‘It forces you to be more creative’: How lobbyists kept their grip on Missouri politics
The big, fat steak dinners are gone. No more tickets to the game. Forget about resigning to quickly take a plum lobbying job.
Voters approved Clean Missouri in 2018, an amendment to the state constitution that effectively eliminated lobbyist gifts to state legislators, tightened campaign contribution limits and further restricted the revolving door of legislators turned lobbyists. It was a stunning achievement for good government advocates, who had voiced outrage for years over the excesses of the state’s cozy Capitol scene.
But as the fifth anniversary of the Clean Missouri vote approaches later this year, a strong lobbying culture remains as Jefferson City has learned to adapt.
The Star spoke with 17 current and former lawmakers, lobbyists, transparency advocates and ethics experts. They collectively painted a portrait of a Capitol where the most egregious conduct has been curbed but the grip of lobbyists and special interests remains strong.
“I don’t think the relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers has changed quite a bit to be honest, if much at all,” one current lobbyist said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I would just say that since Clean Missouri, there is less transparency in what lobbyists and lawmakers are doing — particularly lawmakers.”
For the most part, lobbyists are not eager to discuss their craft. In addition to the sources who spoke to The Star, 10 lobbyists either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed on the record.
In one illustrative example, Strategic Capitol Consulting, a lobbying firm founded by former Missouri House Speaker turned lobbyist Steve Tilley, declined an interview but in email said that “the only impact Clean Missouri has had is on small businesses in Jefferson City and it’s been for the worse - not better.”
Lobbyists may no longer pick up the check at the end of a long evening of cocktails, but restaurants near the Capitol still fill up with a who’s who of legislators, officials and lobbyists. Instead of meals or other gifts, those who want to sway legislators can instead write unlimited checks to political action committees, which have a wide leash to promote their favored candidates and lawmakers.
And lawmakers remain able to raise funds from lobbyists during session, a practice that is prohibited in Kansas.
Crucially, term limits continue to ensure that pesky legislators who won’t go along eventually depart. The entire General Assembly turns over every eight years, but lobbyists – and more importantly, the interests they represent – can hang around for decades.
And the open records requirements of Clean Missouri, which brought the General Assembly under the Missouri Sunshine Law, are still being fought over. An ongoing lawsuit risks gutting the provision and allowing legislators to once again all but ignore rules requiring them to turn over public records.
“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,” said John Hancock, a political consultant who is a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party.
“Sometimes that creativity runs up against the line of legality. And occasionally, it crosses that line of legality.”
Hancock said restrictions on lobbyists and other ethics reforms may be popular with the public, but he’s unconvinced it makes much difference. If people are unethical to begin with, laws aren’t going to change anything, he said.
“I’ve never been somebody that believes you can make someone ethical from the outside in by passing laws, putting up roadblocks. Ethics comes from the inside out,” Hancock said.
Missouri House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said Clean Missouri did not result in significant changes in the way business is conducted in Jefferson City.
While the measure banned lobbyist gifts, there are still workarounds, she said. And term limits mean that lobbyists still hold remarkable sway in the Capitol.
“I don’t feel like there’s any difference in terms of how much influence a lobbyist has on a member,” she said. “The reality of term limits makes it so that all institutional knowledge and, quite frankly, influence that comes with expertise lies with lobbyists, because they’re the only ones who’ve been here for 20 or 30 years.”
Sean Nicholson, who was the campaign manager of Clean Missouri, said the initiative was successful in eliminating an “obscene” amount of lobbyist gifts. Citing a colorful example of how things worked before the amendment was approved, Nicholson noted that carts of booze are no longer delivered to legislative offices.
“Over time, it was just a corrosive and corrupting influence and I think it’s objectively good that that part has changed,” Nicholson said.
Still, Nicholson acknowledges the General Assembly remains “weird in different ways now.”
