Three weeks left in the 2010 Regular Session. This is what would be called the endgame phase in chess, the fourth quarter in football. The next days will make or break lots of important issues.

The Budget, by Constitution, must be completed by May 7th. Right now the House and Senate have both appointed member of the conference committees - conferees - to negotiate the final version of the spending plan. It is going on daily but it is hard to watch the progress as it is all happening around tables where dozens of things happen daily. May have a better idea this week where they are going on major issues.

Adult entertainment bill - the annual attack on strip clubs and adult stores is in progress. The Taliban would be proud.

Prosecutors from St Louis visited Jeff City this week to tell legislators that the Prosecutors who have been opposing the DWI bills do not speak for them. They are "tough on crime" and proud of it. On a political rather than policy level you can't blame them. The St Louis Post Dispatch is leading the charge for putting more in jail. Elected officials are reluctant to pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.
Lots of drama around the Ethics reform bills. As the French politician, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, famously said, " There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader." And that is how it is now in Jeff where a lot of politicians are getting religion around ethics reform. For example one leader who has been legendary in accepting lobbyist gifts has done a complete about face and now advocates zero lobbyist gifts. And every pol has signed some ethics bill and will be glad to tell you about it. Even those who are oppose campaign finance limits try to act as if they are in favor of reform. I swear it is true. Cannot make this stuff up.

But right now the Rules Committee is boxing up the ethics bills at the request of the House Repub leaders. May get out this week. Rumor is they are holding it to kill it and so the Repubs who oppose campaign donation limits will not have to vote that publicly.

Annual attack on Adult Clubs and Video stores

Senate Bartle's annual attack on strip clubs would close Adult clubs. Click here to see it.

Senate Bartle's Annual Adult entertainment bill-Senate Bill 586 is now in the House Rules Committee

The annual attack on strip clubs and adult stores is in progress. Seems like every year we have a bill that would essentially shut down all the adult entertainment in the State and it always goes to the final days. Some years we pass blatantly unconstitutional laws such as the billboard law a few years ago and the industry goes to Court and gets the laws reversed. This year we are being reminded that not only is it a First Amendment issue but it will close clubs and eliminate thousands of jobs in the worst possible economy. You would think that just once the forces who want to impose a their own strict morality on Missouri would give it a rest. You would be wrong.

There is a link above to review the particulars but the highlights include forbidding alcohol, restricting where the businesses can locate, defining "sexually oriented business" so broadly that many argue it would include convenience stores that sell adult magazines, and other anti-sex fantasies.

DWI bill in the Senate poised to fill jails

The House sent our version of DWI "reform" to the Senate a couple of weeks ago. The Senate hat it's own bill on DWI. Both bills are full of ideas that increase penalties in various way. It is difficult to track these bills because they have been changed so much in the process. Here is the link to the House version HB 1695. It does contain one good idea - an amendment I put in. It would change all the driving while suspended charges from felonies and misdemeanors to infractions.

The Senate version is Senate Bill 880, here is the link to it. The only real difference in the bills i the so called "vampire" provision. The House version includes blood testing without a warrant. That provsion is not in the Senate version. Personally I think this issue is a red herring. The strategy is if the threat is to cut off an arm, in this case the horrible provision of forcible blood test without a warrant, the victim will be happy to give up some fingers, in this case the plethora of increased penalties that will fill our jails but make our streets no safer.

Both bill contain "DWI Courts" which are basically like Drug Courts where a judge gives intensive supervision of probationers. Problem is this is another red herring. Does nothing to make streets safer. Merely permits local courts to establish such a docket. Many around the State already do. Not Jackson County of course but lots of them around the State. Problem is no money is given merely the permission which was not really needed in the first place.

And look for any DWI bill, no matter how loony, to pass by a large margin. No politician wants to be seen as soft on crime. Perhaps sanity will prevail in the Senate. They seem to truly want to reduce prison populations.

