Ed Smith, of the MO Coalition for the Environment, contacted us at Show Me Progress to say that there’s a third side to the argument about building another nuclear plant at Callaway County. The Coalition, alongside representatives from Walmart, Sierra Club, Missourians for Safe Energy and Missouri Votes Conservation (yes THE Walmart, to speak of strange bedfellows), flat out opposes any public funding help for Ameren in building a second nuclear plant.

I wrote last week about the opposition of a coalition led by Sen. Joan Bray to Governor Nixon’s proposal that ratepayers ante up $40 million to help Ameren apply for a license for that plant. Bray’s group opposes giving Ameren the money but feels that the political reality is (or at least was) that the Republican legislature would grant the funds. Therefore, Fair Energy Rate Action Fund (FERAF), led by Bray, is working to get something in return for that sacrifice, namely that the Office of Public Counsel would be funded by profits from utilities rather than by the state and that the OPC would get more funding, which it could use to oppose building another nuclear plant.

Charles Jaco interviewed Smith and gave him the opportunity to explain that nuclear power is very expensive, not to mention dangerous (think, Japan and then New Madrid fault line), and that coal is dirty. But if Missourians focused on  improving their energy efficiency, we could save so much power over the next twenty years that not only would a new nuclear plant be unnecessary, but that the dirtiest coal plant Ameren operates could be closed down. Smith sees giving Ameren the forty Mill as the camel’s nose: a way of chipping away at the anti-CWIP law, the law that forbids making ratepayers finance new facilities before they actually come on line.

No doubt, Senator Bray understands and agrees with Smith’s arguments. Her group just didn’t want to lose the battle and have nothing to show for the effort. But now? It will be interesting to see how much or whether the danger of nuclear meltdowns in Japan changes the “fix is in” mentality in Jeff City on this issue.  If that were to happen, FERAF and the Coalition might find themselves presenting a united front against the new plant.  

Here is a pair of political strange bedfellows: ex-Senator Joan Bray (D-St. Louis) and Sen. Jason Crowell (R-Cape Girardeau). Bray doesn’t find it all that strange, really, that she and Crowell are on the opposite side of the fence from Gov. Nixon, opposing the governor’s bill to give Ameren $40 million to apply for a license for another nuclear plant. She says she and Crowell have always gotten along well, but they usually disagreed on issues. It’s nice to find something they can work on together.

Their common interest in this case is ratepayers. Noranda Aluminum, the state’s largest industrial user of power, is in Sen. Crowell’s district; and Noranda, along with Anheuser-Busch InBev, is upset that the proposed $40 million giveaway  did not contain promised funds for the Office of Public Counsel. That is where the interests of the two senators converge. Bray, too, thinks the Office of Public Counsel is ridiculously underfunded. Bray’s group, the Consumers Council, is a coalition of large industrial users (like Noranda and InBev), the AARP, and the MO Assn. of Social Welfare, all working with the Office of Public Counsel to defend rate payers against the rate hikes that the PSC so liberally hands out whenever Ameren comes begging. The Office of Public Counsel, in its attempts at sweet reason in the PSC hearings, is typically outgunned ten to one. Ameren uses the money we ratepayers are forced to fork over to finance lotsa lawyers, who then convince the PSC to wring even more money out of us. For Ameren customers, it’s like being forced to pay for the bullets of our own firing squad.

As head of the Consumers Council, Bray opposes, no question about it, giving Ameren forty million dollars to apply for the license. The Council’s first objection is that state law forbids giving utilities any funds for new plants until they actually come on line. Just as much of a sticking point is that we’re talking about a new nuclear plant, and that especially riles many green activists.

But Bray pointed out to me that as heartily as she opposes another nuclear plant in Callaway County, she must, as head of the Consumers Council, be aware of political realities. And the reality is that Ameren is almost surely going to get that forty mill. That being the case, the advocates for ratepayers had best get something valuable out of the deal if they can, and that’s what they’re aiming to do. To that end, when the bill came up for a hearing in Crowell’s committee, he stipulated that the OPC would get its funds from Ameren rather than from the state and that it would get appreciably more funding. That stipulation had been promised and then–oops–left out. If Crowell and the Consumers Council can stall the deal unless the Office of Public Counsel gets more funding, then at least the OPC can use its new funds to lobby against changing the anti-CWIP law–against, in other words, forcing ratepayers to cough up in advance for a second nuclear plant in Callaway County.

