KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SIX HECTIC WEEKS REMAIN TO RESOLVE MAJOR LEGISLATIVE ISSUES

When we return to Jefferson City Tuesday after the Easter break, six hectic weeks will remain in the 1999 legislative session that ends May 14. Lacking space for a complete summary of all legislative activity, here are a few high points.

Partial-birth abortion:

House Bill 427 passed the House early by a lopsided, veto-proof margin and is in the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare, which defeated it on a 4-4 vote last Monday. Even before that vote, we supporters had begun working to execute a rare parliamentary maneuver known as a discharge petition. This is a petition that must be signed by no fewer than 12 senators (out of 34), demanding that the bill come out of a committee for floor debate notwithstanding that committee's vote against it, or the chairman's opposition, or both.

For Senate Republicans, this writer circulated the petition and got all but one of our 16 members to sign it. In addition, four courageous Democrats bucked their party leadership and signed the petition. So as of this week we had 19 members, or one more than a Senate majority, as signers. Democratic signers, in particular, took a major ration of intra-party grief for having the guts to sign our petition. No such discharge petition has been tried in the Missouri Senate since 1979, and its very rarity helps make it a dramatic action and hence, if successful, a more effective one.

Some time in the next couple of weeks HB 427 should hit the Senate floor, where a decisive majority of votes exists to defeat filibusters, pass it and send it to the governor's desk. Unless he changes his position, Gov. Mel Carnahan will veto it. Should he insist on doing so, then another historic veto override confrontation will loom in September, reprising the one that unfolded in 1997. Unlike that year's, this one will begin in the House, which will certainly vote to override, dramatically building pressure on senators to follow suit.

Tax cuts:

House Bill 516 has passed the House and consists of an increase in the personal exemption on your income tax from the current $1,200 to $2,100. This bill is in the Senate Ways and Means Committee, where other tax-cut proposals are being considered for floor debate by the full Senate. If there is to be significant tax relief this year, it is likely that HB 516 will be the vehicle. There is a decent chance that included in it will be tax relief for businesses and tax credits moving Missouri down the road toward parental freedom to choose your children's schools.

Tobacco:

Senate Bill 288 establishes a trust fund for Missouri's award in the tobacco litigation. It passed on to the House this week with an amendment (added by this writer on an 18-15 vote) that would bar contingent-fee ripoffs in the hundreds of millions of dollars such as the one I've gone to court to try to stop. The amendment says that outside counsel hired by the attorney general may be paid only pursuant to appropriations by the General Assembly. Senate Bill 417 is the Model Tobacco Settlement bill that all the participating states need to pass. I will seek to add the same amendment to this bill and perhaps to others, as well.

As written here before, a handful of greedy tobacco lawyers are attempting the biggest ripoff in 178 years of Missouri statehood. If they get away with it, the gun manufacturers are next, followed by the brewers and the distilled spirits industry. A battle worth fighting, win or lose.

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