Missouri State Senate President Pro Tem Charlie Shields (r) was quoted in today’s Warrensburg Daily-Star Journal:

5/17/2010 12:55:00 PM

SESSION ENDS: Education, ethics, abortion measures pass; jobs bill among failures

Senate leaders say bipartisanship key to session’s success

Jack Miles

Editor

….Shields’ parting comment focused on the need for trained journalists.

“This place works better when we have an active, engaged press corps. People need to get their news from credible sources, and not blogs. To the extent … I can help emphasize having good members of the press with good training and good credentials and good ethics being the ones to report on what the General Assembly does, I would be absolutely willing to help that.”

What kind of training? Or do you mean like trained seals who applaud on cue? Just asking.

It’s time, again, for another panel on blogger ethics.

(See Update at end)

A state so poor that it kicked 100,000 Missourians off Medicaid three years ago has recently developed delusions of grandeur. The legislature is considering offering a Canadian firm, Bombardier Aerospace, as much as $880,000,000 in tax credits over the next 22 years in order to lure the airplane manufacturer to build a plant in Kansas City.

Did you see how many zeros came after those two eights? That figure is edging up on a billion bucks.

But the bill flew through the House with only two hours of debate. The Senate was a different story.  After three days of debate, the bill has stalled on the runway. Cooler heads may yet prevail, and some of them are even republican heads.

Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, who has led Republican opposition to the bill, argues that:

“Paying up to nearly $900 million in tax credits for 2,000 jobs makes no sense.”

And that’s not the only reason to be skittish: Crowell wants to see the details of the deal before Senators commit themselves to following them.

With the biggest tax credit offer in the history of our state at stake, Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, is the only one who’s seen the details? At the very least, he should tell the other senators how many Brooklyn Bridges they are buying here.

But even if the senators had all the details, they should be more than leery. Pitting our state against other possible investors this way is too reminiscent of how Wal-Mart pits one community against its next door neighbor, asking who’ll give it the biggest tax breaks for the chance to have a new Wal-Mart in the community. The only one who wins in those price wars is Wal-Mart. The ones who lose are the local schools, fire departments, and police departments.

To be fair, this deal might not be just the same kind of scam writ larger. Supposedly, those tax credits will be paid back in the form of royalties on planes sold, but a lot could go wrong between now and retrieving our $880 million.

Victor Callahan knows it.  

“At the end of the day, we have to ensure that our taxpayers are protected and that we’re fully accountable,” said Sen. Victor Callahan, an Independence Democrat. “The current bill does not do that.”

Because of sentiments like Callahan’s and Crowell’s:

The Senate voted down an amendment to an appropriations bill Wednesday that would have set aside $120 million in early round financing for the project, with 22 senators voting no.

Let it die. Let somebody else have this pig in a poke.

Update: HB2393 passed in the House 125-16. Democrat Ron Richard of Joplin sponsored it.

Nobody even spoke up for or against lifting campaign finance limits when it came before the state Senate on Tuesday. Why bother? Republicans are going to blast away and get their way. Well, yes, lifting the limits makes politicians look bought, but … so?

Majority Leader Charlie Shields said:

“If they think politicians are bought and sold, at least they want to know who they’re bought and sold by.”

We’re up for sale and we don’t care who knows it.

In fact, lifting the limits guarantees that the price of putting a senator in one’s pocket will go up, thus further guaranteeing that only the richest will control the state. Your little $25 contributions here and there will seem increasingly paltry.

In 1994, 74 percent of Missouri voters approved imposing campaign finance limits. Do you have any idea how rare it is to get 74 percent of voters to agree on anything? You couldn’t even get 74 percent of them to approve of Mom and apple pie. But Missourians knew this was an important idea.

Nevertheless, Republicans keep saying we should lift the limits so that contributors who want to get around them won’t do it in a sneaky way, using PACs. What we want, they tell us, is “transparency”.

No, what we want is to know that Rex Sinquefield and the Farm Bureau aren’t buying our state government. Nor is it hard to figure out how to halt the auction of elected officials.

In a posting last October, I interviewed Jim Trout about the limits. He pointed out that:                                                  

the old law had bugs in it, but the no-cap solution was no solution.  “Take the bugs out, but don’t use a Sherman Tank to do it,” he said in a PubDef interview last January [’06].

What he means by “bugs” is that current law allows legislative committees to raise ten times as much money as any individual can give and there is no limit on how many legislative committees may be formed. Everybody and his brother can have one.  Furthermore, as even Republicans correctly argue, those legislative committees are far less transparent than straight donations.

Trout would like to see two changes in election law.  First, each PARTY should be allowed one PAC, with a set amount of donations allowed.  That means two PACs in the state instead of dozens.  Second, the campaign limits need to be raised.  Inflation has taken a huge bite out of the limits passed a dozen years ago.  Stamps have gone up, and so has air time.

But Republicans didn’t consider taking the sane, responsible, fair course of action by keeping the limits, raising them to account for inflation, and restricting PACS. Instead, they’ve given the finger to the 74 percent of us who approve of those limits.

Their thinking is that the voters won’t do anything about it. Rich GOP donors love it, and the other dunces will keep voting them into office as long as Calamity Jane Cunningham proposes laws to rein in those traitorous judges and the legislature defends us tooth and nail against illegal immigrants–by forbidding them to attend public universities.

So the simpletons froth over judges who might someday raise taxes (even though they never have and wouldn’t). The gullible foot soldiers expel a sigh of relief now that Mizzou is free of wetback students. Meanwhile, the Republican legislature will be free to continue, for example, taking checks from Premium Standard Farms in exchange for denying local governments a say in controlling CAFOs. If rural people keep voting Republicans into office, a lot of them will have to kiss their property values goodbye, not to mention finding themselves living in the midst of illegal immigrants who take the low paying jobs at Tyson chicken processing plants.

