Category Archives: legislature

Somebody could file a lawsuit

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—So we said last week in writing about the difficulties of re-drawing congressional or legislative districts after each census.

Those of us who are of a certain age (I think I am beyond it, actually) remember a St. Louis mover and shaker named Paul Preisler (rhymes with Chrysler, as I recall) who was a pain in the neck on redistricting after census counts in 1950, 1960, and 1970.

Preisler was a Ph.D. biochemist, lawyer, photographer, civil libertarian, photographer, and once an instructor at the Washington University School of Medicine.   He also was a Socialist back in the days when it wasn’t quite the curse word that it has become.

In the 1930s he helped found the St. Louis chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and as its first president he led a successful effort to let the public school teachers there organize.

He joined the Socialist Party during the Depression and sued the Board of Election Commissioners when the board refused non-partisan candidates and minority parties the right to have poll watchers and challengers. The Missouri Supreme Court came down on his side, giving minority parties the authority to have poll watchers and challengers.

This guy never seemed to runout of gas.  Two years after the St. Louis chapter of the AFT was created, he ran for a place on the city board of education.  The school board rejected his candidacy because the board’s constitution made it non-partisan.

The Missouri Supreme court ruled three days before the election that the school board had to let Preisler run.  The board had to print new ballots. Preisler lost but he says he was running on principle, so the loss was okay.

When he got back from the war, he went after the city school board again because of its policy banning married women teachers from being teachers.  He won that case, too, and shortly thereafter decided, at the age of 48 that  he wanted to be a lawyer.

And he did.  In fact he was a professor at the Wash-U law school and became professor emeritus in 1969.

By then he had gotten into challenging redistrict maps.  His first target was again the St. Louis Board of Education. In 1952 he challenged the way the city Board of Election Commissioners had drawn new district maps. He won again and new maps were drawn.

Not one to be satisfied just filing lawsuits, Preisler filed himself in 1954—as a non-partisan congressional candidate. When Secretary of State Walter Toberman refused to accept his filing fee, saying that splinter parties (such as the Communists, and this was at the height of anti-communist feeling in the country) and Communists could not have candidates if the party didn’t get a lot of votes in the preceding election. Preisler argued that he should be able to run as a person rather than as a representative of a political party. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed with Preisler, again.

Not content with shouting from the sidelines, Preisler ran for office several times: twice, as a Socialist, for the legislature (1934 and ’36), six times as a non-partisan for a spot on the St. Louis Board of Education with campaigns starting in 1937 and continuing to 1971. He ran as a non-partisan for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.

He never won any of the several offices for which he ran, which was fine with him because he ran to make a point.

In the 1960s he targeted the state. He decided the new congressional districts drawn after the 1960 census were not as compact and as nearly equal in population as the law required.  That was 1962.  When the legislature tried again and the public accepted the map in ’65, Preisler refiled his lawsuit in early in ’66 and the State Supreme Court agreed with him in the summer of 1966 that THAT map was unconstitutional.

The cases all led to landmark rulings on compactness of districts and the legislature’s authority to exercise its discretion, the court writing in the 1962 case naming Secretary of State Warren Hearnes as defendant that, “[A]ny redistricting agreed upon must always be a compromise. Mathematical exactness is not required or in fact obtainable and a compromise, for which there is any reasonable basis, is an exercise of legislative discretion that the courts must respect.”

For a time Preisler did pro bono work for the American Civil Liberties Union.  The State Historical Society of Missouri, which houses 22 cubic feet of his papers at its St. Louis Research Center, says, “He defended the right of students to wear long hair, hold anti-war demonstrations, and the publish uncensored newspapers. He also defended prisoners and women against discrimination.”

He was also involved in municipal affairs, once filing a suit against the City of St. Louis that eventually killed city plans to build a roadway through Shaw’s Gardens.

When he died in 1971 at age 69, Paul Preisler had another challenge to congressional districts pending. He lost that one, posthumously, in 1975.

There has been no one like him since.

But every time there’s a redistricting map drawn for congressional or legislative districts, there’s always that uncertain time.

Christian Values

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Governor Parson is catching a lot of flak for his reaction to the Senate’s rejection last week of Don Kauerauf, Parson’s nominee for director of the Department of Health and Senior Services.

Part of Governor Parson’s statement that blasted Senate critics for “feeding misinformation, repeating lies, and disgracing 35 years of public health experience is not what it means to be conservative” seems to have escaped the attention it might have received because he went on to praise Kauerauf for opposing COVID masking and vaccine mandates and being pro-life, qualities Parson referred to as “shared…Christian values.” He suggested he would not appoint someone who did not share those values.

He also mentioned other values:  devoted public service, “honor, integrity, and order.”

It’s the use of the phrase “Christian values” that has triggered controversy, though.  “Does the next director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services need to be a Christian?” asked the Post-Dispatch last week.

Beyond the political implication in the statement and the political reaction to it, there are faith issues that deserve examination—and the issue of how religion and politics can be a divisive mix.

I have often said that nothing screws up faith more than religion.

