Kansas City Star, Aug. 19
The Club for Growth, which calls itself a “national network of . pro-growth, limited government Americans,” has reportedly raised $10 million to help Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley run for the U.S. Senate if he decides to do so.
It’s hard to imagine more depressing news - not because we’re opposed to Hawley, necessarily, or the Club for Growth.
Instead, the promise of that much cash may be just the first sign of a tsunami of unaccountable outside campaign money headed for Missouri and Kansas elections in 2018.
A matchup between Hawley and incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill would be one of the most-watched Senate races in the nation. If it happens, Missouri voters will be inundated with TV commercials and mailbox flyers, almost all of which will be misleading and unfair.
Yet the vast majority of those communications won’t come from the candidates themselves. Instead, they’ll be paid for by independent, outside groups, many with secret donors.
Voters may remember a similar deluge in 2016, when independent groups spent $47 million in the race between Sen. Roy Blunt and Jason Kander. That was far more than Blunt and Kander raised and spent for their own campaigns.
Americans for Prosperity. The National Rifle Association. VoteVets. Various labor unions. All poured outside cash into the race.
Some of that spending came from 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, authorized by the IRS. Under its rules, the groups can spend millions supporting political candidates and causes without disclosing their donors.
That’s why it’s called dark money. It’s money that will soon blot out the political sun, like an eclipse.
Kansas will not be immune. A hotly contested governor’s race, an open House seat and a competitive campaign in the 3rd Congressional District are likely to attract millions of dollars in outside dark-money expenditures.
We’d ask those groups to simply knock it off, but that wouldn’t work. Independent, secret spending is now embedded in our politics, enriching television stations, special interests and the political class.
But it isn’t too early to recommend that voters ignore political messages from outside groups.
Dark money campaigns will work only if voters allow them to. Dump mailers in the trash. Hit the mute button when a scurrilous commercial interrupts your favorite show.
Voters can’t stop outside groups from spending tens of millions of dollars on campaigns next year. They can make sure all that money is wasted by refusing to buy what dark money donors are trying to sell.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 19
A new federal lawsuit hopefully will force Missouri to address its woefully deficient prison parole system. Missouri’s prison parolees are caught up in a “sham” parole revocation process that can violate their rights and put them at continual risk of being re-arrested and re-entered into the corrections system, the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center says in a lawsuit filed last week. The state corrections department director and parole board chairman are named as defendants.
While incarceration rates are dropping in most other states, Missouri has the nation’s eighth highest rate and tops the list for returning parolees to prison, the lawsuit contends. The system has kept the state’s prison population near or above 30,000 for many years, which keeps the financial burden high for Missouri taxpayers.
Offenders earn the right to early release by abiding by certain conditions. In Missouri, the lawsuit alleges, they are frequently rotated back into prison because hearings aren’t held or they commit non-criminal, technical parole violations or are accused of unproven crimes.
Key to their ability to defend themselves is access to a lawyer. But the system routinely denies them the right to counsel, the lawsuit contends. Parolees without attorneys in revocation hearings seldom speak on their own behalf, present evidence or cross-examine witnesses because they are unfamiliar with their rights.
The Supreme Court has ruled that parolees have a right to counsel in some revocation hearings but not all, and that they are entitled to some level of due process. The MacArthur center says the parole board revokes release for up to 7,000 parolees a year without offering them an attorney.
This is the fifth lawsuit attorneys for the center have filed against the corrections department and related agencies in eight months. Anne Precythe, the state corrections chief, took over in January after longtime director George Lombardi resigned amid reports he tolerated a culture of sexual harassment and retaliation in Missouri’s prisons. The scandal cost state taxpayers more than $7.5 million in settlements and judgments from 2012 through 2016.
Precythe’s mandate was to clean up the mess. She shook up the parole board when MacArthur Center lawyers revealed that a board member used parole hearings to humiliate prisoners seeking early release.
She’s also overhauling the long-blighted St. Louis Community Release Center, where the body of an inmate who hanged himself remained undiscovered for hours while corrections employees streamed movies and skipped security checks.
The MacArthur center’s continued scrutiny is providing an important check on a system that was out of control.
A corrections department and parole board working to rehabilitate offenders and give them an opportunity to become contributing members of society is in the best interest of all Missourians. It serves no purpose to pay for costly prison terms when offenders could be on a smarter track.
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Columbia Daily Tribune, Aug. 20
For the third time the Missouri Public Service Commission denied approval for the Grain Belt Express power line across north Missouri, deferring to local rural land owners objecting to the use of eminent domain powers to obtain right-of-way access.