Hey, as long as we have to pay for the bullets that will be fired at us, shouldn’t we also be allowed to buy some ammo for our own defense? That’s only fair, especially since we’ll still be outgunned. Consider that the OPC, if it gets its funding from a dedicated stream taken out of Ameren’s profits, wouldn’t have the kind of moolah that the utility’s CEO can spend on lawyers and lobbyists. OPC would get somewhere between $3 and $4 million dollars. Ameren spent $4 million on its last rate case alone, whereas the OPC would have to use its funds for utility cases around the entire state. But the odds would be more even.

And just as important, the Office of Public Counsel would be protected from political vagaries. In these dire times for the state budget, when agencies and programs are being slashed on every side, who knows what might happen to the OPC’s funding? Instead of having one tenth the resources to argue a case that Ameren has, it might end up having 1/20th of the resources. Or none. It could be entirely defunded. We do have a Republican legislature.

The important ball to keep your eye on when it comes to this bill, then, is whether or not, if it passes, it includes a dedicated funding stream taken from Ameren to give the Office of Public Counsel some parity in litigating rate cases. If that happens, it will be because all the stakeholders on our side pooled their might. Big Bill Haywood, that famous turn of the 20th century labor leader, used to show immigrants who were trying to form unions an open hand and demonstrate how easily any single finger can be bent. But then he would make a fist to illustrate the strength that comes from unity. Perhaps the Consumers Council is about to experience itself as a fist.

As for whether giving Ameren $40 million it neither needs nor deserves could ever be considered winning? Eh, that’s a tough case to make. But getting four million dollars a year out of Ameren’s profits for the Office of Public Counsel would certainly take much of the sting out of that kind of “winning”.

It’s a sure thing that Kit Bond will respect the GOP love affair with Big-Oil and King-Coal, not to mention his party’s general policy of obstruction when it comes time to consider the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act – just consider his absurd response to new EPA clean air regulations. Claire McCaskill, on the other hand, may hew to her Republican-not-so-light line, but, given her recent actions in regard to clean energy initiatives, it’s just possible that she may be coming around to understanding that CO2 emission control is part-and-parcel of getting to where we need to be, and that she needs to take a few risks and show some innovative, forward-looking leadership to help us get there.

It is surely this possibility that has led organizations like  Repower America and Clean Energy Works to lobby as hard as they can to bring Senator McCaskill on board. Which brings us to a conference call earlier this morning organized by Clean Energy Works. The call, which consisted of brief presentations from Missourians representing political, business, farm, and military interests, fleshed out four compelling arguments for passing the American Power Act (and, I hope, for improving that flawed proposal):

Clean energy alternatives are here right now: This point was made forcefully by Steve Flick, Board President of Show Me Energy Cooperative, “a non-profit, producer owned cooperative founded to support the development of renewable biomass energy sources in West Central Missouri.” The Cooperative has used “stable biomass” as the basis for a “bio-pellet” that can be used for heat as well as to create electricity – recently the KCP&L utility company purchased the pellets to try them out as an alternative to coal for generating electricity.

Better yet, given McCaskill’s concern that Missourians not “get the short end of the stick” economically, bio-pellet production has the potential to increase farm income. One of the goals of the Cooperative, for instance, is to  “provide additional revenue streams for farmers and producers for their products by utilization in biomass energy production.”

Clean Energy is politically viable: State Senator Joan Bray (D-24) observed that the public is ahead of the policy makers and wants the transition to clean energy now. She noted that the Massey coal mine disaster and the current catastrophic BP oil spill have brought home to Americans the costs of doing nothing. The public expects action not dithering from a congress that, according to Bray, doesn’t seem to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” This argument might reassure our politically cautious McCaskill, especially since it is supported by some recent polling (see also here).

McCaskill, who professes to worry about the impact of precipitate action on the business climate, should also be receptive to Bray’s observation that Congress must make prompt decisions about energy for economic reasons as well, since businesses need to be able to rely on known rules if they are to plan intelligently.