Faith is a basic quality with which all of us are born.  We don’t know it at the time but when we are old enough to comprehend the basic facts of our first out-of-womb existence, we recognize how essential faith is to our lives.  We are born innately trusting that someone will love us, that someone will feed us, that someone will keep us warm, that someone will care for us until we can learn—step by step—to care for ourselves, that someone will protect us, that someone will give us a chance to achieve life, liberty, and give us a chance to pursue happiness.

Religion is an interpretation of standards that affect all of those things. Religions take different approaches to them.  Some are strict in their standards and demands of loyalty. Others are more giving in letting a person interpret values as their own mind leads them to do.

I have a feeling it would be interesting to have a discussion of Christian values with the governor.  From my standpoint, I have to ask if he thinks it is a Christian value that one person goes unmasked although they might expose another to a dangerous virus?  Is it a Christian value to forego vaccines that might lead to a longer and more abundant life?

These are not questions of criticism. They are questions that call for an exploration of faith—which is more basic than religion.

Years ago, in the early days of the discussion at the Missouri Capitol after Roe v. Wade, a state representative asked during a hearing at which a strong pro-life person had testified, “When does ensoulment take place?”   At what point, the questioner wanted to know of the witness, did a cluster of fertilized cells gain a soul?

Whatever the answer was—and I don’t know if there even was an answer—it was not significant enough to stay in my memory.  But it is an essential question in the pro-life/pro-choice debate. And what does that mean if there is a miscarriage?

The discussion of the governor’s statement led me to wander through various internet sites a few days ago.  Here are some Christian values they listed:

Honesty. Humility. Justice. Generosity. Service. Wisdom. Nurture. Endurance (or Perseverance). Love. Thankfulness. Loyalty. Modesty. Courage. Responsibility. Compassion. Respect. Self-control. Creativity. Suffering. Morality. Protection. Hope. Peace.

The Bible is not always a fail-safe guide. Paul told the Christians at Ephesus, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church…Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands.”

But he also wrote to Christians in what is now Turkey (then Galatia), “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

It is a mistake to think, however, that Christian values are those only of Christians.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan received a report in 2006 from the Alliance of Civilizations that examined “basic values common to all religions.”  He told an audience in Ankara, Turkey that “an embrace of differences—differences in opinion, in culture, in belief, in way of life—have long been a driving force of human progress.”

“Thus it was that, during Europe’s ‘Dark Ages,’ the Iberian Peninsula flourished through the interaction of Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions. Later, the Ottoman Empire prospered not simply because of it sarmies, but because it was also an empire of ideas, in which Muslim art and technology wer enriched by Jewish and Christian contributions.

“Regrettably, several centuries later, our own globalized era is marked by rising intolerance, extremism and violence against the other. Closer proximity and improved communications have often led not to mutual understanding and friendship, but to tension and mutual distrust…

“Today, at the very time when international migration has brought unprecedented numbers of people of different creed or culture to live as fellow-citizens, the misconceptions and stereotypes underlying the idea of a “clash of civilizations” have come to be more and more widely shared.  Some groups seem eager to foment a new war of religion, this time on a global scale -– and the insensitivity, or even cavalier disregard, of others towards their beliefs or sacred symbols makes it easier for them to do so.

“Demonization of the ‘other’ has proved the path of least resistance, when a healthy dose of introspection would better serve us all…In the twenty-first century, we remain hostage to our sense of grievances, and to feelings of entitlement.  Our narratives have become our prison, paralysing discourse and hindering understanding.  Thus, many people throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim world, see the West as a threat to their beliefs and values, their economic interests, their political aspirations.  Evidence to the contrary is simply disregarded or rejected as incredible.  Likewise, many in the West dismiss Islam as a religion of extremism and violence, despite a history of relations between the two in which commerce, cooperation and cultural exchange have played at least as important a part as conflict.

“It is vital that we overcome these resentments, and establish relations of trust between communities.  We must start by reaffirming -– and demonstrating -– that the problem is not the Koran, nor the Torah or the Bible.  Indeed, I have often said the problem is never the faith -– it is the faithful, and how they behave towards each other.

“We must stress the basic values that are common to all religions:  compassion; solidarity; respect for the human person; the Golden Rule of “do as you would be done by”.  At the same time, we need to get away from stereotypes, generalizations and preconceptions, and take care not to let crimes committed by individuals or small groups dictate our image of an entire people, an entire region, or an entire religion.”

We have no doubt the governor is a man of faith. He also is a man of politics.  His statement points to the dangers of putting faith and politics too close to one another.

The universal qualities of faith should be used in setting public policy that apply to all equally. Putting religion into the statutes or the Constitution is dangerous because it makes us unequal,  hostages “to our sense of grievances, and to feelings of entitlement.”  Our laws become “our prison, paralyzing discourse and hindering understanding.” And they diminish equality under those laws.

As we ponder the governor’s statement, we see it as a type of awkward shorthand that is too common in our political world today. We think he wants someone with the qualities of faith and the understanding of his contemporary politics.

For many, it is an uncomfortable and unwelcome mix. And it should generate discussion that goes beyond the person who made the statement and includes and challenges us all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bicker, Bicker, Bicker

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We begin this week at the Capitol with the State Senate trying to work out a conflict with Republican ranks on a new congressional district map.

