Friday, July 16, 2010

Kander: Never give up

In his newsletter, Rep. Jason Kander, D-Kansas City, talks about this year's attempt to get ethics legislation through the state legislature:

I’m often asked why, in the face of such strong opposition and long odds, I still believe that Missouri will eventually pass comprehensive ethics reform.


I had intended to answer with a long synopsis of the journey I undertook to author and pass the ethics bill this year.

But this past Wednesday, The Pitch wrote an article that chronicles it in great detail. If you’re interested in how we got to where we are now (it is a pretty interesting story), you should read David Martin’s telling of the tale. Or you can read an article from the following day, when the Governor signed the bill into law.

But even my long-winded retelling wouldn’t fully answer the question of why, despite everything, I remain so optimistic. The only way to really explain it is to tell you a story.

You might have already heard me explain the good and the bad about the ethics bill. You know by now that I’m proud to have played a role in passing the first real ethics reform bill Missouri has seen in almost twenty years, but you also know that I’m disappointed about all the opportunities missed as a result of partisan gamesmanship.

Though it’s in my best interest politically to declare victory on the issue and gather up the credit, it wouldn’t be honest to do so. Misleading you into believing the problem is solved would be worse than never addressing the problem in the first place.

You may remember that I wrote about my friend former State Representative Joe Ortwerth (R – St. Charles) in a previous lesson learned. Joe is one of the most conservative Republicans to have served in Jefferson City in recent memory. We aren’t exactly the most natural of allies.

But Joe was the last Missouri legislator to successfully author and pass major ethics legislation. He created the Missouri Ethics Commission and, due to the politics of the day, was left feeling as though his work was incomplete. He pushed for the ethics commission to have the powers necessary to do its job, but the rest of the legislature preferred to leave the commission with as few real teeth as possible. I know that it has bothered Joe for the last nineteen years.

But Joe didn’t give up.

As for me, I’ve lost track of how many times this year a colleague advised me: “Jason, this is truly over now. Stop talking like it’s anything but campaign fodder at this point.”

Following Joe’s example, I refused to give up. My answer was always the same: “This is too important to do anything other than play until the whistle blows.”

With a week to go, it looked very much like the anti-reform crowd had won. By that point, I had been working closely with Joe nearly every day for weeks. We would meet in my office or in a corner of the Capitol and exchange information about who was teetering, who needed persuading, and what our next move should be. The only people I worked with more closely were my co-sponsor, Rep. Tim Flook (R – Liberty), and a few Democratic members on the ethics committee.

At one in the morning on the final day of session, I found myself in the office of Senate President Pro Tem Charlie Shields (R – St. Joseph) reading a final draft of the bill just before it was passed by the Senate and sent back to the House. Republicans control the legislature, so at that late hour where the fate of the bill was being decided, I was the lone Democrat in the room. A freshman Democrat talking ethics reform with the highest-ranking Republicans in the Capitol.

I realized that twenty years earlier, when Democrats controlled the legislature, Joe was probably the only Republican in that same office.

The next morning, with just a few hours to go in the 95th General Assembly, I gave a weary speech on the floor and then voted to send an important, albeit thoroughly incomplete, ethics bill to the Governor’s desk.

Despite all its shortcomings, the bill did grant the ethics commission most of the powers Joe had originally sought 19 years earlier.

As the Speaker declared the bill truly agreed and finally passed, I looked up in the gallery and saw Joe. He wore the importance of the moment on his face with a resolute, purpose-driven expression that hinted at the presence of closure.

That vote finished what Joe started when I was ten years old. My work had just begun, but as long as there are believers in the cause of ethics reform on both sides of the aisle, we will keep moving the ball forward.

And so, just like Joe, we can’t give up.

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