Clean Energy makes us more secure: Jack Hembree, a U.S. Army veteran from Springfield and a member of Operation Free discussed the fact that because most of our oil comes from the Middle East – only 3% of our consumption is supported by domestic oil production – we will have no choice but to continue our military involvement in the region until we can move to clean energy. Listening to Hembree, it occurred to me that since McCaskill claims to support our troops, given the role of oil in putting them in harm’s way, how can she do other than to vote for the American Power Act?

Clean Energy has no downside: Ralph Bicknese, of Hellmuth & Bicknese Architects in St. Louis offered this formula for evaluating the real costs of our energy sources: just ask what happens when things go wrong.

Coal? Produces coal ash that ends up in unlined and unregulated sludge ponds. And what’s wrong with that? Think about toxic chemical byproducts seeping into your water, not to mention spills – remember what happened in Kingston Tennessee?

Oil? If I need to spell the downside out, you’ve been living in a cave for the last four decades.

Nuclear? As Bicknesse put it, when Nuclear goes wrong, it goes very wrong. Think Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and then think abut the problems inherent in storing poisonous waste with a half-life of a couple of millennia. Not to mention that power from nuclear energy is expensive. It’s a dangerous energy source and it’s not cheap.

Wind, solar? Maybe there are some little implementation problems but nothing that can go catastrophically wrong – no downside at all really. Biomass? essentially no downside that can’t be easily dealt with.

Given Senator McCaskill’s obvious understanding of at least some of the issues, as she articulates them on her Website, if she continues to walk backwards, as she did in her response to the proposed EPA regulations, we must demand that she tell us just why the considerations above do not convince her to not only support, but work to improve the American Power Act. So go call her – let her know that if she does the right thing, we’ll have her back in 2012.

When Sen. Joan Bray spoke to the Bonhomme Township Democrats, the subject of the coerced abortion bill came up, and Rep. Jill Schupp, sitting at the head table, described a hearing she had attended in the House:

Schupp:We had someone who testified she had an abortion when she was sixteen, who was …. She had a boyfriend, but she had, she became pregnant by someone else. She later in life married the boyfriend. He’s her husband. He sat by her while she testified. She said that her mom had convinced her that she should have an abortion, and she said that if she could, she would have her mom put in jail for forcing her at the age of sixteen to have an abortion from a boy who was not her boyfriend. Anyway, these are the kinds of things that are going on. I mean, for someone to say–and I specifically said to her, that you would have liked to have seen your mother go to jail? And she said, “Absolutely.”

These are the kinds of hearings that we’re having. And had the Senate, had Joan not worked so hard and, to, to, to take some of the edge off of that horrible bill, it would have passed in the House. Instead, the House didn’t even bring it back up.

Bray: Yeah it was made so unacceptable because it wasn’t horrible enough. I will tell you, I’ve had it up to here with these folks [inaudible]. And I am, you know, [applause] I’ve been there seventeen years that we’ve had these issues, seventeen years, it’s always been  what … how to put barriers up, how to put barriers, how to put barriers up. Never ONCE has it ever been acknowledged that a man has anything to do with an unwanted pregnancy. It’s: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” And so it’s just a re-e-al irrational … [someone adds: “ridiculous”] [Garbled] There is no acknowledgement that there’s any, any problem outside of a woman’s problem.

Audience member: Joan.

Bray: And it’s not just a woman’s problem. It’s our society’s problem.

Audience member: Joan, has anybody proposed an amendment to the bill that says you have to have informed consent to carry through with the pregnancy? That a doctor has to ….

Bray: We talked, we talked about that. You know, we talked about that. I brought that up. Yeah [nodding vigorously].

Audience member: And how about coercing your teenage daughter against an abortion? And make her donate her body [garbled]

I can imagine an anti-abortionist watching Senator Bray’s facial expression when she mocks the anti-abortionists’ attitude: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” Such a person might think it fair to dismiss her altogether because she stooped to such a mean spirited caricature. But Bray is dead on in her characterization. Granted, few anti-abortionists would allow such facial contortions to show when they speak in the legislature or in most public forums, but make no mistake, Bray caught the souls of those judgmental folk. Consider that bills to prevent unplanned pregnancies languished in the last session of the Republican controlled House.  Consider that the representatives tried to pass House Bills 226 and 533, which would have allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Consider that in past sessions, Republicans have worked to deny poor women access to free contraception (how dare they enjoy sex without having to pay a penalty!).