It’s not a Republican-Democrat fight. It’s a Republican-Republican fight.  Should lines be drawn to eliminate a Democratic Congressman?  Or should the lines be drawn to protect a Republican Congresswoman?  Should Missouri Democrats have only one member of Congress?  Or Two?

Heaven help us if a district might be drawn as a swing district, where the Rs and the Ds might be close enough for a campaign to be competitive.  And interesting.  And challenging for the candidates.

Last week the Senate dissolved into bickering between Republican factions.  Should the map be 7-1 Republican or might it be 6-2 with big city Democratic enclaves guaranteed places at the table?  Neither R faction could pass the bill on its own. An alliance with Democrats might provide the margin needed but the Ds would demand a 5-3 map or one that would give them a better shot at getting a third district.

And that is a bridge too far to cross for the either faction of the Rs.

There was concern that the original proposed district lines (approved by the House) would put the Second Congressional District in jeopardy of turning blue, giving the Ds a third seat. Incumbent Ann Wagner barely has survived the last two elections, drawing less than 52% of the vote each time. Republicans might have to work hard to keep that district under the House-passed map because the Democrats surely would work hard to take it, especially given its new borders.  The ultra-conservatives in the Senate don’t want to worry about that so they filibustered until the other Rs agreed to fiddle with the boundaries and make things look better for Wagner’s chances.

It appears we are to be spared the situation after the 2010 census when the lines were drawn to make our delegation 6-2 Republican by putting two Democratic incumbents in the same district.  William Lacy Clay defeated fellow incumbent Russ Carnahan after Carnahan’s district was re-drawn to include a big chunk of Clay territory in St. Louis.  There are no incumbents running against each other this time.

Lawmakers are working hard to avoid having judges draw the lines. A lawsuit after the 1980 session led to a federal district court drawing new districts for the 1982 election, the first election since Missouri lost its ninth congressional seat.  The court’s map put forty percent of Wendell Bailey’s district into Bill Emerson’s district.   Bailey, whose home was barely inside the new district, established a residence in a new district then represented by Democrat Ike Skelton.  Republicans thought Bailey was the best possible candidate to take out Skelton, and he did run strongly but Skelton, who kept 60% of his old district won—although Baily held him to a 54% majority.

That result points to something important.

Congressional districts that are not drawn to protect incumbents provide better contests for voters to decide which competing ideas best represent them. But in practice, that is not the goal of those drawing the lines.  Protecting the dominant party is the ultimate goal when the lines are approved by a partisan body.  We’ve seen that pendulum swing both ways through the years.

Democrats have a point—that the 2020 presidential race broke 60-40 Republican. Therefore, they argue, the most representative congressional map would be one with which Democrats might be able to win another seat, making the delegation 5-3 and more representative of the overall political face of Missouri.

Republicans have a point—that the most recent legislative elections left the chambers of the legislature two-thirds Republican. Thus, the real-world Golden Rule prevails: He who has the gold, rules.

So the divided Republicans in the Senate bickered the week away last week, seemed to iron out some of the intra-partisan wrinkles as the week ended, and are likely to have a map that makes Second District Republicans more comfortable to start things this week.

Then a period of uncertainty arrives. Somebody could file a lawsuit.

And when this game goes into that overtime, the two teams (or three) that have been playing the game so far will be on the sidelines while a third team controls the scoreboard. And that’s not what the majority party wants.

The Casinos in Our Pockets

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We lived in an “appointment” world in 1993, when the first Missouri laws governing casino gambling were written.  Voters had approved riverboat gambling, as it was called then, in 1992. The first casinos on boats would open in the spring of 1994.

Many of us still got our national news with the 5:30 network newscasts on television and our local news at 6 and 10 p.m. when those laws were written.

If we wanted to buy new clothes, we went to a clothing store during the hours it was open.  We went to grocery stores during their open hours to get our food.

We knew when each day we could go to the mailbox to get letters from friends and relatives.

And by the end of the year we knew that if we wanted to gamble we would have to go to the riverboat at a certain time to be admitted.

The Station Casino-St. Charles and the President Casino on the moored Admiral riverboat opened May 27, 1994. Gamblers could board the boat in St. Charles from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for a two-hour cruise (for which they paid three to five dollars, depending on the day). If they missed the cruise time, they had to wait for the boat to come back so we could pay to get aboard for the next trip.

The President never cruised. It was permanently moored near the Gateway Arch because the old aluminum Admiral had no engines. Gamblers would pay two dollars during the week and five dollars on weekends and could board every two hours from 10 a.m. to midnight.

But the world was changing and the change accelerated each year. “Appointment living” was beginning to diminish although many of us did not realize it at the time.

There were some hints, however.

The Pew Research Center reported in 1994 that the percentage of Americans getting news from the internet at least once a week had more than tripled since 1991, going from 11-million to 36-million news users.

The number of hosts on the internet tripled from January, 1994 to January, 1996, the year something called a “browser” was created—Netscape, the same year that the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda passed a Free Trade and Processing Act allowing licenses to be given to companies wanting to allow internet users to gamble. By the end of the year there were fifteen gambling websites. The next year there were 200 and by 1998, a study was published showing online gaming revenues had topped $830-million. Modern online gambling in this country dates from November 22, 2010 when the New Jersey Senate passed a bill allowing certain forms of online gambling.

