Previously:

Missouri Boys State – 2013 (June 16, 2013)

Kansas City Mayor Sly James – Missouri Boys State – June 16, 2013 (June 17, 2013)

State Treasurer Clint Zweifel (D) in Warrensburg speaking at Missouri Boys State

on the campus of the University of Central Missouri – June 17, 2013.

State Treasurer Clint Zweifel (D) was the keynote speaker this evening at Missouri Boys State on the campus of the University of Central Missouri. After his prepared remarks he took questions from the audience. One question, on nullification of federal laws, prompted a one word response:

[….] Question: Considering your experience in the state legislature, do you believe that states have the constitutional ability to nullify federal laws?

State Treasurer Clint Zweifel (D): No. [applause][laughter]

By the way, you’re not gonna get a lot of one word answers from politicians, so enjoy it. [laughter][applause]

That’s a significant difference between a statewide office holder and the republican controlled General Assembly.

Previously:

HB 436: loonier than Wayne LaPierre at a press conference (February 5, 2013)

National Firearms Act (NFA)

….Firearms subject to the 1934 Act included shotguns and rifles having barrels less than 18 inches in length, certain firearms described as “any other weapons,” machineguns, and firearm mufflers and silencers….

Uh that would be sawed off shotguns, fully automatic machineguns, and silencers.

FIRST REGULAR SESSION

[TRULY AGREED TO AND FINALLY PASSED]

SENATE COMMITTEE SUBSTITUTE FOR

HOUSE COMMITTEE SUBSTITUTE FOR

HOUSE BILL NO. 436

97TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

1204S.04T          2013

AN ACT

To repeal sections 21.750, 571.030, 571.101, 571.107, 571.117, and 590.010, RSMo, and to enact in lieu thereof fourteen new sections relating to firearms, with a penalty provision.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the state of Missouri, as follows:

[….]

3. (1) All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations, whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in this state, shall not be recognized by this state, shall be specifically rejected by this state, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this state.

           (2) Such federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations include, but are not limited to:

           (a) The provisions of the federal Gun Control Act of 1934;

           (b) The provisions of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968…

[….]

[bold emphasis in original, underline emphasis added]

In the Journal of the Missouri House for May, 8, 2013:

[….]

2273 Journal of the House [pdf]

On motion of Representative Funderburk, SCS HCS HB 436, as amended, was truly agreed

to and finally passed by the following vote:

AYES: 116

Allen Anderson Austin Bahr Bernskoetter

Berry Black Brattin Brown Burlison

Cierpiot Conway 10 Conway 104 Cookson Cornejo

Cox Crawford Curtman Davis Diehl

Dohrman Dugger Elmer Engler English

Entlicher Fitzpatrick Fitzwater Flanigan Fowler

Fraker Frame Franklin Frederick Funderburk

Gannon Gatschenberger Gosen Grisamore Guernsey

Haahr Hampton Hansen Harris Hicks

Higdon Hinson Hodges Hoskins Hough

Houghton Hubbard Hurst Johnson Jones 50

Justus Keeney Kelley 127 Koenig Kolkmeyer

Korman Lair Lant Lauer Leara

Love Lynch Marshall Mayfield McCaherty

McGaugh McKenna Messenger Miller Moon

Morris Muntzel Neely Neth Parkinson

Pfautsch Phillips Pike Pogue Redmon

Rehder Reiboldt Remole Rhoads Richardson

Riddle Roorda Ross Rowden Rowland

Scharnhorst Schatz Schieber Schieffer Shull

Shumake Smith 120 Solon Sommer Spencer

Stream Swan Thomson Torpey Walker

White Wieland Wilson Wood Zerr

Mr Speaker

NOES: 038

Anders Barnes Butler Carpenter Colona

Curtis Dunn Ellinger Ellington Englund

Hummel Kirkton Kratky LaFaver May

McCann Beatty McDonald McManus McNeil Meredith

Mitten Montecillo Morgan Newman Nichols

Norr Otto Pace Peters Pierson

Rizzo Runions Schupp Smith 85 Swearingen

Walton Gray Webb Wright

PRESENT: 000

ABSENT WITH LEAVE: 009

Burns Cross Gardner Haefner Kelly 45

Lichtenegger Mims Molendorp Webber

Representative Diehl declared the bill passed.

Speaker Jones resumed the Chair.

[….]

[emphasis added]

Yes, you got that right. A veto proof majority in the Missouri General Assembly voted to nullify federal prohibitions of sawed off shotguns, fully automatic machineguns, and silencers.

