The legislative session ends at 6:00 p.m. Friday, and on Tuesday, after four months of absorbing punches from the GOP, House Democrats felt like they were hanging in for the 14th round of a bout with Sonny Liston. The topic of the day was the omnibus education bill, a 200 page tome. Think of it as a shoe box filled with dozens of scraps of paper, each one proposing some small change to how education works in this state. Many of them have majority support, but almost every one of them is a deal breaker for somebody–or several somebodies. So the larger the tome, the tougher it is to get passed.
Each new amendment brought more wrangling, and Rep. Mike Spreng, D-Florissant, fed up with it, was just waiting for the bell to end the round. He says he didn’t come to Jefferson City to score points against Republicans or defend Democrats. He came to do some good for Missourians, and he didn’t think the arguing tended toward that goal, whether it was about accepting federal funds to pay for informing parents fourteen days before the start of the school year if their child’s school is failing or about instituting a quality rating system for pre-schools.
Rep. Steve Brown, D-St. Louis, was less disgusted. True, he didn’t see the talk, talk, talk as productive, necessarily. But he did think it was important for Democrats to stay on their toes in the fourteenth round, lest Republicans manage to sneak another end of session Village Law or midwifery licensing provision past everybody. At the same time, the arguments at least serve the purpose, Brown said, of eating up the clock, using time that Republicans might otherwise employ for some mischief.
For all I know, that was what he thought Rep. Vicki Englund, D-St. Louis, was up to when she rose to question Rep. Tim Jones, R-Eureka, about his adamant support for accepting federal funds to inform parents about failing schools. Actually, she wanted an answer. Why, she wanted to know, despite his frequent contempt for federal funds, did Jones want this money but not the federal dollars for “poor, sick children”?
“Apples and oranges, lady,” said the gentleman from Eureka. “Apples and oranges. I take it on a case by case basis.”
Well, OK, but that answer begs the question of why in one “case” he wants the federal money and in another (even more deserving case, Englund would argue) he doesn’t. So she asked twice more why he wanted the dollars for education but not for poor, sick children.
And got the same refrain. “Apples and oranges, lady. Apples and oranges. I take it on a case by case basis.”
That amendment was batted around for half an hour. Another passed so quickly that I missed the debate because I sneezed. As Spreng pointed out, the leadership allows extended debate and delaying tactics when they want to. But they can cut it off in a nanosecond when it suits them.
Turns out that all the amendments debated on that bill, whether passed or failed, were moot, because the omnibus education bill failed. It sank under the weight of too many amendments. Presumably, the leadership is now looking over the vote results, ferreting out which amendments played the biggest part in sinking it. Once they get a handle on that, they’ll decide whether and how to take another stab–in the short time at their disposal–at passing it.
By that time, members of both parties may be feeling punch drunk.
Photo by Michael Bersin