Category Archives: legislature

Eric the Meddler

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Our Missouri Attorney General has sued China for not coming clean about COVID. He has meddled in how Pennsylvania ran its 2020 presidential election. He sued more than a dozen school districts that had decided their students were safer if they wore masks to limit COVID exposure. Now he is demanding emails from academics that he thinks are critical of him or might be teaching something he finds it politically advantageous to criticize.

Does this sound like the person whose duties are described on his own office webpage?

The Attorney General serves as the chief legal officer of the State of Missouri as mandated by our Constitution. The Attorney General is elected by Missouri voters, serves a four-year term, and is not subject to constitutional term limits.

The Attorney General’s Office represents and provides legal advice to most state agencies; defends challenges to the validity of state laws; enforces civil law, including consumer protection and environmental laws; defends the State’s interest in civil actions, including bankruptcies, workers’ compensation claims, professional licensing cases, and habeas corpus actions filed by state and federal inmates; and serves as a special prosecutor in criminal cases when appointed. In addition, the Office handles all appeals statewide from felony convictions.

The Attorney General’s Office brings and defends lawsuits on behalf of the State and prepares formal legal opinions requested by State officers, legislators, or county attorneys on issues of law. The Office represents the State in litigation at all levels ranging from a variety of administrative tribunals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Frankly, it seems our attorney general hasn’t read his own webpage lately, although he seems to be pretty loose in his interpretation of bringing and defending lawsuits on behalf of the State.

A few months ago, Schmitt’s office filed open records requests with the University of Missouri-Columbia. One demanded three years of emails seemed to target a research program to help teachers helping teachers promoting social emotional learning. The Rand Corporation says social emotional learning gives students “the skills they need to work in teams, communicate their ideas, manage their emotions — even stand up to a schoolyard bully. For anyone who has ever complained that kids these days don’t have the strength of character, the stick-to-it-iveness, of previous generations, here’s one way to better ensure they do.”  The second letter demanded four years of emails from a couple of Journalism School professors sent to the head of Politifact, a political fact-checking website.

Why is he interested in these things?  Schmitt’s office has told The Kansas City Star he’s “simply trying to get to the bottom of the fact checking process.”

—whatever the heck that means.

His latest target is Missouri State University Assistant Professor Jon Turner who reacted on Twitter after Schmitt asked parents to report “divisive” curriculum in their kid’s schools.

The Missouri Independent has reported that Turner tweeted that Schmitt used to be known as a moderate state Senator but since becoming AG, he has become “so ANTI-TEACHER I just can’t wrap my mind around the flip-flop” and he said he was working to “make sure this dangerous, hateful political jellyfish never gets elected to anything again.”

Schmitt did not take such remarks lightly.  His office fired off a letter to the university demanding all of Turner’s emails for the previous three months as “part of a fact-finding process we undertook that was looking into the practices and policies of education in our state,” as Schmitt’s spokesman put it.

Turner has told the Independent that his reseach looks at the four-day work week and other challenges facing rural schools, not something Schmitt’s office should bother Schmitt.

Turner says Schmitt’s “attempted intimidation” has just made him more concerned that Schmitt is politicizing his position.

Schmitt also has targeted MSU. Earlier his office demanded emails from various professors and documents related to a training seminar sponsored by the University called the “Facing Racism Institute.”.

The University describes the institute as “the area’s leading program for uncovering racism and understand its impact on individuals and the workplace. It says more than 600 people have attended the institute. The university says, “Racism is still a powerful force in our lives and community. The Institute challenges participants of all backgrounds to be part of an equally powerful dialogue. We provide a safe space and neutral guidance needed to help that dialogue emerge.”

Again, it appears he hasn’t read his own office’s mission statement on its web page although he takes the language about bringing lawsuits on behalf of the state rather freely.

A good friend of your correspondent, who headed the Springfield Chamber of Commerce for many years, called the Institute “the best experience that we have found to have people understand the challenges and perspectives of folks unlike themselves. It is hard to be inclusive if you don’t understand what others might feel like.”