Forget seersucker. It looks like scratchy gray wool uniforms are back in vogue. [That sarcastic reference to the last serious nullification disagreement which was settled almost 150 years ago came from someone else on the Internets.]

There’s even more right wingnutty goodness in HB 436:

….6. Any official, agent, or employee of the United States government who enforces or attempts to enforce any of the infringements on the right to keep and bear arms included in subsection 3 of this section is guilty of a class A misdemeanor….

[emphasis in original]

Oh, that’ll cost a lot of money to litigate all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It looks like Representative Dean Dohrman (r) has earned his keep.

And Representative Denny Hoskins (r) is running for a leadership position:

Denny Hoskins, CPA

Missouri House of Representatives

District 54

Capitol Report

May 10th, 2013

[….]

….I am pleased to officially announce my candidacy for Speaker Pro Tem of the Missouri House of Representatives. As you may, or may not know, Rep. Jason Smith, current Speaker Pro Tem, is running for the vacant Congressional seat in Missouri’s 8th district. I believe I have the experience, character, and conviction needed to fill the position. Speaker Pro Tem is selected by a vote of my House colleagues, many of whom have already expressed their support of my candidacy….

[….]

Heh. Service is its own reward.    

More teabagger drivel, introduced today in the Missouri House:

HB 995

Declares the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as unauthorized by the United States Constitution and creates criminal penalties for persons enforcing or attempting to enforce the act

Sponsor: Frederick, Keith (121)

Proposed Effective Date: 8/28/2013

LR Number: 2201L.02I

Last Action: 4/02/2013 – Introduced and Read First Time (H)

Bill String: HB 995

[….]

“…creates criminal penalties for persons enforcing or attempting to enforce the act…”

That’s gonna be some monster court docket.

“…Declares the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as unauthorized by the United States Constitution…”

Uh, I do believe the United States Supreme Court has already weighed in on this.

Ripley: Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

Nope, well before you left.  

In 2010 about 20% of eligible Missouri voters went to the polls. Not surprisingly, a majority of that 20% were the foaming at the mouth Tea Partiers and other like-minded souls who were all riled up by anti-Obamacare agit-prop of organizations like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity (not to mention the simple fact of the first black president). One of the results of that election was that a crop of impenetrably hard-right pols were introduced into the Missouri legislature.

As a result, the real work of government has been left to patronage groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which supply anti-union, anti-education, anti-environmental “model” legislation that best serves their anti-worker, anti-tax, corporate purposes. Since such corporate groups are so willing to do the hard work for them, the junior Representatives have been free to ride their favorite hobby horses into the legislative arena. Most recently we’ve seen bills to combat the non-existent threat of Sharia law and bills that the promote hard-currency schemes of paranoid gold-bugs – oh, and don’t forget the bill that would allow bullies to torment gay classmates with impunity.  

Now State Rep. Kurt Bahr (R-19) has married the desire to carry water for the corporatocracy with the 10th amendment fetishism of many of those on the right-wing fringe. Well in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision about the constitutionality of Obamacare, this former intern of U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) (says it all, doesn’t it?) has introduced HB1534 which asserts that if anybody in Missouri tries to implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare), they will be subject to criminal charges. Bob Priddy at the MissouriNet Blog sums up Bahr’s position:

So let’s see if we understand Rep. Bahr. He has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States says there are three separate and co-equal branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. Rep. Bahr argues that a legislature in one of the 50 states can make a judicial ruling as it affects only the people of that state. (The PP&ACA is so unconstitutional that anyone implementing any part of it is a criminal.) It appears he should start getting ready to issue warrants because some parts of the Affordable Healthcare Act already are being implemented in Missouri.

Wouldn’t you know that, first-time around, the rampaging GOP nullifiers in the House passed this piece of idiocy 109-41. Details of the debate, including some very amusing audio, can be heard here. It’s worth reading (and listening to); Rep. Chris Kelly aptly sums up the Democrats’ frustration with Bahr’s thick-headed embrace of nullification, declaring that “this is breathtaking in its contempt for the Constitution of the United States.”

Bahr’s last (first? middling?) stand also works well with the goals of the mostly anonymous corporate types who finance organizations like ALEC. Ed Quillen of the Denver Post has argued that the rabid anti-Obamacare frothing of politicians like Bahr is just another facet of the attack on workers that the corporate elite is waging through their GOP proxies. Writing about why the GOP is doing little to actually promote job creation, but lots to benefit “job-creators,” he states that Republicans aren’t just stepping on the brakes because they want our Democratic president to fail:

When it comes to jobs, there’s more to the story than the normal political desire to defeat someone of the other party. Republicans like employers, those noble “job-creators” vexed by bureaucracy and regulation. They don’t like workers.