Budget Conferences continue even as Nixon makes more cuts

Four weeks left in the legislative session. Ideas that have not advanced may be in trouble. That includes the ethics reform bill that I have put a great deal of time and energy into. It is in jeopardy.

Ethics reform bill in big trouble in the House

House bill stalls at the Rules Committee

The big ticket item that was proposed by Jay Nixon and it seemed everyone would support to some extent is the Ethics reform bill. The Speaker appointed a special committee in the House to do this. Almost everyone in the House is a sponsor or co-sponsor of some ethics bill. The special committee heard all the bills. Held public hearings then worked and worked to put together a bill that had bipartisan support. This on some issues that it is very hard to agree upon.

The House Committee was able to put together a bill that had the support of the entire committee. In fact I signed the bill the the committee constructed and we then voted it out to go to the floor for debate. But before that happens it goes to the "powerful Rules Committee" for review. Rules is supposedly a gatekeeping committee that decides which issues will go to the floor for debate. But it is being used to simply kill the bill. The ethics bill was scheduled to be voted out Thursday. I am the only person on the Ethics committee that also serves on the Rules Committee. I asked there why the bill had not advanced. I was told that the Chairman, who was absent from the meeting, would have that information next week. But after adjournment the informal answer was that the Republican leadership is killing the bill unless the Ethics committee will remove the campaign contribution limits and other finance provision.

Expect big drama and posturing this week if that rumor is indeed true.

The DWI bill advances to the Senate

The House voted 128-25 to send the House version of DWI "reform" to the Senate. This in spite of the fact that the Senate had this week voted to reduce the number of prison beds by 2,000 and close a prison. Now the DWI bill does virtually nothing except raise penalties which will increase the number of people sent to prison. Meanwhile a Senate version is advancing to the House. The House bill reads like a brainstorming session of members of MADD who were locked in a room with a huge vat of coffee but not food. We put about 10 amendments on the bill and I was successful in getting an amendment to change Driving While Revoked to less serious charges called infractions. If that amendment stays in it will at least free up some prison space.

Budget Drama continues

The Senate on April 14 passed its version of a more than $23 billion state operating budget for the upcoming fiscal year, cutting $453.8 million in proposed spending recommended by Gov. Jay Nixon in January. The Senate cuts are roughly double the $224 million in reductions the House of Representatives approved last month. Because the state's revenue projections have worsened significantly in the months since he offered his proposed FY 2011 budget, Nixon is generally supportive of lawmakers' actions to further reduce spending.


The full Senate reversed a committee's decisions to eliminate the $37.5 million needed to fund the Career Ladder program, which provides teachers extra pay for extra duties, and to cut an additional $14.8 million for colleges and universities, which had agreed to freeze in-state tuition for the 2010-2011 school year in exchange for a cut of no more than $50 million. By agreeing to limit the cut to the agreed amount, the tuition deal remains in place. House and Senate negotiators must now work out a final version of the budget, which both chambers must approve no later than May 7.

Join me on Twitter.... @JohnBurnettKC

Thank you for the opportunity to serve.

State Rep John Burnett

Fun week. My sister Carla, husband Joe, and youngest niece Emma visited. Since Carla is the youngest of the ten Burnett siblings her daughter Emma is the youngest of our mother's 27 grandchildren. And what a kid! Bright red curly hair and literally everyone compares her to Annie. She made the week, which was otherwise very sad, a fun time.

This week we passed a resolution that would have been more appropriate in pre Civil War America. It calls for "State Sovereignty". More below.

As expected the Senate took up the budget the House punted to it and made huge cuts to education. The amount of the cuts was no surprise. But the huge cuts to education were. More budget games went on with the budget for the current year. More below on that as well.

I know budget speak is deadly boring but at the end there is short article about the official dead dog of Missouri. Do check that out even if you skip the budget stuff.