Because that’s how it goes, when voters shrug their shoulders over politicians that whore after money.

[M]ore neurological development occurs by the age of 4 than in the rest of a person’s life – and impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation. Children unable to read by third grade are unlikely to graduate high school, and will cost society dearly in increased social service costs.

That’s the argument Senator Jeff Smith (D-SD4) used to try to persuade the state Senate to accept his amendment to a bill Charlie Shields (R-SD34) was sponsoring that would require the state to rate the quality of pre-schools. Smith’s amendment offers free pre-school to three and four year olds if the family earns less than 130 percent of poverty and if the family lives in an unaccredited school district (there are three in the St. Louis area–SLPS, Wellston, Riverview Gardens–and one in Wyaconda in northeast Missouri). The proposal, which would cost the state about $5 million a year, aims to help 1250 children a year come to kindergarten prepared to read, so that they’ll be set on a path to success.

The debate lasted several hours, with the opposition arguing that the St. Louis Public Schools have failed at managing their budget and at achieving decent academic goals. Their dropout rate is abysmal, so some legislators feel the district should not be rewarded for its incompetence. Smith argued that we’ve unaccredited the district; now we need to give those children a helping hand.

He says that when the Senate prepared to vote:

I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked around the room and saw several allies in their seats. But then, even though the “Ayes” seemed louder than the “No’s”, the chair called the vote for the “No’s”. I quickly rose to request a roll-call vote, which Democrats (outnumbered 20-14) often dread, because senators often look to the bill sponsor [in this case, Shields] for guidance before voting on amendments, and because important roll-call votes usually fall along party lines. Sen. Shields had told me only that he “wouldn’t fight” the amendment – vague enough to leave open the option of voting against without speaking against it. This also did not necessarily preclude the frequently-employed but barely perceptible shake of the head (if another senator were to seek guidance).

But in the end, though my amendment significantly increased the cost of the bill and was thus opposed by the influential Appropriations Chair, Sen. Shields voted yes (along with every Democrat and 7 Republicans), and the amendment prevailed 21-7. I plan to work with Sen. Shields to help shepherd the bill through the House, though its prospects are uncertain.

The problem with getting it through the House is that a bill requiring a quality rating system for pre-schools failed there last year. If the House passes it this time, the funds for the pre-school program will be divided between public schools and non-sectarian community-based early childhood centers–for two reasons.

The first is that a previous bill offering free pre-school to poor children in Kansas City had the unintended consequence of driving some community-based pre-schools out of business. Furthermore, the St. Louis Public Schools do not even have the space and slots available to effectively use all of the money. And besides, diverting half of the money to private early child care centers helped appease some of those who feel that giving the SLPS such a reward is throwing good money after bad.

None of those who voted Aye will still be in the Senate when St. Louis and Wyaconda begin reaping the rewards of Smith’s vision fifteen years hence. Those 21 senators, nevertheless, voted for the long term. Perhaps the House, as well, will see the wisdom of leaving such a legacy.    

The Ethics Commission has defnitely ruled that over-limit campaign contributions will have to be returned.  Sort of.  Which is to say that private hearings will be conducted with candidates who want to claim that returning them would be a hardship.  Such hearings might not conclude until February or March, and by then the legislature may well decide to pass another unlimited contribution law.  (The Supreme Court ruled the last law unconstitutional because of the ban on raising funds while the legislature was in session.  That part of the old law would be left out.)

In other words, as far as the Ethics Commission’s decision, it might all be moot.  In fact, it is moot when you consider that getting around those bothersome campaign contribution limits is child’s play anyway.  Instead of giving a lot of money in a lump sum, you distribute it to various campaign committees in several smaller sums.  Or you do a Rex Sinquefield 100 PACs maneuver.  Then, as Senate Majority Leader, Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, (pictured above) will tell you, you not only get to ignore the limits, you get to disguise where a candidate’s money actually comes from.

“I think that ought to send the message that really what you want is transparency. You want to know where the money comes from. And the more time and more places the money comes through, the harder it is to track its roots.”

Thus the solution, Shields will tell you, is to lift all limits. Sadly, even some democratic Senators agree with Shields, including Tim Green (Florissant), who introduced the original amendment, Chuck Graham (Columbia) and Chris Koster (Harrisonville).

But most Democrats would side with Senator Joan Bray (D-St. Louis), who says that any renewal of unlimited contributions legislation would likely be met with a filibuster from her party.  Bray says the Republicans would have to move the previous question to pass the bill, referring to a parliamentary move that cuts off debate, one that used to be extremely rare but has been used increasingly by Republicans.

Whereas Shields argues for transparency, Bray argues that:

“The public thinks we’re all controlled by money, and we don’t need to do anything more to make that reality or perception,” Bray said. “The public strongly likes the idea of contribution limits. It has expressed that in votes in the past. And we should respect and not resort to indulging ourselves in unlimited contributions.”

Bray argues for legislation that would control the proliferation of PACs and political committees.  Only a public campaign finance system would make more sense.  But short of that, a Democrat needs to introduce legislation to control PACs.

Here’s an analogy:  If people are finding embezzling too easy to get away with, Republicans think it would be wise to make the embezzlement easy to spot … and legal.  They figure that if it’s easy to spot, the boss can fire the embezzler.  Democrats want to make the embezzlement more difficult to achieve … and illegal.

There’s a no brainer.