If jobs are hard to come by, then employers have more power, just as it’s a lot easier to say “take this job and shove it” if you know they’re hiring down the street. That’s another reason Republicans want to keep unemployment high.

This also helps explain the Republican resistance to universal health care. If you must rely on your employer for health insurance, that helps keep you in your place, and your employer literally has power of life and death over you.

Bahr’s spite-fueled legislative tantrum directed at the ACA may be feel-good medicine for those who are inclined to constitutional posturing, but it is also intended to insure that it is the unfettered market – that is to say, employers, and ultimately, the corporatocracy – that will have the ultimate power over our lives. Quillen correctly observes that the model that the right embraces is that of the Deep South where the Republican “oligarchs”:

… want “a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.

Dare I mention that, when it comes to the legislative crop of 2010 we get a do-over this November?

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the PBS Newshour rebroadcast a segment originally shown at this time last year in which school children read Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was, as you might expect, both a charming and moving exercise. As I listened, however, I was suddenly struck by the specific phraseology in one of the refrains where King had begun to develop the variations on the “I have a dream” theme, especially the words I have bolded below:

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” – one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Let’s see – where I have I heard folks talking about “nullification” before. Could it have been the Tea Party – those folks who pretend to be so outraged when anyone points out that there are often hints of petty racism in their rhetoric? Could it have “dripped” from the lips of some of our own Missouri legislators – Jane Cunningham and Jim Lembke perhaps?

Nullification is a constitutional theory, based on a questionable interpretation of the 10th amendment, that holds that individual states can abrogate federal law; in its most extreme form, it stipulates that states are voluntary participants in the federal union and can withdraw their allegiance as they desire. It formed the theoretical basis for the Confederate secession and should have been laid to rest by the civil war. According to the Constitutional Accountablility Center:

… the tactic was most aggressively advocated for in the 1820s and ’30s by pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun (who started the short-lived Nullifier Party), extended by the Confederate secessionists in the 1850s and ’60s, and then reinvigorated by segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.

There you have it – a theory utilized by slaveholders and bigots.

But, you say, aren’t Tea Partiers and their representatives like Cunningham and Lembke using nullification to protest laws like Obamacare that affect all races? Indeed. But isn’t it interesting that the Tea Party grew out of opposition to a mild, centrist health care reform law that would bring millions of uninsured into the health care fold, while helping slow increases in health care costs overall. Didn’t you find the violence of the opposition surprising? Don’t you – at least secretly – suspect that the general rage might have had something to do with the fact that the law in question is the signal achievement of America’s first black president?

And, of course, there’s the fact that many on the right are convinced that big government programs benefit brown people at the expense of whites. Just a few days ago, in fact, one of the GOP presidential contenders let the cat out of the bag once again. Rick Santorum, speaking on the topic of welfare in Iowa declared that:

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

This in spite of the fact that only 9% of food stamp recipients in Iowa are black, or that most welfare recipients in the U.S. are white.

So was Mr. Santorum revealing his own racism, or pandering to what a 2010 survey described as the “racial resentment”  of his Tea Party leaning audience? Actually, I ‘m not sure it makes much difference. What the revival of nullification talk tells us, among many other things, is that we still have a way to go before Martin Luther King’s vision of the peaceable kingdom is fully realized.  

Conventional wisdom has it that, given the unbalanced turnout that is expected next Tuesday, the Missouri effort to weaken health care reform, Proposition C, will prevail. A comment on my earlier post about the Missouri Hospital Association’s anti-Proposition C campaign noted that when it passes it “will not be pretty …, especially on Fox and hate radio.” Well, I’m here to tell you that the triumphalism has already gotten bizarre.

The St. Louis Beacon reports that State Senator Jane Cunningham believes that Proposition C is divinely ordained since its assured passage just goes to show that God “interferes in the affairs of men.” According to Cunningham, God doesn’t want all Missourians to have equal access to health care.

What I want Cunningham to ask God next time she and he get together for coffee is why he’s so worried about requiring individuals to take responsibility for their health care? She and the people she represents affirmed, after all, that they want a private rather than a public health care delivery system; did they do so only because they thought that they could push the cost of their emergency room visits onto the rest of us, helping to push health costs ever upward, and sending deficits spiraling?

Cunningham seems to imply that God opposes the individual mandate because it limits “personal freedom,” and requires people to spend money. But God doesn’t seem to be at all worried about mandates for the purchase of auto insurance. Nor does he seem to be worried about requirements for building standards, food safety measures, disabled access and a whole slew of “mandates” that have associated costs, but which make our country a decent place to live.