Career Ladder for Teachers collapses

The Senate, predictably, slashes spending for education

Remember the House sent the Senate a budget that was about $500 million out of balance? Well, this week the Senate Committee working on the budget did the cuts of that $500 million and they are not pretty.
Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate the entire $37.5 million for the Career Ladder program that the House of Representatives had approved for next year's state budget. The program provides about 18,000 teachers who perform extra duties with salary supplements ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 a year. The program provides extra funding for teachers who do extra work. The program provides after school tutoring services and a wide range of services directly to students.

The state splits the cost of Career Ladder with participating school districts. Because the state pays its share a year in arrears, money in next year's budget would reimburse districts for expenses incurred in the current school year. As a result, if Career Ladder funding isn't restored in the final budget, the districts won't be reimbursed. The Senate committee eliminated the program as part of its effort to balance the state budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

Since the funding is in arrears the teachers who have worked all this school year may not get paid. Each district will have to decide if it can pay the entire amount even if the State backs out. So you can see why both teachers and administrators are upset about this. Educators love this program because it provides such direct educational help to students and we can expect a huge outcry about this when people start understanding what is happening.

The budget for the current year albeit a smaller issue is very important too:

HOUSE APPROVES, REJECTS, APPROVES SPENDING BILL

Fair warning - the following is very detailed, tedious and boring. But it was a huge part of our week and I know there are people interested. So here goes. A day after rejecting a supplemental appropriations bill that it previously had approved, the House on Thursday, after a morning of waiting while the Majority "discussed it among themselves" (read that as arm twisting in private) switched positions for a second time and voted 96-51 to send the bill to the governor to be signed into law. The House's repeated flipping of positions on HB 2014 resulted from a dispute over a provision in the bill that will spare 152 local school districts from midyear spending cuts but impose even bigger funding reductions on the state's other 371 districts. It is complicated but important and actually a major policy action.


Because of a funding shortfall, Gov. Jay Nixon in January called for reducing the state's scheduled payment to local districts for current school year by $43 million. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had planned to deal with the shortfall with a 2 percent funding reduction for all districts. The House Budget Committee, however, added a provision to exempt so-called "hold harmless" districts from the cuts. Hold harmless districts, which are predominantly wealthy suburban districts and certain small rural districts with high local tax levies, don't receive annual increases from the state's education funding distribution formula but still get more money than they would receive under the formula. Republicans from those districts very much did not want to vote for this bill but the R Leaders demanded it. Thus the arm twisting and flip flopping.


When the bill initially came before the full House in March, lawmakers defeated an amendment by state Rep. Rachel Bringer, D-Palmyra, to remove the hold-harmless exemption. Rachel sits next to me on the floor so I get to witness that she is one of the best legislators and lawyers in the House. Anyway, the House then passed the bill with the exemption intact, and the Senate followed suit. By the time the bill returned to the House for final approval, however, many representatives changed their positions after realizing their initial votes against the Bringer amendment adversely affected their local districts. You have to hand it to those rural Repub legislators they may not listen to anyone except each other during debate but when their school superintendents began calling them out for voting against their districts they woke right up.


The House attempted to open negotiations with the Senate to remove the exemption, but the Senate considered the issue settled and refused. As a result, the House on April 7 voted down the bill 75-79. The next day, however, in a show of political power by the Majority who managed to change the vote of 20 Members overnight, the House again changed positions and granted the bill final approval.

Opponents of the exemption are urging Nixon to use his line-item veto authority on appropriations bills to strike the controversial provision.
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Shades of Pre-Civil War posturing in the MO House

Sounded like they want Missouri to vote to secede from the Union

Wednesday, April 7th, the House sent the Senate a proposed state constitutional amendment that purports to give the state the authority to ignore federal laws or court decisions that it doesn't like. The measure, HJR 88, passed on a largely party-line 87-62 vote with all Republicans in support and most Democrats opposed.

This is not a new idea. In fact American History students will recall the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that was among the tensions leading to the Civil War. Andrew Jackson, the President at that time, was given the authority by Congress to use force and South Carolina backed down. Wikipedia has a good article on it. Wikipedia says:

The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. This ordinance declared, by the power of the State itself, that the federal Tariff of 1828 and the federal Tariff of 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of South Carolina.