Itt appears that Eric Schmitt is guilty of something we hear his party blasting the Democratic congress and administration for:  government overreach. Whether he has, as Turner says, politicized his office is something we’ll let you decide.

Some of those he has targeted accuse him of trying to intimidate them. Others think he’s involved in political meddling in things that are not part of his official duties (read the intalicized description of the AG’s duties again).

In truth, he’s just being political.

We covered Eric Schmitt when he was a state senator.  We found him to be a thoughtful conservative.  We watched him struggle to pass a major autism bill.  We watched as he tried to transform Lambert-St. Louis Airport into a major trade hub with China—in a time when China’s economy was booming and its geopolitical ambitions had not turned perilous.

We kidded him about his claim that he was the tallest person ever to serve in the Missouri Senate, especially after we found an old newspaper clipping indicating he might only have tied for that distinction.

He’s not that Eric Schmitt today.

Perhaps political ambition is behind it.  Perhaps his advisors have told him he has to behave as he has behaved and is behaving because that appeals to a political base ginned up by and encouraged by Donald Trump—a man who has no compunction about dragging others down to his basest level.

Too bad the old Eric Schmitt isn’t the one running to join Josh Hawley representing Missouri in the U.S Senate. He seems to have left himself behind when he crossed the street from the State Treasurer’s office in the Capitol to the Attorney General’s office in the State Supreme Court building.

Is the tax cut the Christian thing to do?

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The question came up in the Searchers Sunday School class at First Christian Church in Jefferson City yesterday.

Perhaps the question arose, at least partly, because on Saturday, the third annual Prayerfest attracted hundreds of people to the Capitol to pray for ten things: marriage and family, religious liberty, fostering and adopting, law enforcement, sexual exploitation, business and farming, government, racial tensions, right to life, and education.

Lower taxes didn’t make that list.

The bill passed by the legislature last week will reduce general revenue by $764 million a year. My friend Rudi Keller at Missouri Independent has noted the state’s general revenue fund had $12.9 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year and the state ended the year with almost $5 billion unspent.

But shouldn’t it have been spent?

Just because the state has it doesn’t mean the state should spend it.  But Missouri clearly has public needs that are not being met.  Whether it is more responsible to give a little bit of money back to a lot of people or to use that money to served thousands is an ethical—and religious—question.

The 2003 Missouri General Assembly passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act intended to keep the state from restricting the free exercise of religion except under specific, limited, circumstances.  But we often have been reminded that freedom carries with it responsibilities.

Perhaps we need a Religious Responsibility Restoration Act that relies on Cain’s refusal to accept responsibility for the welfare (or even the life) of his brother.  The Judeo-Christian tradition does say that there is a personal responsibility for our neighbors, even those we don’t like (recall the Good Samaritan story).

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.”  And he told the Romans, “Let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may build up another.”

Instead of using money legitimately gained for the benefit of many, it appears the governor and the legislature have decided to lessen the state’s ability to pay the costs of the services thousands of Missourians need.

The Missouri Budget Project reports these things:

–Between FY 2007 and FY 2020, there was a 22% cut in Missouri’s investment in programs to support independent living when adjusted to today’s dollars.

–While average incomes and property taxes increase over time, circuit breaker eligibility guidelines and the size of the credit have remained flat since the last increase in 2008. As a result, fewer people qualify for the credit over time and those that do are more likely to fall higher on the phase-out scale – meaning they qualify to receive a smaller credit. In addition, Missourians who rent from a facility that is tax-exempt were cut from the Circuit Breaker Program in 2018.

—When adjusted for inflation, required per student funding for K-12 schools was significantly lower in FY 2022 than it was in 2007. That is, the value of our state’s investment in its students is less than it was 15 years ago.   

—Missouri’s investment in K-12 education is also far below the national average. Our state revenue spending per child is less than 60% of what the average state spends to educate its children.