Cunningham and her pals also seem to think that God is all lathered up about “state’s rights” – which leads me to ask why he didn’t intervene more forcefully when that issue was settled at the conclusion of the American Civil War. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that a supposedly all-powerful God really gets too worked up about weak constitutional arguments.

All this leaves me with just one question.  If it isn’t God who’s working to deliver a victory for the Proposition C forces, who could it be?  Could it have anything to do with that force darker forces that manifest as apathy, stupidity and cupidity?  I don’t know about you, but that’s not exactly what I describe as divine intervention.

Our Republican dominated state legislature couldn’t manage to pass a meaningful ethics bill, but, as I am sure you know by now, they did join Arizona and Florida in placing an essentially empty measure on the ballot (the August Primary ballot in Missouri) that is meant to nullify the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), known popularly as Obamacare*. Three states, Virginia, Idaho and Utah have already enacted similar legislation. So Missouri must be coasting on the leading edge of a cresting wave of anti-Obamacare sentiment, right?

Wrong! A recent report notes that of the 40 states identified by the health insurance industry front group, The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as likely to take steps to oppose the federal legislation, 24 have rejected anti-PPACA legislation – including such deeply red states as Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. In seven states the legislation has been tabled or otherwise put out of its misery, and three states, Texas, Rhode Island, and Montana, never got around to doing anything at all. Meanwhile, plans for implementation are proceeding apace in all 50 states – including Missouri which seems to have a few adults left in government.

If Missourians vote for this amendment next August, they will have identified themselves with a very small and retrograde group of states – and while it is fun to go along with the crowd, it’s not so much fun to crawl out on the bleeding edge practically alone and find out you’re a laughing stock – but, of course, that’s a risk folks run when they jump to “defend” the Constitution before they have taken the trouble to figure out just what the Constitution actually says.

So where does this leave our anti-Obamacare stalwart, Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder, and the weirdly anonymous donors (insurance industry or industry stooges?) who are financing his intended lawsuit against the PPACA? FiredUp! has suggested that Kinder may be getting cold feet or, at the very least, stalling for political advantage. It is, though, becoming more and more apparent that this paticular pander is akin to shooting at a moving target, and, in the end, he may not get all the bang that he expects for his donated bucks – or any bang at all perhaps?

* Obamacare … yes, I know that the Teople (i.e., Tea Party People) use it as a pejorative, but I like the term and see nothing wrong with it. Obama’s a relatively good guy as far as I’m concerned, and he should get credit for taking this issue on and getting something, imperfect as the PPACA may be,  out of our ossified, corporate-owned congress. Calling the PPACA Obamacare can be seen postiviely as one way to recognize his role.

In an article in the New York Review of Books last October Michael Tomasky predicted that if  health care reform becomes fait accompli, the follow-up strategy of the fringewing opposition would be to rally under the “Tenther” banner. Tentherism refers to one of the more amusing distortions of the constitution current in right wing circles; Tenthers hold that the ninth and tenth amendments allow states to nullify any federal legislation they don’t like.

Although the Tenther premise is assuredly negated by the Constitution’s supremacy clause along with other considerations, the more feckless of Missouri’s fringer pols have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. As Hotflash noted last October, state Senator* Jane Cunningham has promised to introduce nullification legislation. Not to be outdone, the witless but very energetic Cynthia Davis (R-19*) has already started the ball rolling to amend the State Constitution and nullify the provisions of federal health care reform legislation.

The Tenther movement,  however, like the related Tea Party anger orgies, is not quite as natural a development as would-be constitutional defenders such as Davis and Cunningham would like us to think – or may actually think themselves. According to Lee Fang of ThinkProgress:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), founded in 1973 by conservative activist Paul Weyrich, is a DC-based front group which helps state lawmakers craft corporate-friendly legislation. As the Atlantic has noted, ALEC developed template health care “states’ rights,” legislation to declare aspects of health reform unconstitutional. ALEC has promoted this “tenther” legislation using its network of mostly far right Republican state lawmakers. The bills, which have been adopted in some form in 24 states so far, aim to invalidate federal regulations of health insurance, the public option and the individual mandate using the Tenther Amendment.

To take the chain of influence one step further, one of the main architects of the ALEC Tenther strategy is Joan Gardner, Executive Director of State Services with Blue Cross Blue Shield Association’s Office of Policy and Representation. Is the picture becoming clearer?

Jane Cunningham and Cynthia Davis may be the face of Tentherism in Missouri, but we should remember who is pulling the strings. Bleat as they may about “freedom,” Cunningham and Davis are doing nothing more than providing a sham patriotic facade for the insurance industry’s war to save its profit margin.

* Corrected