Anti-abortionists oppose more than abortion. They want women to bear children–without discovering that sex in and of itself is kinda fun. And Joan Bray is rightly fed up to here with seventeen years of watching their nonsense.

Furthermore, some of them, when they don’t get their way, “water the radius around them with their vitriol” and [poke] dangerous lone wolfs with sticks” so that a young woman winds up wanting her mother put in jail and Dr. Tiller winds up dead.

Let me understate the case: theirs is not a healthy outlook.

Senator Joan Bray, D-St. Louis, just finished her seventeenth session in the legislature (ten in the House) and will be termed out of the Senate in 2010. Tuesday night she offered the Bonhomme Township Democrats her take on the just completed session.

She called this one unique because having a Democratic governor “made life much more bearable”; because there was new leadership in the House and Senate; and because in the Senate, where more time is allotted for an individual to talk and even filibuster, the Republicans have begun fighting among themselves.

The infighting is a natural evolution once a party has been in power for a few years. Republicans, in their sixth or seventh year in the majority, she said, have gotten the hardline policies enacted (changes to tort law and workmen’s compensation, cutting people off of Medicaid, and increased abortion barriers). Now they’re down to their third tier issues, so they start disagreeing.

Where I spent my first six years in the Senate filibustering a lot, this year, they were filibustering their own bills. And Senator Days and I remarked one day that we actually got to–when they brought in supper for us because we were staying late–we actually got to go into the lounge and have supper with everybody else because we weren’t out on the floor having to keep the conversation going for fear something bad would happen.

(…)

In these very, very acrimonious debates, some of the worst moments on the Senate floor since I’ve been there took place this year of Republicans against Republicans.

As Bray’s time in the Senate has gone on, she increasingly notices the deleterious effects of term limits. In the relatively short time legislators have there, they’re focused on pushing through their agendas and see little advantage in investing in relationships. Furthermore, next year when Bray is termed out of the Senate, she says that institutional memory will be gone in that body. True, the average stay of senators was only seven or eight years in the past, but there were always a few senators who stayed longer. Without their knowledge, both in the House and the Senate, of how legislation should be handled, the process doesn’t work as well. They just don’t know the rules:

A transcript is below the fold, but don’t depend on that alone. When Bray gets started on the House Budget Committee, it’s almost like watching a cross between a preacher and a standup comedian.

My observation of, of, of … that the processes just don’t work as well. People don’t know the rules. And there’s reasons for all those rules, for doing things the way they’re done. And because there’s nobody left in the House who has, you know, a long, in depth knowledge and experience of working [garbled], knowing how things should get done, it’s gotten very sloppy. And when they come to the Senate from the House, they have a real hard time adapting to the different ways of the Senate, and it’s just … right before we went on spring break, like the night before we went on spring break, I just … said, you know, we’re a mess. I mean, we were just a mess. People didn’t know how to make a motion, they didn’t know how to talk, they’d be laughing and talking with each other on the floor when …. None of this is allowed when you’re trying to [garbled].

Anyway, the Secretary did some remedial classes with the folks, [laughter] trying to get things back on, you know, the way things should be done. But I, you know, I, when someone like me and my class are going out [inaudible].

Uh, let me talk a little bit about the budget. I spend most of time working on the budget. I’m the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee. And we’re organized a little differently from the House [inaudible]. The House has several appropriations committees and then the Budget Committee. And they do their work, and they send it over to the Senate Appropriations Committee. We’ve gone through the budget all along, and we go through it another time and go through  it another time and then go off to conference and get it done.

This year was a huge different environment because of, first of all, the state shortfall in general revenue. Which I’ve experienced before. I was here in the early part of this decade when we spent night after night after night trying to figure out where we could squeeze a few dollars out here, there, wherever, and foresaw that was gonna be the case this year, but then that great, you know, fairy godmother called Washington D.C. sent down this stabilization money and stimulus money. And, uh, that was real interesting exercise.

Uh, thank goodness the nut cases in the, in the Republican party didn’t prevail, so we did … take … the money. [Laughter] You know some states didn’t. And I thought we did a fairly good job of [inaudible] the budget. I will, not to disparage my sister’s [puts a hand on Rep. Jill Schupp sitting next to her] uh, uh, body, but the House, well, I want to tell you, it’s been a real trip watching the House budget the last six, seven years. Omigosh, I’ve had, I mean… ‘How shall we do it this year? [waving hands in the air] How shall we do it…? You know, what’s a [inaudible]  We recreate the wheel every time we do this. It’s just crazy.