—Even with today’s rosy budget, Missourians can’t access long term care through the Department of Mental Health, child welfare workers are overwhelmed, and the state’s foster care system is in desperate need. Vulnerable Missourians – including kids – are being put at risk because Missouri has the lowest paid state employees in the country, resulting in staff vacancies.

Others reports indicate services (that in many cases are more important to thousands of people than a small tax refund) are badly in need of the funds the legislature and the governor want to give away:

Stats America ranks Missouri 38th in public welfare expenditures.  $1581. Mississippi is 20th at $2,098. W. Va is tenth at $2,722. Alaska, Massachusetts and New York are the only states above $3,000.

Spending on education: USA Facts. (from the Economics Lab at Georgetown University)  Nationwide, the top spending schools by expenditure per student spent $40,566 or more in 2019, more than three times the median school expenditure per student of $11,953.  Missouri was at  was $10,418.  That’s 37th in the country.

We were 26th in per capita spending on mental health services.  Missouri ranks 40th in mental health care, says Healthcare Insider.com

Average teacher pay 52,481 says World Population review. 39th among the states.

We are 32nd in police and corrections spending.

It’s not as if we are overburdened.  The Tax Foundation says we are 27th overall in tax burden, 22nd  property taxes burden.

Against that background is this assessment of the tax cut enacted by the legislature last week:

The Missouri Budget Project, which evaluates state tax policy and state needs says “A middle class family earning $52,000 will see only about $5.50 in tax savings each month. But the millionaire across town will get more than $4,200 a year.”   (To make sure that we’re comparing apples and apples, the middle class family’s annual savings will be $66 a year under the MBP projections.)

Reporter Clara Bates wrote for Missouri Independent about three weeks ago that “the Department of Social Services had an overall staff turnover rate of 35% in the last fiscal year ranking second among state agencies of its size after only the Department of Mental Health.”

It’s even worse for the Children’s Division: “Among frontline Children’s Division staff — including child abuse and neglect investigators and foster care case managers — the turnover rate last year was 55%, according to data provided by DSS. That means more than half of the frontline staff working at Children’s Division across the state at the start of the last fiscal year had left by the end of the year.”  Why the turnover?  High workloads for the staff. And the high workloads lead to more employees leaving at a time when the state needs to be hiring MORE people.

Missouri has almost 14,000 children in foster care.  The national average for children finding a permanent home within a year of entering the system is 42.7%.  The average in Missouri is “just over 30%.”

The politically-popular pledge to “shrink government” is exacting a terrible price on those who need its help.   The Department of Social Services has lost more than one-third of the employees it had twenty years ago.  The number of employees in the Children’s Division is down almost 25% since 2009

The number of full-time personnel at DSS shrunk by a third in the last two decades. The Children’s Division has had nine directors in the last ten years.

But instead of using the money the state has to ease or correct these more-than regrettable situations, the governor and the legislature are giving away $764 million dollars a year with the bill passed last week.

It’s always politically easy to cut taxes, especially in an election year.  It’s easy to talk about how much an individual taxpayer might get back.  It’s harder to confront the damage that might be done to the services that taxpayer needs or relies on.

A lot of people in the legislature and a lot of people in the broad citizenry of Missouri speak proudly of their religiosity. And many of them think the concept of “shrinking government” is a laudable accomplishment.

We should beware of the Pharisees who do not consider whether they are their brother’s keepers and who fail to realize that freedom of religion also carries a religious responsibility to “pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.”

In the Sunday School class yesterday we asked whether the tax cut that will become law soon is the Christian thing to do—-a question that we hope bothers at least some of those who are so boastful that this is and always has been a Christian nation.

Well, is it—a Christian thing to do?

Am I my brother’s keeper?  How does saving $5.50 a month in taxes answer that?

Tread Carefully

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The Missouri General Assembly convenes in a special session in a few days to consider a significant cut in the state’s income tax and other issues.

The past and the present and two seemingly unrelated situations suggest this is a time to tread carefully—-although, this being an election year, politics could take a higher priority than should be taken in considering the tax cut.

Let’s set aside politics for a few minutes and raise some concerns based on years of watching state tax policy be shaped.