“The lobbyist gift culture has been dramatically reduced,” Nicholson said. “There are still ways that some politicians try to get around it by using campaign funds to do stuff, but I heard from registered lobbyists from across the political spectrum and they like that politicians aren’t asking them for free stuff.”
Big money flows to PACs
When an initiative petition placed Clean Missouri on the November 2018 ballot, the vote followed years of failed efforts by some legislators to impose campaign finance and ethics reforms on themselves. At the same time, stories circulated of eye-popping gifts and campaign contributions.
Voters in 2016 reimposed campaign contribution limits after Missouri spent a decade as one of a very small number of states without limits. In the past, the state’s richest donors gave vast amounts directly to candidates.
Illustrating the kind of money flying around, St. Louis mega-donor Rex Sinquefield in 2014 made a $1 million donation to Bev Randles, a potential candidate for lieutenant governor. At the time, it was considered the largest single donation to a candidate in state history.
Those kinds of massive contributions to candidates are no longer allowed. While voters have approved various limits in recent years, in 2020, they set a cap of $2,400 per contributor per election for each state Senate candidate and $2,000 for each state representative candidate.
Far from taking money out of politics, the past six years of contribution limits have instead funneled money around campaigns and into political action committees, which often operate as the political arms of major business groups, trade associations and other special interests that regularly lobby legislators and state officials. PACs can accept unlimited donations and a federal court order also allows PACs to contribute to other PACs.
Companies and organizations that have registered lobbyists often also donate large sums to PACs. For example, the health care company Centene last year wrote checks totaling $120,000 to PACs that aid state legislators in both parties. The company also has 14 lobbyists currently registered to work on its behalf. Centene’s subsidiary, Home State Health, contracts with Missouri to provide managed care services, including for the state’s Medicaid expansion population, and health services for children in foster care. Its contract was renewed last year.
While PACs can’t be controlled by a candidate, the committees are allowed to support or oppose ballot measures and candidates. They can also exist beyond a single election cycle, allowing them to amass large war chests they can reach into when the right candidate or issue comes along. Dark money groups are also active in Missouri elections, but unlike PACs don’t have to disclose donors.
In just a few years, PACs have become the primary vehicles by which corporations, advocacy groups and other special interests boost legislators and other officials.
“You can have unlimited amounts of campaign dollars going to a PAC and so that’s what we see now is they just go to PACs,” said Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican.
“And so you have less transparency with those,” Patterson said, “because they’re independent, whereas before if someone wanted to give a campaign committee $25,000 directly to that campaign committee — it is what it is — but at least you knew who it came from and where it was going to.”
Now that the big money flows to PACs, candidates and their campaigns have more difficulty driving their message. Jonathan Ratliff, a political consultant and former political director for the Missouri House Republican Campaign Committee, described the outsize role of PACs as an unintended but unfortunate consequence of recent reforms.
“They’ve given a greater voice to PACs and less of a voice to candidates, which I think does a disservice to Missouri voters,” Ratliff said.
Missouri term limits despised
Adding to fears about outside influence in politics is the fact that lobbyists are allowed to stick around the Capitol building much longer than lawmakers. Missouri’s strict term limits, approved by voters in 1992, cap legislators at eight years in the House and eight years in the Senate.
Supporters say this arrangement allows fresh voices to get a seat at the table. In theory, term limits require the Missouri General Assembly to evolve with the citizens of the state.
But many lawmakers, political consultants and others argue it creates an atmosphere where lobbyists and outside groups are more knowledgeable about issues than the lawmakers actually passing laws.
Term limits can also encourage a revolving door of lawmakers turned lobbyists by ensuring constant new classes of ex-lawmakers. Clean Missouri cracked down on but didn’t entirely eliminate the phenomenon.
The amendment requires legislators to wait two years after leaving office before lobbying. They previously only had to wait six months – allowing an individual to serve as a lawmaker one session and lobby their former colleagues the next.