It was about that time that the casino industry was starting to see an erosion in patronage. In Missouri, casino admissions reached almost 54.3-million in FY 2005 then declined for three years before climbing back to almost equal 2005’s number. Admissions began annual declines after FY 2011.  In FY 2019 (the last full year before the pandemic crippled casino business), casino admissions had declined by 49%.

Various reasons for the decline can be suggested but the end result seems to be the same—people just don’t go to where casinos are.

So the casinos have to go where the people are.

The situation is not unique to the casino industry. It is part of our changing lifestyles and those changes have become more obvious with the COVID-19 Pandemic that has forced casino closures for in-person business and quarantines for many who would patronize them.

We no longer live in an “appointment” world.  We can buy clothing at any time of the day off the internet.  We can use the internet to get our groceries delivered.  We can order deliveries to our homes from our favorite restaurants.  The same with our pharmaceuticals. Telemedicine is eliminating some office and hospital trips.

Casino betting can happen 24 hours a day because, as one source has observed, “everyone has a casino in their pocket.”  Casinos are looking for new products that can be offered through the ubiquity of the internet that we call up on our ubiquitous cell phones.  First is sports wagering. But later, Missouri legislators are likely to be asked to let table game betting to take place remotely.

Those who find gambling a reprehensible sin will find nothing redeeming about gambling on the internet.  But thousands of other Missourians will welcome the opportunities—as they welcome opportunities to grocery shop from home.

In a world where less and less of life is lived by appointment, the gaming industry knows it must change. And it is, as it should.

Missouri’s casino gambling laws must change, too.  Laws written and fees created in the days of physical customer presence in casinos need to be changed to account for virtual presence.  State services relying on gambling fees and taxes will be increasingly diminished as appointment gambling diminishes.  Casinos, profiting from laws of the 1990s appointment culture, resist modernization of the law. It is understandable that they do.

What is not understandable is why the Missouri General Assembly would not want to protect the state’s interests by bringing our laws from the appointment era into the virtual, but very real, era.

 

The parable of the caretakers’ wealthy friends

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And the professor came among them as they convened to determine the welfare of the people.

And the professor said unto them, “Do not foolishly assume that following an unchanging law benefits the great mass of people who have chosen you to make wise decisions on their behalf.  Nor should you find it adequate to proclaim that enriching a few by adhering strictly to the law is good.”

And he said, “Suppose you, as caretakers of the common good, approve a generous spending plan of $32 billion for the benefit of those who have chosen you. And suppose you determine that $32 billion is adequate for the future and ignore the undeserving who believe your good stewardship of financial resources has become inadequate.

“But inevitably the system generates $33 billion in the next year, and $35 billion in the second.  By following the law, friends and supporters of those who established the “adequate” amount can divide the excess totaling $4.5-billion.

“But in the fullness of time,” said the professor, “those who are limited might rise up and say to those they assume to be their caretakers, ‘This is unfair for inflation has reduced the buying power of $32 billion to only $26 billion and those who rely on actually having $32 billion are becoming impoverished and the people who elect the caretakers are suffering.’”

“’You have established by the growth in wealth of your friends and supporters, year after year, the true value of the $32 billion. Yet you have refused to adjust the law to be fair to the greater number of those you serve while bowing to the wishes of supporters who offer benefits to you for being with them.’”

“’But we are only following the law.  We are meeting all of our obligations,’” you respond. “We are blameless.”

And the professor cast disdainful eyes upon them and said, “Your professions are hollow and self-serving! Those you proclaim are well-served are instead growing thin, yea, their ribs are beginning to show.  In the interests of fairness and justice, it is time—yea, it is PAST time—to adjust the law so that they shall be fulfilled.”

“But,” the caretakers said to the professor, “we do not understand why we should be forced to give our excess back to those who fall under the law.”

The professor rose and he said with passion, “Wisdom without honor has become greed.  You have impoverished those you claimed to help and it is time for those remaining with honor to show the courage to recognize what you have done and to correct it to the benefit of the greater public welfare.”

But the friends and supporters did not care about those who were being impoverished as they grew wealthier.  “You cannot change the law,” they said.  “Giving the impoverished dollars that are worth dollars would be punishment for our success.  Have pity on us for we are your friends.”

And the professor stood nearby hoping the caretakers of the public good would see the hollowness, self-serving, and greed of the supporters who demanded protection from those who trusted the caretakers to be just.

 

Racial Centennial

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Lost in this year’s numerous Missouri BIcentennial observance is a CENtennial event that hints at the idea that there is a cultural problem in the telling of our history.  We cannot let this year slip away without observing that—-

A significant event from 1921 has been overlooked.

Republicans gained control of the Missouri House for the first time since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in 1921. There was something special about that crop of Republicans.