Days after Governor Parson announced he was calling the legislature back to cut the income tax, President Biden announced his program to eliminate a lot of college student loan debt.  The two issues, seemingly wide apart, actually are related in this context. It will take some time to explain.

We begin with the Hancock Amendment. In 1980, Springfield burglary alarm salesman—later Congressman—Mel Hancock seized on a tax limitation movement sweeping the country and got voters to approve a change to the state constitution that tied state government income to economic growth.  If the state’s tax collections exceeded the calculated amount, the state had to send refund checks to income taxpayers.

Some of the Hancock Amendment was modeled on Michigan’s Headlee Amendment adopted two years earlier. But the timing of Hancock could not have been worse.  While Michigan’s amendment was passed during good economic times, Missouri’s Hancock Amendment went into effect during a severe economic recession considered to be the worst since World War II.

Missouri therefore established a limit that had a low bar. There are those who think the state has suffered significantly because of that.

Except for one year the Hancock Amendment has worked well.  Too well, some think, because it has encouraged state policy makers to underfund some vital state programs already hampered by Hancock’s low fiscal bar.

In 1998, the state revenues exceeded the Hancock limit, forcing the Revenue Department to issue about one-billion dollars in refund checks (averaging about forty dollars per household).

The legislature decided it did not want to repeat that. So it decided to cut taxes to keep from hitting the Hancock limit again.  Not a bad idea, except that when the national and state economies took a dive, financing of state institutions and services was severely lowered.  Had the refund program remained in effect, the economic downturn would have meant no refunds but institutions and services would have been hurt far less because the tax base would have stabilized funding.

The MOST (Missouri Science and Technology) Policy Initiative, a fiscal think tank, has recorded twenty tax cuts from 1993-2013.  The result is that Missouri is almost four-billion dollars under the revenue limit set by Hancock, according to the latest annual study done by the state auditor.

Missouri is unable to do a lot of things it could be doing because the legislature eroded the state tax base instead of issuing checks.

Now the legislature will consider an even deeper tax cut.

Nobody likes to pay taxes. But there has been cultivated in our state and nation a culture that seems to think the benefits of government—education, public safety, infrastructure, care for the sick and elderly and indigent, and other parts of our lives we take for granted—should be free.  Or, to the way of thinking of some people who don’t need those things, eliminated.

How does the Biden program to forgive billions of dollars in student loans provide a cautionary element to consideration of the Parson tax cut?

When I was in college in the previous century, I knew many people who worked their way through school. Some could do it with part-time jobs on campus or in the community. I had one friend who worked for a semester and then took classes for a semester.  I have one friend who  financed his college education by selling thousands of dollars worth of Bibles and other religious books during the summer.

But the expense of a college education today makes that kind of self-financing impossible, or almost impossible.  And here is a major reason why.

Back when my generation and the generation after us, probably, could work our way through school, the state provided for a substantial cost of higher education.  Today, the percentage is much lower.

Last year, one of Missouri’s most distinguished attorneys—who also was appointed by Governor Parson to the Coordinating Board for Higher Education—W. Dudley McCarter, noted in The Columbia Missourian, “After striving to attain this goal over the past 10 years, the state of Missouri has now succeeded in becoming the state that is at the very bottom in funding for higher education. No, it is not Mississippi, Arkansas or Alabama — it is Missouri. Over the last 10 years, state funding for higher education has increased nationwide at an average of 12.40% with some states increasing funding by over 40%. In Missouri, however, funding has decreased during that same period by 13.70% — the only state that had reduced funding. When adjusted for inflation, the decrease is actually over 26%. The national average for funding is $304 per student, with some states providing over $700 per student. In Missouri, the funding is less than $200 per student.”

The downward trend has been going on far longer than that. The internet site Ballotpedia has noted that state appropriations per full-time student dropped by 26.1% in the first decade of this century, about twice the national average.

