Missouri doesn’t rein in lobbyists. Is it time for voters to demand change once again? | Opinion

Because Missouri lawmakers sometimes fail to pass laws the public wants, the people occasionally take things into their own hands and use a petition system to change the state constitution to achieve the desired goal.

That’s what happened in 2018 when voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment called Clean Missouri. The primary idea was to stop lobbyists from buying lawmakers by loading them down with gifts. The amendment also included other changes to try to assure that legislators do what the voters want even if that goal conflicts with what special interests want.

What we know five years later is that a few things have changed for the better in Jefferson City because of Clean Missouri. However, we also know that the initiative hasn’t changed the underlying system that allows lobbyists to have ready access to — and influence over — lawmakers. The result is that lobbyists in the capitol still have considerable power to make sure laws they want are passed and ones they don’t want die aborning.

In a recent report on the results of Clean Missouri five years after its adoption, The Star’s Jonathan Shorman and Kacen Bayless included this telling quote from John Hancock, a political consultant and former chair of the Missouri Republican Party:

“Whatever the ethics reform is, campaign finance, you pick it — all it does is it forces you to be more creative to do the stuff you want to do. Sometimes that creativity runs up against the line of legality. And occasionally, it crosses that line of legality.”

Clearly, the backers of Clean Missouri did not intend for Hancock’s forthright description to reflect reality today. Nor did they want lawmakers to work hard to avoid the amendment’s requirement that they adhere to the Missouri Sunshine Law, which gives residents of the state access to public records and meetings. But that’s exactly what The Star’s report said is happening.

It’s obviously time for legislators to fix the failings of Clean Missouri. If that doesn’t happen, it may be time for another petition initiative.

Missouri, of course, is not the only state with laws and rules about lobbyists and the influence they can exert. Every state makes at least some attempt at that. In fact, a national, independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit watchdog group called Open Secrets tracks all of that in considerable detail.

For instance, Open Secrets gives an overall ranking for how well the states do in controlling unethical lobbying and making sure the public can be heard above the lobbyists. A top score on its lobbying disclosure quality scale is 20. As of late June 2022, the state of Washington had the best ranking at 19. Missouri, by contrast, came in at just 11.75. Kansas was even worse with a score of 9.5. At the bottom of the list was North Dakota, with an embarrassing 6.

Those numbers are a composite of scores for various aspects of lobbying disclosure. The only category in which Missouri got a top score of 5 was for “timely disclosure.” (In that area, Kansas got a 4.)

One of the questions raised by the several failures of Clean Missouri is whether it’s time to look at the question of term limits for lawmakers. As The Star’s report noted: “The entire General Assembly turns over every eight years, but lobbyists — and more importantly, the interests they represent — can hang around for decades.”

What’s called “institutional memory” is thus often lacking among legislators, who must spend a lot of time when they first arrive learning how things work and understanding the history of the issues they want to work on. So it’s fair to ask whether the benefits of term limits exceed the drawback of having a regular turnover of lawmakers coupled with the long-term presence of lobbyists.

Although the Clean Missouri reforms have helped make the legislative process a little less grimy, state lawmaking so far is nowhere close to ethically pure.