KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EXCUSES ARE GONE, GIGANTIC TAX REMAINS

My first year in office was 1993. That year saw Gov. Mel Carnahan push through huge tax increases. When the dust settled in May of that year, nearly half-a-billion dollars in higher taxes had been dumped on working Missourians, without the vote of the people we had been promised short months earlier, when there was an election to be won and voters to be lied to.

Is that too harsh? Let's review the facts. Begin by recalling that in 1992, candidate Mel Carnahan had promised to push for a $200 million tax increase for education to be submitted to a public vote. Now, consider the three legs of the stool on which Mel Carnahan rested his push for the $350 million in higher taxes in Senate Bill 380, dubbed by him, in the Orwellian fashion of big governments everywhere, the Outstanding Schools Act. Leg Number One is straightforward and unremarkable: The universal push for nearly everyone in government, at all times, for money to spend. Fair enough. But what were the other two legs -- the two indispensable legs without which the stool could never stand?

Leg Number Two was the commonly heard refrain: "The judge made us do it." The claim here is that Cole County Circuit Judge Byron Kinder ordered the legislature to spend and tax more money to equalize the state's foundation formula for distributing state aid to local districts. (In January 1993, Judge Kinder had struck down this foundation formula as so unequal as to be unconstitutional.) Every Democrat who voted for Carnahan's bill, and even some among the tiny handful of Republicans who followed suit, hung their hats on this one. In this they were falling in line behind the governor, who, egged on by the liberal editorial pages of the state's largest newspapers, adopted this one almost from the instant of the court ruling.

There was the itsy, bitsy problem that a plain reading of Kinder's ruling found no such "order" anywhere inside, but no matter. When Big Government gets its engines revved up, egged on by every liberal editorial writer not playing in a rock band someplace, any fib will do. This one nicely served its purpose.

The assertion in Leg Number Two is gone, sawed off once and for all last month by Judge Kinder himself, in an interview in which the Associated Press asked him whether his ruling ordered a tax increase. "No!" the blunt-spoken judge exclaimed. "Did you see anything in there about a number? Of course I didn't say anything about a number, because that's not my (judicial) function."

Then there was Leg Number Three. Lawmakers who wanted cover for having supported Carnahan's promise to submit the whole thing to a public vote needed an out. These legislators were quite desperate, even panic-stricken, about this. They, too, had hid during their campaigns behind the pledge to take any such tax increase to a public vote. It became abundantly clear that no such package of tax increases could possibly pass without some sort of fig leaf to line up votes based on a supposed chance for the people to vote on it.

Enter Speaker Bob Griffin. Remember him? Now, Mr. Griffin is nothing if not clever. In fact, charged with felonies centering on bribery, influence peddling and so forth, on Jan. 6 he will go on trial for what might charitably be called an excess of, well, cleverness. Mr. Griffin was in his 12th year as Missouri's longest-running speaker of the House. Griffin came up with a phony, "contingent" referendum clause added to the bill at the last minute. In pertinent part, here it is: "Section C -- Contingency. Section B of this act (the tax increases) shall become effective only if the question prescribed in Section D of this act is submitted to a statewide vote and a majority of the qualified voters voting on the issue approve such question, and not otherwise.

"Section D. In the event the Supreme Court of Missouri does not affirm in whole or in part the decision in the case [decided below in Judge Kinder's court], a statewide election shall be held ... At such election the ... voters ... shall vote on the question of whether the taxes prescribed in Section B of this act shall be applied to all taxable years beginning on or after the date of such election and not otherwise. ..."

This week, a unanimous Supreme Court struck down this "contingent referendum" as bogus and unconstitutional, confirming the arguments made by those of us who saw it as such back in 1993.

Leg Number Two? Gone. Leg Number Three? Gone. Mel Carnahan's higher taxes? Here to stay, the law of this state, based on two Big Lies now exposed for all to see. I look forward to the governor's next speech on why people are cynical about their government.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communiciations and a state seantor from Cape Girardeau.