A study done a few years ago for Missouri State University showed that, nationally, student higher education tuitions made up 30.8% of higher education revenues in 1993. By 2018, tuition was financing 46.6% of higher education costs—and the costs were higher. It was during that time that student borrowing ballooned to offset declining percentages of state and federal higher education support.

The Biden student loan forgiveness program deals with those who have debts already. It does nothing to prevent current or future students from incurring crippling student debts, because government has reduced its support for higher education.  And now, the legislature is being asked to reduce state revenues even more.

We lack the expertise to get too far into the weeds of economic nuance.  But reducing the state’s ability to meet its fiscal responsibilities in the future, whether it’s in higher education or numerous other fields is a long-term issue that must be approached with great caution.

Things are flush right now, thanks partly to inflation and the massive injection of federal Covid relief funds in the last few years.  But Missouri still is far short of its own limit on the state tax burden and still far short in funding numerous human-service needs.

It is politically popular in an election year to cut taxes. The public seldom recognizes the long-term penalties that might result.  Tomorrow’s college graduates might be among those paying a high price for today’s popular tax cut and incurring new student debt burdens.  And if a recession hits next year, as some economists keep predicting, some unfortunate results of this year’s tax cut could become painfully clear.

Governor Parson has taken a wise step in meeting with members of both parties to explain why he thinks a tax cut is appropriate today. We suspect he had an easier sell with member of his own party than he did with the other side. We expect some passionate discussion of this issue during the special session.

We also expect a cut will be enacted.  We hope, however, that we do not have a repeat of the unfortunate post-refund tax cuts of decades ago. We must be careful as we consider what we might do to ourselves, our children, and our friends.  Tread carefully.

The Lake

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Wire service reporters used to do something called a “new top” as stories developed.  If something happened reasonably soon after an original story was sent out on the wire, the reporter would write a new lede that would replace the opening paragraph or paragraphs, and editors down the line could use it and graft the rest of the story behind it.

Today we offer a new top to an old story that we related in this space on September 5, 2016.  It was about the naming of the Lake of the Ozarks.

Construction of Bagnell Dam was completed in April, 1931 and the water reached spillway level in May.

A year-and-a-half before the dam was finished, a controversy broke out about what to name the reservoir.  Union Electric, now Ameren, the builder of the dam, found itself fighting an effort in January, 1930 to name the reservoir “Lake Osage.”

A land company had bought property on the planned lakeshore and had gone to the Camden County Recorder of Deeds to register the name “Lake Osage.”  But the development of the lake was a private enterprise by Union Electric which immediately said the proposed name was not authorized and would not be allowed.

The land company liked the name because it wanted to build a “summer colony” it wanted to call Osage Beach.

But critics thought “Lake Osage” would be confusing because the new lake was only two counties away from Lake Sac-Osage at Osceola (now the Truman Reservoir).

The 1929 legislature passed a bill calling the new lake “Lake Missouri,” but Governor Henry Caulfield vetoed it.  Several other names were suggested including Lake Benton, for Senator Thomas Hart Benton.  When the legislature passed a bill in ’31 calling the reservoir “Lake Benton,” Caulfield vetoed it, too, because it referred to “Missouri’s greatest Senator,” a phrase some might question then and one that could be questionable when future men and women had the job.

Union Electric, through the construction years, had referred to the dam creating the “Ozark Reservoir,” which turned out to be the largest man-made lake in the world—a claim that was eclipsed five years  later.

By 1932 the lake was generally referred to as the Lake of the Ozarks. As far as we know there was never a formal dedication of the lake’s name.

And Osage Beach became much more than a “summer colony.”

Slouching into adjournment

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Jacques reflects on life in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

 All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

They’re gone.  They’re done.  The chambers are dark and cool.  The hearing rooms are empty and quiet.  The unpopulated rotunda echoes with the sounds of a few footsteps.

The players have departed, some to return but others now of no further use, their importance immediately extinguished because they can no longer do things for people who want things done.

Some of those who have served will never be seen again in these hallways.  Their offices soon will be occupied by some other temporary presence who will come to this time, too.

And what have they left behind? What lasting benefit was there of their service?