The Grain Belt transmission line would send wind-generated power from Kansas to Indiana where it would supply power grids for eastern states and a number of customers along the way, including the City of Columbia. Missouri is the only state on the route denying approval.
Four out of five Missouri PSC commissioners said they would approve the line except for a decision by the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals that all affected counties must grant prior permission. Arguably this is a misconstruction of the county prerogative. Grain Belt supporters might be able to limit the counties’ role on appeal.
The PSC assesses “necessity and convenience” of proposed public improvement projects like the Grain Belt Express. Counties are empowered and required to assess safety and engineering aspect of projects crossing public roads and otherwise potentially threatening public ways and places. For projects like Grain Belt or an interstate highway, county approval of engineering and safety impact is required. Where does it say in the law counties can disapprove a cross-state project because local property owners don’t like the idea of eminent domain? Were this the case, projects like highways might never be built.
The very idea that a single county in a single state can stop a project like the Grain Belt Express is preposterous.
Grain Belt might have a good case on appeal testing the ability of counties to withhold approval and/or the ability of the Public Service Commission to deny permission on this ground. The law intends to establish county oversight on engineering and safety grounds, areas where no such problems with the power line have been found or alleged.
Speaking for the City of Columbia, which has signed a prospective contract to buy power from Grain Belt, Mayor Brian Treece says denial of this favored source of clean power sends the message developers of similar projects need not consider building in Missouri.
The array of Grain Belt supporters is long and varied, including jurisdictions wanting to buy power, business interests and many others seeing this private enterprise development as a big step forward in the quest for practical expansion of alternative sources of power and, in the interim, a desirable economic development project.
Most ironic is that the PSC would agree except for a questionable application of the unrelated Western District finding. Further evaluation is required.
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Joplin Globe, Aug. 20
At the end of his life, his flowing black hair having thinned and gone white, Joseph Orville Shelby no longer looked the part of the dashing Confederate cavalry commander he had once been. And as the 19th century drew to a close, he no longer gave voice to that part, either.
In the end, he gave voice to something else: a lesson we should all carry forward as this nation wrestles with racism both past and present and monuments honoring - even deifying - political and military leaders of the Confederacy.
Shelby’s lesson is this: They were wrong for what they did, and there was more shame than glory in their actions.
Before the war, Shelby, according to a biographer, had been “a blue-chip stockholder” in the slave-holding South. Born in Kentucky, he became one of Missouri’s wealthiest slave owners. By the 1850s, he was an agitator of the border war, riding with those bands of Missourians who attempted to hijack Kansas territorial elections with violence, “at the point of a Bowie knife and the revolver,” as was said at the time.
Shelby, by his own admission, may have been among the most violent men of that era.
“I went there to kill Free State men. I did kill them,” he said in that last interview.
When the war came, Shelby commanded cavalry at many of the major battles in the region, riding thousands of miles in some of the most ambitious raids of the war. That he was personally brave, daring and a formidable opponent is beyond question. So is the fact that he was wrong and acknowledged it.
“I am now ashamed of myself for having done so,” Shelby said of his actions. “But then times were different from what they are now.
Before he died in 1897, Shelby reflected with a Kansas historian on those tumultuous years. His words had none of the buckshot and bravado of the Bleeding Kansas and Civil War eras. Shelby, instead, spoke of his remorse, his regret, for the role he played and for what it did to his country.
“I had no business there,” Shelby said of Kansas. “No Missourian had any business there with arms in his hands. The policy that sent us there was damnable, and the trouble we started on the border bore fruit for 10 years.”
But in Waverly, Shelby’s hometown, there is a bronze equestrian statue honoring him. It was not erected in the aftermath of the Civil War but in 2009. In “The Lost Cause,” a blog published by the Kentucky Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, it was explained that the statue came after 26 years of fundraising and when “the states of Kentucky and Missouri had both failed to raise a statue to their brave son and heroic figure.”
But by Shelby’s own admission, he did not see what he had done as heroic, nor was he proud of it, and that statute fails to convey the truth.
And that is the problem with some of the Confederate monuments erected around the country: They offer no context, no perspective of what the war was really all about, the high price the nation paid, and the regret that some Southern leaders later expressed.
“Those were the days when slavery was in the balance, and the violence engendered made men irresponsible,” Shelby said. “I now see I was so myself.”
Until we carve those words into bronze and marble in city squares and public parks throughout the South, the monuments will remain a lie.
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