There is a good [inaudible]. The Senate did a, the Senate Appropriations Committee did a really good job crafting a budget. We tried to, with the general revenue we had, we tried to fill the gaps in services, using stabilization money from the feds, and, uh, you know, tried to do it real thoughtfully and carefully, and I think came out with a really good budget. But then we had to go to conference, and the Senate can’t win on everything. The House, with its crazy budget, had to win on something. And as a result, they won on things that were just heartbreaking, that did not have to happen.

Like, we did not have to cut 500 people off alcohol and drug services. We didn’t have to cut 600 people out of mental health services and close eleven community health centers. We didn’t have to do that. But because they had to win on some things, guess where they cut. You know, they went on with the cuts in mental health and alcohol and drug treatment. So that was really discouraging.

But by and large, the Senate prevailed on the budget. We did use the stabilization money properly.

I can see why Bray got elected. She’s a live one, who–as it just so happens–also takes her job seriously.

(By the way, I’ll have a couple of other tidbits from Tuesday night’s talk in upcoming postings.)

Two weeks ago, of course, nobody knew that this year’s anti-abortion joke of a bill would get shot down in the House. So last week, pro-choice senators had to be thinking, some option that was they were being offered: agree to a law that forces medical professionals to lie to patients seeking abortions or stand by and watch a much worse law passed.

And by “much worse law”, I’m not even referring to that godawful grotesquerie the House sent over containing a provision making it a felony to coerce a woman to have an abortion. As I’ve pointed out before:

When “Honey, I think you should have an abortion” becomes a felony, we might as well move to Afghanistan.

Republican senators, being, on the whole, less wild eyed than their House counterparts, knew that the “Freedom of speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ freedom of speech” coercion provision wasn’t going to fly. They’d have needed 18 votes to move the previous question (that is, force a vote) and shove it by the Democrats. But even with 23 Rs to 11 Ds in the Senate, the votes weren’t there.

So Democrats in the Senate knew the coercion provision was off the table. Even if it hadn’t faced a Nixon veto, the Supreme Court would have deep sixed it. No, the choice Democrats faced was between two bills that both required:

• that a woman seeking an abortion come in on two separate days, first to be informed of the risks and then to receive the abortion
• that professionals working in abortion clinics lie to patients about the possible effects of abortion.

Both bills required that women be warned they would face certain psychological consequences, but that information is based on junk science. True, the claims were printed in reputable journals, but that doesn’t make them credible:

The articles, filled with ersatz science, are indeed printed in respected journals. That’s because such journals take a few articles on controversial topics, knowing that the peer review process will reveal them to be full of holes. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff. The Elliot Institute [an anti-abortion group] lies, in effect, when it pretends its claims are wheat, not chaff.

You might think that such discredited information could be successfully challenged in court, but you would be wrong. Senator Jolie Justus, D-Kansas City, and Senator Joan Bray, D-St. Louis, were in touch with litigators at the national offices of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, who told them that such provisions had been upheld in legal challenges elsewhere in the country. Furthermore, the Missouri 8th Circuit has proven hostile to challenges to the anti-abortion laws passed by Republicans.

It was obvious, then, that pro-choicers were going to have to swallow a bitter pill and vote for the lesser of two evils. Although the differences in the two bills Democrats faced look small, they matter. As Justus put it, it’s the difference between being kneecapped and having your head shot off. Fortunately for the pro-choice camp, the Republicans preferred to offer something they could pass without having to move the previous question. They had the votes to pass either version, but they’d have had to PQ Democrats on the more draconian one, a move they’re loath to employ.

So, what were the differences?

