floor that the press had occupied.  Wonder if it ever occurred to the senate to just move its information people into the fifth floor offices to begin with and save a bunch of effort and hassle.

And now it’s spending more money on another move—getting rid of those pesky reporters at the press table on the senate floor because one of them reportedly (an appropriate word in this instance) did his job by tweeting that the senate leader had told a senator who had been presiding that he should have brought Senator Brian Nieves under control when Nieves went off on one of his embarrassing tirades.  The senate is spending still more moving money to turn an area that has been for public visitors for the last 96 years into a place for people who apparently have been illegal aliens on the senate floor in this capitol—as well as the one built in the 19th century.

We are sure the Senate will give the taxpayers it so aggressively wants to protect a complete final report to the public about how much it has spent, total, to move all these people from top to bottom to top in the Capitol.

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Another example of efficient thinking: Had to get a new computer monitor the other day.  Got one of those 23-inchers (so maybe there will be fewer typos in these entries since the letters are bigger).  Once again, a piece of equipment treated the purchaser like an idiot.  Remember owner’s manuals?  Remember you used to be have directions to things that you could READ?  The box lid for this thing had some drawings that were useful only because this user had hooked up a monitor before.  One drawing appeared to show an “on” switch, which was fine except the screen was still black when a little blue light came on on the front panel.  Inside a plastic bag were some booklets.  Directions?  Oh, no.  Warranties written in most of the world’s known languages.  The user’s manual was on an enclosed disc.   Great.  Except if the monitor is only a black screen, what in Heaven’s name is the user supposed to use to read the directions that tell him how to make the monitor not black?

This user thinks he has been insulted. A person smart enough to have a computer apparently is not smart enough to read an instruction manual on  hooking up the monitor unless he is smart enough to hook up the monitor  so he can see images of the manual. Obviously because you are reading this, the problem got solved, no thanks to the drawings, so the disc with the users’ manual on it is not needed.

Now that the monitor is working, it’s time to plan to do some other things that make about as much sense: check the stock market, make some airline reservations, buy a tankful of gas for the car, wait for the House to rationalize passage of the Wesboro Amendment……

 

Reaping the whirlwind

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A couple of syndicated columns published in the last several weeks seem from this lofty office (my office is in a loft that overlooks the living room) on this quiet street to be a good assessment of today’s politics and how we got here.

Cal Thomas wrote of the Republican presidential campaign in “Sewer Politics” in a March 1 column that he was going to talk about gutter politics “but given Donald Trump’s horrid statements, the gutter would be a step up because things have descended into the sewer.  Never in modern times has there been a presidential candidate who has hurled more personal insults and hurtful accusations at his fellow candidates and others who disagree with him.  It should embarrass a normal person, but Trump appears beyond embarrassment.”

Thomas admits he is amazed by the continued strong support evangelicals are showing Trump and the general silence about that support by evangelical leaders. “This is what can happen when some pastors who are called to a different kingdom and a different King settle for an earthly kingdom and a lesser king,” he wrote.  However he praises Max Lucado, a best-selling writer who told Christianity Today he felt he had to speak out because of “Trump’s derision of people.”  He says he would not be speaking up except that, “he repeatedly brandishes the Bible and calls himself a Christian.”   Lucado thinks it is “beyond reason” for Trump “to call himself a Christian one day and call someone a bimbo the next or make fun of somebody’s menstrual cycle.”

Thomas suggests at the end that this election could become not a choice for the lesser of two evils but a choice “between the least evil of two lesser.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his February 26 column, noted a rise in the last thirty years of people who are against politics, which Brooks says is recognition “of the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions.”  He says it’s the effort to balance or reconcile or compromise those interest, or at least a majority of them” by following rules established “in a constitution or in custom to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.”  He concedes it’s a messy, muddled process in which “disappointment is normal” because people have to settle for less than they want.”

He thinks the Tea Party is the best example of the anti-politics movement that wants to elect people with no political experience. “They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.”  But, he writes, “They don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victory for themselves and their doctrine,” a process that has had “a wretched effect on our democracy.”   And, he argues, the anti-politics movement is sending this nation into “a series of overlapping downward spirals.”

How is it doing that?  First, by electing people with no political skills or experience, he says. “That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.”

Brooks thinks these politically-inexperienced people “don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations.  When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitcs” leading to the election of people who “refuse compromise and so block the legislative process” which, in turn, “destroys public trust (which) makes deal-making harder.”

And along comes Donald Trump, a man Brooks thinks is the culmination of all of these trends: “the desire for outsiders; the bashing style of rhetoric that makes conversation impossible; the decline of coherent political parties; the declining importance of policy; the tendency to fight cultural battles and identity wars through political means.”  He compares Trump to the “insecure school yard bully.”

Brooks says he printed out a New York Times list of Trump’s Twitter insults.  Thirty-three pages is what it took.  And he cites a study by political scientist Matthew MacWilliams that Trump supporters are likely to score high on tests that measure authoritarianism.

He concludes, “This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide.  The answer to Trump in politics. It’s acknowledging other people exist. It’s taking pleasure in that difference and hammering out workable arrangements…”

Those of us who have or have had front row seats to the deterioration of politics in Missouri know precisely what Cal Thomas and David Brooks are writing about.

What it all boils down to is that the sewer politics we—and many of you—complain about is our own fault.  We have done this to ourselves and, quite frankly, we have been urged on in our destructive efforts by people in this columnist’s own medium, radio, who have found rudeness and disrespect profitable.  Analysts in years to come will undoubtedly find today’s era of antipolitics had many causes, but the root cause is that a large part of the general public bought into the idea that the way to solve government problems was to elect people who don’t respect government and the political system that has made it work.

Thomas and Brooks have identified the problem and how we got here.   So what is to be done about it?

Of all the public figures this reporter has watched in his forty-plus years of covering Missouri politics, John Danforth is the one he most respects.   A few months ago Danforth put out a new book.   It is worth reading.   In a future post, we will offer some of his reflections.

But in the meantime it might be good to think about the necessity of repealing term limits.  Missourians approved them but by their own actions on that very day and in every election since Missourians have shown they don’t really believe in them.  And it seems from this lofty view that the Brooks’ overlapping downward spirals accelerated in Missouri from that day.