The fact that they served, that they sought the responsibilities and the obligations of office, can be enough.

Some—those who will never again do anything as consequential as vote on some pages of words that establish allowable behaviors for six million people—might have time now to ponder their legacies.  Did they benefit all Missourians or just a few?  Did they protect the many or place a few ahead of them?  Will their time in the Capitol matter in the arc of history.

Or does it make any difference?

We have found ourself wondering during this session what some departing members will consider their legacy. When the last newspaper article is written about them, will one of their distinguished accomplishments be that they shut down the Senate for half of the session, for purely partisan and sometimes personal reasons?

For those who won’t be back in either the House or the Senate, will they be remembered because they almost were part of the least productive legislative session in modern history?  If the House had not approved twenty Senate-passed bills on Friday, the day after the Senate quit a day early, this session would have approved only 23 non-budget bills. The record low number in modern times is 31 in 2020, when the pandemic scrambled everything.  What scrambled everything this year was the conservative caucus in the Senate that believed its seven members should tell 17 other Republican Senators and ten Democrats how to run the place.

Our friend Rudi Keller says the average number of bills passed since 1981 was 155.

Senator Emory Melton, who served 28 years from Cassville, once opined that “it is not the bills that pass sometimes; it’s the bills that DON’T pass.”  A lot of bills didn’t pass this year, good ones and bad ones that were sentenced to death, early, by seven of 197 legislators who thought the congressional redistricting map should be about partisan politics rather than about public representation in Government.

We wonder if anyone considers whether a law they sponsored will still be on the books twenty-five years from now.

Will two legislators who talked to each other during debate almost every stay in touch even one year after leaving the capitol?

All glory is fleeting, said Patton.  All glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever, said Napoleon. How many years will elapse before one of their townsfolk is surprised to learn they once served in the Missouri General Assembly?

What’s done is done. The session will be recalled for the stalemate that froze the Senate for half the session.  It will be recalled because one chamber threw in the towel a day early and the other gave up before the statutory deadline on the last day.  Well after any memories of individual accomplishments, this session will be recalled for those things.

Grantland Rice, the dean of sportswriters in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—–the man who described the Notre Dame backfield as “The Four Horsemen”—wrote a poem titled, The Record:

When the game is done and the players creep

One by one to the League of Sleep,

Deep in the night they may not know

The way of the fight, the fate of the foe.

The cheer that passed, the applauding hands,

Are stilled at last — but the Record stands.

 

The errors made, and the base hits wrought;

Here the race was run! There the fight was fought.

Yet the game is done when the sun sinks low

and one by one from the field they go;

Their day has passed through the Twilight Gates,

But the Scroll is cast — and the Record waits.

 

So take, my lad, what the Great Game gives,

For all men die — but the Record lives.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading List

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This is the last week of the legislative session.  Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.

This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club.  A lousy one.

Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.

Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.

If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.

To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber.  Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.

Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value.  We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.

America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.

The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.

New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later  It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, by Carrie Gibson.  Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers.  But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.

There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.

If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to.  And with these books, there is.

We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.

But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.

 

 

The Light

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—is starting to grow larger at the end of the tunnel.

The last week and a half of the legislative session is here.  It’s time for legislators wanting another two or four years in Jefferson City to get the heck out of town and start telling the folks why they deserve another term, or a term of some other kind that lets them remain at the public trough.

The biggest budget in state history, bloated with federal pandemic relief funds, must be resolved by Friday—and it probably will be.  But the session is likely to be recalled for its divisions in the Senate and the lost first half of the session to filibusters that went beyond making a point, whatever it was.

It won’t be much to go home and brag about in this campaign year.  And for those who will be spending their last days as decision-makers for the state, this year won’t be much of a legacy to be mentioned in the last newspaper article written about them.

It could be worse.

We remember when sessions went until June 15 in non-election years with a midnight adjournment.  Given what we’ve seen this year, we are intensely grateful that custom was ended some time ago when reason was more present in the General Assembly.