The flavor of the historic moment, and of the times, was captured in the Jefferson CityMissouri State Journal in January of ’21:

The Fifty-first General Assembly of Missouri was about to convene. The majestic corridors of Missouri’s new capitol with their classic lines were filled with people approaching the chambers of the two houses…The hall of the House of Representatives, with its imperial columns and lofty galleries, was he center of attraction…It was the Missouri of Thomas Hart Benton, Francis Preston Blair, William Joel Stone, Francis Marion Cockrell, George Graham Vest, Sterling Price, “Jo” Shelby, and a thousand figures of great renown…

Down the middle aisle filled with Missouri’s chosen, came a negro waiter from the City of St. Louis, fresh from the pots and pans of the City Club’s kitchen. He walked with the assurance of the state’s exalted. He strode with the confidence of one invested with new authority, and his black countenance shown with the pleasure of his new role, his eyes sparkled with delight. Passing beyond the lesser lights, he took his seat near the Speaker’s dais, and claimed his own.  Alone, of all the desks in the hall, his was piled mountain high with floral tributes from his race. Others were bare of decoration, but his was conspicuous for the profuseness of its splendor.

He was the representative-elect from the Sixth District of the state’s FIRST CITY—the wealthiest, most highly cultured constituency in the state. He was the first negro to be elected to the Missouri legislature. Albeit he had neglected to meet the constitutional qualifications of paying taxes, he had  been provided by the St. Louis machine which had selected him, with what is known as a “politician’s lot” a space of ground scarcely large enough to accommodate a good-sized box, with taxes of the princely rate of $1 a year. He had won at the polls, and he held his seat. Walther Hall Moore had become a full-fledged Missouri representative.

The formalities prescribed by the Constitution—fossilized relic of the white man’s rule—were complied with, and the House adjourned.  He stood at his place, with the broad smile, so natural with men of his race, and divided his roses among a congratulating group of Republican members and their wives, who surrounded him in their eager desire to grasp his hand. They bore forth his flowers proudly, while a little group of blacks in the galleries cheered and the Lieutenant Governor of the state—like himself, a St. Louis Republican—welcomed him to his new duties.

The name was WALTHALL, not Walther.  A few days after the condescending description of his entrance into the House chamber he introduced his first bill—making Lincoln Institute “into a State university for negroes” and providing a million-dollar appropriation for that purpose. One account said, “This is one of the things demanded from the Republicans by negroes during the last campaign, but the Republican platform convention refused to include it in the platform.”  Nonetheless, Moore got his bill passed.”

Moore’s district was three-quarters white.  He was not re-elected in 1922, but was elected in ’24, ’26, and ’28.  He was a postal clerk, not a waiter.  He was 34 years old when he first took his seat in the House. He was just short of 74 when he died in St. Louis in 1960.

The year he died, three African-Americans were elected to the House: Baptist minister William Wright, lawyer Hugh J. White, and retired postal worker Henry W. Wheeler. All were from St. Louis.

It took another forty years before the first black State Senator was elected (Theodore McNeal) and the state has yet to elect a person of color to any of its executive branch positions—a century after Walthall Moore walked down the center aisle of the House of Representative to take his seat.

Someday, though…….

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Alright alright alright

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—-As potential next Texas Governor Matthew McConaughey says.

Governor Parson is going to ask the legislature next year to give salaried state workers a 5.5% pay raise and pay hourly workers $15 an hour.

The governor proposes; the legislature disposes.  We’ve all heard that.  So proposing is one thing. Accomplishing something is something else.  But this is a good move.

The state minimum wage is now $11.15.   And salaries for our state workers consistently have been among the bottom five or six states.  Openpayrolls.com calculates the average state employee last year made $28,871, 56.2% below the national average for government employees.

The minimum wage boost would affect about 11,000 state workers.

A review of state employee salaries five years ago by the data-mining study organization, Stacker.com ranked Missouri 47th out of 51 with the highest and the lowest salaries in the same general field—education.  With the average monthly salary of state and local employees then, the average monthly pay for all state and local employees was $3,746. The highest paid industry was listed as “Education,” where the average higher education monthly pay was $6,796. The lowest monthly salary then was in elementary and secondary education: $2.394.

Myron Cohen, a comedian who was a frequent guest on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” show, used to tell the story of a fellow who came home from work early and found a naked man in his bedroom closet.  “What are you doing in there?” he is asked.  “Well,” says the naked man, “w-well…..everybody has to be somewhere.”

Somebody has to be at the low end of everything, including state employees.  Missouri has been content to be that “somebody” in too many categories for far too long.  The governor’s proposal is not likely to raise Missouri’s state workers very many notches on the poorly-paid lists.  But a pay raise of about five percent for hourly workers and 5.5% for salaried employees will be a big jump for our friends and neighbors who don’t deserve the disdain they often feel when they disappear each day into the offices and cubicles where the business of a 6.1-million member corporation called Missouri is run.

Unfortunately, there are reports of legislatures in several states that are seeing all of the federal COVID relief and infrastructure funds pouring in and they have started thinking of cutting taxes instead of realizing the advantages that come from the one-time infusion while maintaining competent levels of service under current taxing levels.

We hope Missouri’s legislature will not adopt the same attitude—-although we know there are those who will continue the state’s tradition of taking steps that make it harder for the state to pay for the promises it has made to its citizens for services and programs.

Just this once, let the deserving folks in cubicles have a little financial elbow room.

 

 

Eyewitness to the end

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Every war has its “last” events and on this 103rd anniversary of the end of The Great War, we have one for you, with the account of a former Jefferson City resident who was part of what arguably was the final American artillery attack on German positions.