“The motivating factor for lobbyists is to gain access to lawmakers and I don’t think anything has changed in the last decade that alters that relationship or makes it less likely that lobbyists will be able to get time and access to lawmakers to any less degree than they would have before,” said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Quade, the House minority leader, recalled the first bill she ever filed — legislation in 2017 that would mitigate the child care “cliff effect,” where state financial assistance is cut off after a person gets an increase in income, such as a pay raise.
After months of research and meetings with staff, Quade said she eventually learned from a lobbyist that there was already a state program — called the Hand-up Program — that attempted to address what she was trying to fix but the program was largely ineffective and needed to be updated.
“The way that we got the bill passed that I was working on was actually going back to that law and just adjusting what had already been done,” she said. “If I hadn’t just happened to run into that lobbyist who was working on that issue all those years before I got here, we would have never found the solution. Term limits take away that institutional knowledge.”
Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, said the good that came from Clean Missouri hasn’t offset the problems with term limits.
“The biggest issue is that you have a transient legislature who by the time they figure out how to work through an issue are being pushed out the door,” he said. “You show me another $40 billion company that has a new CFO every two years.”
Rizzo compared the knowledge and experience between lawmakers and lobbyists to a rookie quarterback competing against Tom Brady. He said this allows lobbyists to be extremely influential in the building.
“These people have been there,” he said. “They know the rounds. They know the ins and outs and how it works. They have the history.”
Andy Arnold, who’s worked as a lobbyist in Jefferson City since the early 1990s, pushed back on the argument that term limits give more power to lobbyists. While he considers himself “one of the old guys in the building,” the revolving door of lawmakers means that lobbyists have to constantly catch new lawmakers up to speed on issues.
“I guess I can see how people think that, but I just don’t agree with that,” Arnold said. “I feel like I’m trying to educate somebody every year. Every two years, I’ve got a new group of people to educate.”
Gift ban improved perception of lobbyists
The culture in Jefferson City is certainly different nowadays, said Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, a Columbia Republican. He said during his first few years in office, lawmakers ate lobbyist-funded meals during committee hearings.
However, Rowden said he does not think those lobbyist-funded meals swayed votes often.
“Is the perception better? Yeah, probably. Do we talk about that stuff less? Yes, which I think is probably a good thing,” Rowden said. “We get to talk about stuff that matters and not lobbyist-paid meals.”
But Missouri lawmakers are still trying to chip away at a key element of Clean Missouri. The voter-approved constitutional amendment made it clear that lawmakers had to adhere to the state’s Sunshine Law, which protects citizens’ rights to access public records and meetings and turns 50 years old this year.
The change gave the public more insight into lawmaker emails – including their communications with lobbyists.
While government transparency advocates have called for lawmakers to increase the scope of the state’s open records laws, the only real push among lawmakers has been to exclude certain documents and communications from public view. A major bill this year to restrict access to records has so far not received a floor vote, however.
Even without changing the Sunshine Law, Missouri courts may still empower lawmakers to sidestep the Clean Missouri requirements. In January, Cole County Judge Jon Beetem sided with the Missouri House in a lawsuit over access to legislative records, allowing lawmakers to keep some documents confidential.
Beetem ruled that the Sunshine Law allows some records to be protected, and only gives access to open and public records. A House rule that allows lawmakers to withhold correspondence with constituents and documents about caucus strategy doesn’t violate the Missouri Constitution, he found.
The decision is under appeal and could ultimately be decided by the Missouri Supreme Court.
“One of the intentional choices that the coalition made in crafting the language was to say that the legislature needs to follow the same Sunshine Law that everyone else does…we’ve seen resistance to that,” said Nicholson, the Clean Missouri campaign manager.
“I think a lot of good things were accomplished in spite of the legislature’s attempt to roll back some of that,” Nicholson said. “And I think reformers and citizens are going to have to keep working because these aren’t partisan problems. These are people-in-power problems.”