Premonition

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Your faithful chronicler was invited to speak to a group of freshman, sophomore, and junior State Representatives last week. It turned out they all were Republicans, including some Republican candidates for the House.

If Democrats want to hear the nonpartisan speech, I’d be glad to do it for them.

In fact, the words of a Democrat had a prominent role in the early part of the speech.  I had recited some facts about being raised in a Republican family. But I came of age in the Camelot era, a pedigree that I hope is somewhat behind my efforts as a reporter to harass both parties equally.

As I was researching some of the material for the speech, I came across the speech President Kennedy would have delivered at the Texas Trade Mart. As history records, the world ended for him ten minutes or so before he was to arrive there. The conclusion of the speech reaches across the generations since that day in Dallas.  Here’s the part of that speech that made it into part of my remarks last week:

“In this time of division and hostility, of narrowness and demagoguery often fueled by fear of the different instead of the opportunities presented by the things we have in common, it might be good to reflect on some of President Kennedy’s words again.  The other day I came across some words he would have spoken at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, a day I remember vividly as a young reporter.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,…doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness…

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense…

We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

It has been too long since we heard that kind of uplifting challenge. And it’s time for leaders with courage to speak that way again.”

The crowd provided a standing ovation at the end of the talk, which was nice. I hope that means they didn’t think they were listening to nonsense.  And that they won’t go out and deliver it.

Motivational posters

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Your correspondent dislikes walking into a room—usually somebody’s office—decorated with motivational posters.  You know them.  Lovely pictures with some syrupy words about success, or greatness, or achievement, or—motivation.

The motivational poster industry probably has been around forever; I think I have read of some motivational sayings painted on the walls at Pompeii.  But they’ve become noticeably popular in the last two decades or so.  We will leave it to various “ologists” to study what has changed about us to warrant such treacle.

There always was this feeling that anybody who really needed one of these saccharine decorations must have been short of self-esteem—or working for bosses who think a treacly poster can be a transformative influence on the employee.

I know several apparently well-adjusted folks who have these things on their offices.  As far as I know they do not spend any time every day meditating on them and pondering the significance of the message. They seem to be perfectly normal people who do their work competently every day.  I’ve known some of them long enough to know that the poster in their office has not changed the high-quality work they have always done anyway.

All of this is why my newsroom work station, for several years, sported a calendar from Despair.com (https://despair.com/collections/demotivators) that countered the hard-hitting soupy sayings on walls elsewhere in the building.  Every couple of months there was a new mini-poster taped under my name thingie.

Now, understand that news people have a tendency to be kind of anti-establishment, independent, unruly, and untidy souls who have an inborn pride in being to some degree as manageable as a wheelbarrow full of frogs.  Or cats.  Or Beagle pups. We are only slightly more manageable than a wheelbarrow full of canaries.

But my work area used to be decorated with beautiful pictures such as one showing several hands hoisting a trophy with the big word, “Winning” beneath and the ensuing paragraph: “Because nothing says, ‘You’re a loser’ more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner.”

There are several others—enough that I did not have time to acquire them all.

One that some legislator with a sense of humor might want to hang in the outer office where visitors can see it. If features a lovely early evening sunset-illuminated Nation’s Capitol and its reflection in a mall pool.  It says “Government,” and beneath it are the words, “If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.”

Apparently there is an alternate contemplation: “They may seem inefficient and feckless at times, but your Representatives in Washington just want what’s best for you assuming you’re a major corporation. Otherwise, you’re pretty mush screwed.”

Another poster shows a stack of newspapers with the big word “Media,” followed by, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”

And there’s one labled “Conspiracy” that says, “Never attribute to stupidity that which can easily be explained by a pathological blood lust for control.”

Or one showing hands raised in high fives and labeled, “Teams,” with the note, “Together we can do the work of one.”

And of course the poster reading “Motivation,” which advises, “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job.  The kind robots will be doing soon.”

I’m waiting for the poster that says “Treacle.”  The accompanying line should be a pip.