Missouri’s own John J. Pershing found Private Henry N. Gunther of Baltimore, Maryland, died at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918 in an unnecessary one-man attack on a German machine gun emplacement.

But another Missourian was involved in another “last,” or at least a “last of the last.”

Germany surrendered at 5 a.m. that day but French General Ferdinand Foch demanded the shooting stop six hours later so the message of the surrender could be distributed to the front lines on both sides.  Author Joseph Persico in his book, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, calculated there were 11,000 casualties in those last six hours, including the deaths of 3,000 soldiers.

Former Jefferson City resident Charles D. Capelle, was with the American Red Cross.  He sent a letter home describing his day, the last day of the war.  The Daily Capital News published it on Christmas Eve.

I was sleeping in a dugout several miles beyond Verdun, with the commanding officer of an ambulance train. At eight o’clock, when we were still in bed, the telephone rang. The captain answered and the operator said, “I am asked to tell you that the armistice has been signed and that hostilities will cease at eleven this morning.”  We told all the soldiers nearby, who at once set up a great yell and then refused the good news.  After breakfast alI went up to a battery of 155’s nearby, knowing that if the news were true, the battery would cease firing at eleven o’clock.  About ten they began firing all the guns regularly and sure enough, at five minutes before eleven they prepared to fire the last shot.  The full gun crew at each gun took hold of hands and they put in the line on one gun, and with watch in hand all awaited the hour.  “Then all pulled the lanyard together. “One last can for Jerry,” said the gunners, and then howled and skipped in their glee like a crowd of Indians.  You may be sure, too, that I was as happy as they were. 

            For a long time none could realize that the whole thing was over. Out of the mud and cold, out of the holes in the ground, out of the shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and back to the real bed without “cooties”—finally—and that thought was in everybody’s mind—back in the U. S. A.

His letter continued for several paragraphs, describing pulling back to “shell-torn” Verdun, then farther to “a considerable town” where there were “all sorts of civilization” including an officer’s club where there was “wonder of wonders—a chance to take a bath.”

Capelle, a Jackson County native, had lived in Jefferson City while he was an assistant reporter for the Missouri Supreme Court, 1909-1915 and then a member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles until 1917. He was about 35 when he went to France with the Red Cross and was attached to the 26th Infantry (Yankee) Division from Massachusetts (which included the 51st Field Artillery Brigade), where he witnessed the last shot of the war.  He returned to Jackson County after the war, served as Mayor of Independence, 1922-24 and was elected in 1932 to a term in the Missouri House.  He died at the age of 56 in 1939.

National Museum of the United States Army credits the final round of the war being fired by Battery E of the 11th Field Artillery, which fired a round from its 155 mm artillery piece, nicknamed Calamity Jane at exactly 11 a.m. on November 11, one minute after Capelle’s unit fired its last shot. We suppose there could be some discussion of whether a round fired at the precise second the armistice went into effect was fired during the war. The shot from the 11th FA landed after the war.  The shot fired by the 56th FA probably landed before the official time of the Armistice.  We’ll let World War One historians argue that.  From a parochial standpoint, we come down in favor of Capelle’s account.

 

Who should control sports wagering?

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Kurt Erickson’s article in last Friday’s Post-Dispatch should be a warning that the state’s control of casino gambling is in danger.

Erickson wrote that four of our professional sports teams are launching a petition campaign to legalize sports wagering, an issue the legislature has talked about for several years but has been unable to get out of its own way and approve.

The St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues, the Kansas City Royals, and the St. Louis City soccer club have filed nine proposed petitions with the Secretary of State. One of them will become the focus of a campaign to amend the constitution to allow sports wagering. The proposals also establish various tax rates and earmark revenues from sports wagering.

Some of the proposals will lower the overall tax on casino gambling by creating a super-low rate on sports wagering revenues. The proposals also change the way funds from gambling taxes are allocated.

Both are issues of legislative concern—-and of concern to educators in particular.  Both are issues the legislature dealt with in the 1990s when casino gambling was first legalized. The earmarking of funds from casino gambling has been a legislative prerogative from the beginning. The legislature changed the earmarks once, moving portions of casino admission fees from support for early childhood education to support for nursing homes and cemetery development for Missouri veterans.

Legislative leaders need to protect the general assembly’s authority to determine the best interests of the people of Missouri—the people who send their representatives and senators to the capitol on their behalf.

The only way to do that is to approve sports wagering during the 2022 legislative session.

The BEST way to do that is to recognize that casino gambling laws enacted in the 1990s are no longer adequate thirty years later at a time when casino gambling as an industry and  public access to casino gambling are changing.

Additionally, it is time the legislature recognize that the two-dollar admission fee established in 1993 has become a multi-million dollar liability to the state and to the casinos’ own host communities.

Proposed legislation has been written, but not introduced, that addresses all of those topics.  One of the major provisions is increasing the admission fee to a contemporary amount that is the equivalent of 1993’s two dollars. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says the equivalent for this fiscal year is $3.67.  A new estimate will be released in February, during the legislative session.

The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50, leaving seventeen cents unclaimed.