So the Repubs voted to start down that path again by asking for a statewide vote on "State Sovereignty". Dems mainly just listened in awe at the proposal and did not engage in any serious debate. That did not slow down the speech making on the Repub side of course.

The highlight of the debate though, was when two Repubs spent a long exchange telling each other how the Constitution decrees that "all men are created equal." Since those words of Thomas Jefferson are arguably the best known political phrase in any of America's founding documents one Dem lawyer from St Louis claimed he just couldn't help himself in correcting them that it was in that thing called the Declaration of Independence. He then apologized for interrupting the flow and encouraged them to continue. They did.

NO Dead Dogs for Missouri

HOUSE SPIKES BILL TO CREATE OFFICIAL MISSOURI DEAD DOG

Missouri lawmakers rarely pass up the opportunity to create a new official state symbol. But the House defied convention when it voted 67-84 to reject HB 1271, which would have honored Seaman, a dog that accompanied explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their survey of the upper Louisiana Territory more than 200 years ago, as the official state historical dog.

Missouri currently has 26 official state symbols, including a state invertebrate (crayfish), a state dinosaur (hysibema missouriense) and a state tree nut (eastern black walnut). New symbols typically are proposed by elementary school students and tend to pass easily, grumbling from some lawmakers about wasting time enacting unnecessary statutes notwithstanding. During the debate on HB 1271, however, one lawmaker derided the bill as creating an "official state dead dog."

Join me on Twitter.... @JohnBurnettKC

Thank you for the opportunity to serve.

State Rep John Burnett

The House is considering one of those really bad ideas that slip up on us from time to time. The proposal is to let Emergency Medical Techs revoke peoples' drivers licenses. Amazing but true.

We did our annual abortion bill this week. We do this every year and every year it does not pass the process but we voted it out of the House anyway. As we always do.

Guns. Need I say more. We will have more of them in the House if this passes.

Horsemeat. A huge fight. Seems some want to make MO the only state in the union to sell horsemeat for human consumption. Yum.

Legislators can already carry guns in the House but this will expand that

Bill will permit staff people in the Legislature to carry concealed guns. Oh and while drunk if careful about it

House Bill 1787 which passed first round approval this week will allow staffers to carry concealed weapons in the Legislature.

It also lowers the age for concealed carry permits from 23 to 21 years of age. It is House Bill 1787.

An amendment was also passed that removes the ban carrying while intoxicated provision of the law and replaces it with some other language here is the language:


" (5) [Possesses or discharges a projectile weapon while intoxicated; or] Has a firearm or projectile weapon readily capable of lethal use on his or her person, while he or she is intoxicated, and handles or otherwise uses such firearm or projectile weapon in either a negligent or unlawful manner or discharges such firearm or projectile weapon; or"

(THE BRACKETED LANGUAGE IS REMOVED FROM STATUTE AND THE OTHER IS ENACTED INSTEAD.) So before it was illegal to carry a gun while intoxicated even with a permit. Now it is legal so long and you are not "negligent" or do something otherwise illegal.

I intend to vote against this on final passage. I just don't see how this improves the concealed carry law.

Horsemeat for human consumption coming soon in Missouri

House approves controversial bill allowing horsemeat for human consumption

After spirited debate and a late night rendition of the Mr Ed song by a St Louis Rep, the House voted 91-61 to allow horses to be slaughtered in Missouri for human consumption.
The main provision of HB 1747 attempts to circumvent a de facto federal ban on slaughtering horses for human consumption. Although Congress hasn't specifically prohibited the practice, it has pulled funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspect facilities that slaughter horses for meat. Without inspections, those facilities have been forced to close. HB 1747 would impose a fee on horse processors that would pay for state-level inspections. Any horse meat from Missouri slaughterhouses would be sold to foreign markets.

Under this new law Missouri would become the first and only state to permit this practice. So Missouri would actually become a leader in something.

I voted NO.

Annual Abortion bill passes House