• The milder version would have exempted the Columbia abortion clinic for three years from the new requirement that a patient be at the clinic in person to receive the medical warnings. If she doesn’t live in Columbia, that would necessitate two trips or two days in the city–a hardship for many women seeking abortion. Justus pointed out to me that the Republican senators offered this provision in order to make the bill more palatable.
• The milder version didn’t require that the false information be dispensed by a doctor. It could be given to patients by any qualified medical professional. It would have been economically impractical for abortion clinics to pay a doctor to be on the premises to give out the information and then to return 24 hours later (because of the mandatory waiting period) to perform the abortion.
• The milder version said that the information offered in the informed consent sessions had to be “medically accurate.” With Margaret Donnelly heading the Department of Health and Senior Services, believe it: that provision would have been enforced.

Pro-choice senators voted for the bad, but less onerous, version–though not before Bray reamed out Republicans. (If you didn’t read about it, treat yourself to some red meat.)

And the hotheads in the House blew their top that their precious coercion nonsense had evaporated and that Columbia was getting a three year reprieve. There was talk in the hallways about how the Senate version had been written by ACLU lawyers! House anti-abortionists refused to vote for it, so the whole hoopla ended up being moot for another year.

The only people who breathed a sigh of relief were the pro-choicers and, oddly enough, the people on the pro-abortion side who make their living working on this issue. As Justus pointed out, there are more than sixty anti-abortion laws on the Missouri books, forty of them passed since 2000. Unless Roe is overturned, pretty much everything that can be done to put up barriers to abortion has been done. But those folks making their living off of the quarrel don’t want to lose their livelihoods. It’s a cottage industry that is working very hard to perpetuate itself.

So they’ll be back, come January. And this year’s sparring was, what?, round nine of a fight that could go past fifteen rounds. See you next year for round ten.

Moves are being made in several quarters in our state government to ensure that the use of the funds provided our state by the federal recovery package will be transparent and accountable.

First of all, to make the injection of federal dollars more transparent to the public, State Auditor Susan Montee has set up a handy-dandy stimulus tracker on her website. Once the federal dollars start flowing into state coffers,  the tracker will update daily to reflect every dollar allocated by our state government. Campaign finance junkies who like to play “Follow the Money” might find a fix during the long months in between campaign finance reports.

Also, in a move that could aid Montee, the unlikely team of Senators Gary Nodler (R-Joplin) and Joan Bray (D-University City) have guided a bill through the Senate, SB 313, that would create two separate funds for federal stimulus dollars. The first is a “Federal Budget Stabilization Fund” for money intended to bolster the General Revenue, like unemployment benefits and Medicaid reimbursements. The other, the “Federal Stimulus Fund” is for any additional funds. The idea here is to make sure the legislature doesn’t reroute federal stimulus dollars for other purposes by putting it all in general revenue.

Interesting to see that both Nodler and Bray are termed in 2010. In any case, it’s nice to see state officials making an effort on behalf of transparency.

Three Democratic senators want all campaign finance contribution limits lifted:  Tim Green (Florissant), Chuck Graham (Columbia), and Chris Koster (Harrisonville).  Tim Green, in fact, introduced the amendment to lift the caps. 

Because Koster has taken a hundred thou from Rex Sinquefield, he’s also taking some political heat.  KMOX radio interviewed him about that question, and he stood firm for lifting the limits.  Here’s the interview if you want to hear it.  Republicans–and these three Democrats–like to muddy the waters with the old “we need transparency” canard.  Yes, we do, but throwing out all caps on contributions is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Just last week, I wrote about senator Joan Bray’s solution to the transparency in contributions problem.

“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. ….

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.

That’s a no-brainer.

A no-brainer indeed, unless you’re a legislator who prefers to sell yourself and sell the public out.

I’m not being hard on Koster here because he’s a former Republican.  We’re glad to have anybody from the other side who sees that Democratic ideas are better.  And Koster has charisma that would be put to better use promoting Democratic ideals than pushing Republican selfishness.  If he would promote Democratic principles.  But how much good does it do Democrats to have Koster switch parties if he still votes to get rid of campaign donation limits?

And by the way, Tim Green and Chuck Graham also need to repent their votes on this issue and push to limit PACs. 

Because that’s the solution:  limit each party to one PAC. 

Jim Trout, who sued over the no-cap-on-contributions law and won, has said that the old law had bugs in it, but that 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.

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.

Senator Koster.  Senator Green.  Senator Graham.  C’mon now.  You know that solution would level the playing field so that ordinary voters would get a fair shake for a change.  Don’t you?

(Tim Green is pictured above and Chuck Graham is pictured below.)

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.