The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50.  We know the casinos will vehemently oppose this provision because they like to keep a dollar-67 in 2021 dollars for every two 1993 dollars they give the state (which have a purchasing power of only a dollar and nine cents now). They’re happy getting richer and richer while the state gets poorer and poorer

The proposal leaves seventeen cents unclaimed. The filing of the possible petitions has prompted a suggestion for the remaining seventeen cents.

We know from past experience that the private owners of professional sports teams will expect the legislature to put up state taxpayer funds to help pay for a new stadium. The tub-thumping for a downtown Kansas City Royals stadium is well-underway, in fact. The state does not have the major funds the teams want it to commit without cutting funding for other state programs.  A provision not yet in the suggested gambling reform bill could direct the unclaimed seventeen cents into a state fund for construction and renovation of professional athletic facilities, alleviating the inevitable pressure on the state for help with new professional facilities.

With wagering being permitted on sports, it is only proper that part of the proceeds from that activity be directed in that direction.

One reason sports wagering legislation has struggled and foundered in past legislative sessions is the effort to bring so-called grey-market gambling machines in convenience stores under state regulation. Efforts to make the two issues run in tandem have been counterproductive.

There is no doubt that it is important the state regulate those machines. But the stakes have been increased enough on sports wagering with the proposed petition campaign that the two issues should be separated and sports wagering should be a higher priority.

Nothing in what has been written today should be considered as opposing either sports wagering or regulation of the grey market convenience store machines. The author does not oppose either but does believe our gambling laws are outdated and are costing the programs the state once promised would be funded by those taxes and fees tens of millions of dollars a year.

The governor and the legislature have many issues to consider as priorities in the 2022 session. One of them is changing the law to make it harder to circulate petitions. We hope that issue will not obscure the importance of the sports wagering effort.

The proposed petition campaign should make state authority to regulate gaming and to appropriate the proceeds from it one of the major issues as a stand-alone matter that will not be endangered by other issues.

The Pro Tem

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Jim Mathewson died a few days ago.  He was one of a dwindling number of state senators from a different era when “Senator” wasn’t a word; it was an honor.

It was a pre-term limits Senate before Missourians hypocritically denied themselves the right to vote for legislators they wanted to continue representing them.

It was the era of Harold Caskey and John Schneider, of A. Clifford Jones and Emory Melton, of John Russell and Wayne Goode, Betty Sims and Harry Wiggins, Danny Staples, Morris Westfall and others who respected the institution and honored its written and unwritten rules, who treated the Senate as a body rather than a series of factions.  It was a Senate where the filibuster was a legitimate tactic because the majority on any issue knew it might be the minority on any other issue and the object was compromise that produced progress, before a time when an unyielding steamroller ignored the possibility that someday roles might be reversed and a time might someday come when payback would be a steamroller run by the other side.

It was a time of bare-knuckle politics, have no doubt about that. But eye-gouging and rabbit punches weren’t tolerated.

Jim Mathewson was the leader of the state senate for eight years.  Nobody will ever equal that record or even match it as long as good men and good women are banished from public service because voters fell for the pitch of those who capitalized on the idea that those we trust in our elections every two or four  years instantly become untrustworthy.

Jim Mathewson was a Horatio Alger story, a poor boy who made good because he never gave up, eventually rising to what he argued was the most powerful office in state government, more powerful than the governor, in fact.

He was elected to the House in 1974, then moved up to the Senate in 1980. He was born on a forty-acre farm in Benton County to a “very poor” family. He father left when he was five years old and although he came back six years later, the two were never close. The fact that the family was poor, and he knew it was poor, was a motivating factor in his life. He told a State Historical Society interviewer, “I think it made me meaner and tougher and harder working.”

For a time he and his wife, Doris, ran a steakhouse in Sedalia until it burned down and there was little insurance. Some friends, seeing he had no real livelihood, decided to file him for State Representative, something Mathewson had no interest in being. He beat an incumbent, though, and got elected to a job paying, then, $8,400 a year, about one-eighth what he was making with the steakhouse.

“I got hooked!” he told the interviewer, “and I got hooked bad.”  He was a personable guy and a few years later he started getting some important committee assignments. And he started building bridges. “I’m of the Democrat philosophy, but I’ve never been offended by anyone that was of the Republican philosophy. We just happened to think different on some issues. I believe that Republicans love their family just like I love mine. I believe that they’re Christians just like I believe I am. I believe that they’re going to go to Heaven just like I am. They’re just kind of warped in their thought process about [things] while they’re here. Okay? (chuckling) And I say that jokingly, because I have probably as many friends that are Republicans as I do Democrats.”

Pure Mathewson. Taking his work seriously but not himself (a fellow Capitol reporter remarked a few years later that it seemed legislators had gotten that idea backward—and, frankly, sometimes it seems he is right).

But he was so focused on being a legislator that he wasn’t making much money in the real world. He narrowly avoided bankruptcy only because the father he hardly knew left enough in his estate for Mathewson to pay off debts. He was able to re-establish himself as a businessman in Sedalia.  He began to rise in authority and popularity among fellow Democrats in the Senate and in 1988 he was elected President Pro Tem, the leader of the Senate.

