PACKING HIGHWAY GROUP IS BAD IDEA

I don't know about you, but I am greatly concerned about the proposal of Governor Mel Carnahan and certain legislative leaders to "pack" the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission by expanding its membership from the current six to nine or 10 members. This has got to be one of the worst ideas to come along in recent Missouri history. (I like the tongue-in-cheek quip, by our columnist Jack Stapleton, who observed that if we're going in this direction, why not just give a member to each of Missouri's 114 counties, plus the City of St. Louis?)

A direct analogy can be made to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt, in 1937, to expand the U.S. Supreme Court from nine to 15 members. FDR was frustrated and annoyed by a Supreme Court that had struck down as unconstitutional many of the New Deal initiatives during his first term.

The 1936 GOP presidential nominee, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, carried only Maine and tiny Vermont against the hugely popular FDR, giving rise to the Democrats' famous taunt, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont." FDR promptly proposed what history calls the famous "court-packing" scheme. The outcry against it was so great that overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, swept in by FDR's historic victory, rejected the leader of their own party in defeating it. FDR's move was widely seen as extravagant overreaching; history books relate it as one of the major blunders of the entire, 12-year tenure in office of one of America's most brilliantly successful politicians.

For many decades now, we in Missouri have had neither Republican nor Democratic roads we have had a largely professional approach governed by a six-member commission appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. This commission hires a professional staff of engineers and other help. This has worked well, and there is no need to change it. If we do change it in the direction now being proposed, the big, big loser will be outstate Missouri.

At present, highway commissioners represent not merely their own areas, but genuinely try to represent the entire state. This is as it should be. We have already begun thoroughly politicizing highways in Missouri, by empowering the commission to issue bonds for road construction, subject to coming back to the General Assembly for approval by concurrent resolution. This bad decision was taken by a legislative majority, over my objections, during last fall's special session.

We in outstate are already on the hook for a gigantic domed stadium, and if certain urban interests have their way, we'll pony up for light rail and other mass transit projects. My interest in saying this is not to pit urban against rural interests any more than is already the case, but merely to point out that the proposal is terrible for outstate Missouri. If you want to see the end of highway construction in most of rural and small town Missouri, then this idea is the way to go. The proposal is a good candidate for Senate filibuster, to stop any chance of its ever passing.

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Welfare State Reactionaries

Listen to these words of warning from Professor Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writing in the New York Post last November 19:

"What the welfare state is saying, whether in this new `Health Security Act' or in a thousand other programs, is that we are not to be a nation of independent people controlling our own lives, but a nation of clients whose lives are controlled by bureaucrats, dispensing taxpayers' money according to the vision of the anointed.

"This is not a new idea, however much the advocates of the welfare state proclaim 'change.' Most of the history of the human race has been a history of the masses of ordinary people having their lives controlled and their destiny decided by some elite.

"It has taken centuries of struggle, agony, sacrifice and bloodshed to get out from under the thumb of those who acted as if they had been born into this world "booted and spurred, to ride mankind." Now we are turning around and heading backward, toward a world where people's fates are not in their own hands but in the hands of some puffed-up political 'leaders.'"