Hate

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We picked up a copy of The Southern Poverty Law Center’s The Year in Hate & Extremism 2021 the other day. It lists, state-by-state the groups it considers to be hate and extremist organizations.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 as a civil rights and public interest litigation organization. It has become known for filing suits against white supremacist organizations and other discriminatory groups. It promotes tolerance education programs.

Some of those the conference has listed have criticized the listings as being politically-motivated or not warranted or so broad they are not accurate.

There are thirty Missouri organizations on the 2021 list.  Thirty out of 733 hate groups spread throughout the 50 states.  Nineteen of Missouri’s thirty groups are “general hate” (10) and “general antigovernment” (9).

We have no active KKK, racial Skinhead, neo-confederate, anti-immigrant, anti LGBTQ, conspiracy proponent or constitutional sheriffs organizations.

This does not mean, of course, that there are not those who fall into those categories as individuals or that these movements have not infiltrated mainstream politics, society, and religion. Clearly there are many people who have bought into the ideology of these groups. The SPLC singles out one political philosophy in particular.

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 exposed an alarming reality: that extremist leaders can mobilize large groups of Americans to use force and intimidation to impose their political will…They’ve coalesced into a political movement that is now one of the most powerful forces shaping politics in the United States….Within the GOP, a radical faction is attempting to rout the few remaining moderates unless there is a robust counter-effort from democracy supporters.

Let’s be clear.  The SPLC is not saying every Republican is within this sphere. We know many who are not.  But many of these groups or those individuals buying into their rhetoric see that party as their best vehicle to achieve power and they see the upcoming midterm elections as their best road to the top.

Just as it took a record involvement of Democrat, Independent, and disaffected Republicans to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, so it is likely to take a record forceful involvement of mainline Republicans (along with some Independents and crossover Democrats) in the August primary and the November general elections to blunt this movement in Missouri.

The commission warns of the danger of these groups and those supporting their attitudes.

Extremist groups have also found ways to insert themselves into mainstream politics. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, they shifted their efforts to local politics, focusing especially on COVID safety protocols and school curricula. Hard-right organizations disrupted school board and city council meetings around the country and, in the process, created space for more extreme and bigoted voices. As a result, public servants have experienced a wave of threats that will likely continue as the country heads toward the 2022 midterms.

We have talked to many people who shake their heads, unable to understand why some office-holders and candidates who have seemed thoughtful and reasonable people until now are sounding as unreasonable as several seem to be—or either side of the ballot.

The mainstream citizens, the ones who shake their heads is despair at what our politics have become, must be vigilant and active in 2022. Sitting back and wringing their hands is not an option.

The Southern Poverty Law Center concludes:

The United States must…look for ways to build a more resilient democracy…Even more, a reinvigorated vision of a more inclusive democracy is necessary, ne that creates a stark alternative away from the destructive path of the hard right. That means expanding and protecting access to voting, creating legislation to protect people who face discrimination, promoting civics education and teaching students an anti-racist curriculum, and ensuring all Americans have healthcare, housing and other vital services so they can lead safe and dignified lives.  History tells us that the threat is real, but it also reminds us that we can turn the tide.

Some of this language can be dismissed easily as “hard left” language and in the poisoned atmosphere of our politics today it is easy to dismiss it instead of exploring it.

Our state is protected by the explorers, not the fighters.  None of us should be afraid to explore even if we face the hateful charge that we are “woke,” or some other word or phrase intended to brand us as immaterial.

It is a truism that if you cannot intellectually justify your point, you can always think you win by calling someone a name, giving them a brand, assigning them to a mythical place of dismissal. Such pronouncements should be dismissed out of hand.

Getting back to where we started—

Missouri being the home to thirty groups considered hate or extremist organizations is not something to be proud of. Letting them or individuals sharing their views dominate our political discourse is a danger to all of us no matter what side of the aisle we are on.

A silent majority can become a silenced majority if it is afraid to assert its power against those bent on destruction and control.

Perhaps naively, we place our hope in that silent majority, that silent courageous majority, that we hope is quietly waiting to turn itself loose on our election days in 2022.