Why did he want the job?   “The power,” he openly admitted.  “The President Pro Tem of the Senate in many, many ways is the most powerful person there is in the state of Missouri. Even more powerful than the Governor because you control all the gubernatorial appointments! And a Governor cannot appoint anyone if they can’t get it by the President Pro Tem of the Senate. Because the President Pro Tem of the Senate is usually smart enough to make themselves chairman of the Gubernatorial Appointments Committee. And the President Pro Tem appoints all the committees, including the all-powerful Appropriations Committee where all the budget comes from. Not only do appoint the chair, but you appoint the members. So generally you have control over that, as you do over most of the committees — or all the committees, really, because you appoint all the chairs. So you know, I wanted to be that person. I wanted to feel that I was not only a person who could be a follower but I wanted to prove that I could be a person that was a leader. It was a unanimous election in our caucus and on the floor every time. So I feel awfully proud of that. It was a good thing.”

He thought he could have been elected for another term but felt it was time for someone else. A few years later, Republicans gained control of the Senate and the last few years were nowhere nearly as rewarding as the rest of his career had been.  The take-no-prisoners style of the new majority grated on a man who thought he had helped maintain the historically collegial atmosphere of the chamber—“the body,” he called it.

There’s one other thing about Jim Mathewson to tell you about.  He was the first Senate President Pro Tem to occupy the physical office of the Pro Tem.  The room complex next to the south end of the Senate Lounge had been the office of the President of the Senate, the Lieutenant Governor, from the day the Capitol was first occupied.  I tell about it in the Capitol history book that I hope goes to the publisher before the end of the year:

The Senate takeover of the Lieutenant Governor’s office space finally happened in the fall of 1988 through the efforts of outgoing President Pro Tem John Scott, who had grown tired of dashing back and forth from his fourth floor office to the Senate Chamber. Senator Jim Mathewson of Sedalia, the incoming President Pro Tem, remembered that Scott approached him at the end of the September veto session and said, “Don’t you think it’s a darned shame that all of these years that the Speaker’s had that office right there on the corner where he can have meetings?”

 

It’s convenient. Everybody knows where it is and they all run in there and they meet and they settle issues and so forth, press conferences and whatever, and we have to use our individual offices when we’re President pro-Tem, and we hold the same power as does the Speaker.  Why don’t we create a special President pro-Tem’s office?

 

Mathewson asked, “Which one d’you have in mind?” Scott answered, “The Lieutenant Governor’s office.” Scott and Mathewson decided to enlist the support of the Senate’s top Republican, Richard Webster…Webster had done some research and told them, “The truth of the matter is there’s no provision in the constitution or the statutes that says the Lieutenant Governor even gets an office.” Scott introduced a resolution at the end of the veto session that let the Senate take control of the office after that year’s election. 

            Shortly after Mel Carnahan won the Lieutenant Governorship, he asked Mathewson not to kick him out of the office.  “Yeah, Mel, I am,” Mathewson told him,

 

And he said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Yeah, I can.”  And he said, “Well, by what authority?’ And I said, “We did the research. That office belongs to the Senate. The Senate voted…that the Pro Tem would have that office, and I guess that’s me, Mel, because the caucus just elected me and we’ve got twenty-two votes. I think I’m probably going to be Pro-Tem.” And he…got red-faced as hell…and said, “You’re not going to do this.” And I said, “Yeah, I am, Mel. Gonna do it.  Sorry.”

 

Carnahan threatened a lawsuit but Mathewson played hardball: “You can do that but let me remind you of something that’s just going to offend you further…You don’t have a great big budget already. You take on the Senate and you won’t have any.” Carnahan stomped out of Mathewson’s office, returning more cool-headed a few days later to ask Mathewson what could be done if he accepted the plan.  Mathewson, Scott, Webster, and Carnahan quickly went to the first floor to look at a complex of Senate staff rooms in the northeast corner of the building. Mathewson told Carnahan the Senate would pay to remodel the space if he would take it. Carnahan agreed a few days later.  Mathewson kept his promise to have the new office ready for Carnahan by the time he was sworn in at the start of 1989.

A few years later, then-Lt. Governor Peter Kinder convinced his friend from Cape Girardeau, Senate Administrator Mike Keathley, to have the auditor swap office spaces with the Lt. Governor’s office space.

Mathewson couldn’t run for another term in 2004. He seldom returned to the Capitol. His day was already slipping away, his desk in the chamber and his office occupied by a new generation of Senators.

Are they worse people than Jim Mathewson was?  As people, I don’t think so.  As Senators, as Jim and the others of his era might perceive them in their behavior as senators, maybe.

But comparing generations against each other is hard and risks being unfair because nostalgia is not fair. Perhaps it is accurate to say that today’s senators are not like yesterday’s senators. Sometimes the old lions growling in the weeds who remember those of the Mathewson generation think “Senator” has become just a word. It will be interesting to hear the eulogies (many years from now, we hope) for those who have come after his era.

He concluded his interview with the State Historical Society by saying:

“You know, sometimes you’ve got to hang your life out there. And I have time and time again, and I’m proud of the fact that I did it and I have no regrets! My attitude is this: If the issue is important enough to do, then it’s more important than my political future. And I’ll do it.”

That’s worth thinking about.

(If you want to read Jim’s entire interview—and those of us who knew him can hear his voice as we read the transcript—go to “James L. Mathewson State Historical Society oral history” and click on the icon on the upper right for a download.)