June 1, 2009 08:30 AM
On Friday, May 29,
Representative Jason Kander left for three weeks of training with the Army National Guard. The morning before, he spent about
40 minutes talking with The Missouri Record about his first session in the legislature and the issues that shaped
it, why he decided to run for office, and his advice for would-be candidates. Parts 1 and 2 of the interview appear below.
Part 1 of 2: The Tyranny of the Majority
The Missouri Record: Thanks again for your time this morning.
Rep. Jason Kander (D-44): No problem.
So you are to deploy soon?
Well, deploy is a strong term. I report tomorrow for three weeks of training in South Dakota. I’m a Platoon Trainer for officer candidates in the Army National Guard. So I go up to South Dakota and I will wear a black cap and scream at a lot of guys who want to become officers.
Were you an attorney before you ran for office?
Yeah. I graduated from law school in 2005.
What type of law do you practice?
I do mostly plaintiff’s work, pretty much exclusively litigation. My law firm is just myself and three other lawyers. We now represent Fraternal Order of Police in Kansas City. So as a result we do some union negotiation work.
Why did you decide to run for State Representative?
I always had a very serious interest in political affairs and public service. While I was overseas I saw the direct consequences of policy decisions and saw the outcome of politics. For instance, [there were] missions where we should have had helicopters but the helicopters were in Iraq. The decision of whether to go to Iraq was in some ways politically driven and definitely affected my mission in Afghanistan. I came home and looked at a similar process at the state level on health care, education and environmental policy. And so I decided to become a part of the solution.
I am interested in how one concludes that he alone is the best person to serve in the State House. How did you come to that conclusion?
I don't know. Good question. I suppose just like anyone else who applies for a job, especially if you know the other applicant. At some point it comes down to confidence in your abilities and I felt confident that my background and my philosophy fit the district.
Tell me about that background.
I suppose that the greatest influence on me in terms of my professional background and my political philosophy is probably my time in the military. It is a defining experience in a lot of ways. I tend to be someone who takes very seriously the idea of carrying through on promises. If you ask anybody on my staff, I am sure that they’d say I am fair but at the same time people understand that if they tell me they are going to do something I expect them to do it.
For instance, one of the big motivating factors from a policy perspective for me was the state Medicaid cuts in 2005. I view that in many ways the same as a lot of Democrats: I believe in the idea of extending health care to people who are working and aren’t making enough to provide it for themselves. I believe in trying to help them reach their potential. As a military person I feel like we made a promise to those people that if they worked and they had a job and they were trying to do the right thing that we would give them some support. I feel like [the previous legislature] broke that promise.
Describe your political philosophy.
I’m not sure. I’m not real good with labels. I see myself as progressive but I don’t see myself as extreme.
Does anyone ever see themselves as extreme?
I’ve seen some people in the State House who will definitely say, “Yeah, I’m pretty far out there,” and they are proud of it. I am center-left and then the question is how far off the center am I? I don’t really feel like I am very far off the center at all. But you make a good point. Who ever really knows?
What was your biggest surprise about your first session in Jefferson City?
My biggest surprise was the way in which the House Republican bosses really didn’t represent what I consider to be the Republican Party. I know that I am probably the last person that the Republicans would like to see defining what is Republican. The Senate Republicans charted a pretty mainstream—and in many ways conservative—course. But the House Republicans were unwilling to accept it. So my biggest surprise was the way that House Republicans became a roadblock to progress, even progress pushed by Senate Republicans.
Do you think you would be more comfortable serving in the Senate?
No, I don’t. I would be really comfortable serving in the House and the majority.
What was the most important thing you learned this session?
The most important thing I learned is that it is extremely important to speak up for your district even when you don’t have the votes. Even when we don’t have the votes to win on an issue, it is important that my district—the people who feel the way that I feel--be heard. That may move the debate around next time and it may matter in future years. Though I may not always have the numbers to win on an issue in the House, I do have the ability to change that debate when it goes to the Senate.
There was some criticism of the Kansas City delegation for failing to bring transit funding to the city. Do you agree with that?
Well, I think that there has not been a full understanding [of the issue as a result of] the way that it has been reported in the media. What a lot of folks are forgetting was that it had been turned into a stimulus bill and it was intended to be a stabilization bill. Those are two very different things.
Of the $4.4 billion that was sent by Congress, about half was supposed to be for stimulus and we passed a bill—House Bill 21—that was a $2.6 billion stimulus bill. [Those funds] went all over the state including Kansas City, I believe, but that really wasn’t controversial. What was controversial was regarding the money left over—about $2 billion—that was supposed to last two years for stabilizing the state budget. After we used about $900 billion in the operating budget, the Republican Budget Chairman [Rep. Allen Icet] introduced a bill that used stabilization dollars for stimulus purposes. With the bad revenue situation that we have, this would have put us in a worse situation next year—possibly having to cut very vital state functions in order to balance the budget. I cannot speak for other members of the delegation, but for me personally I felt like that was using stabilization dollars for a stimulus purpose. I voted against the bill and that’s because I don’t want to build a building in Kansas City this year and next year cut health care or cut education across the state, including in Kansas City. That was really the choice that a lot of us were facing and that has not really been given the proper amount of attention.
Where did you get your undergraduate degree?
American University [in Washington, DC].
You were a political science major I’m guessing?
Yes.
So you must have had plenty of preconceived notions about the legislature. Were any of them challenged once you served?
Oh, yeah. I mean the funny thing is that people ask me, “Is it what you expected?” You know what? I don’t even remember what I expected. I have learned so much that I’m not sure I remember what my expectations actually were.
I am really lucky that my minority leader chose to put me on the Budget Committee as a freshman because I learned an incredible amount about the nuts and bolts of state government. So as far as whether my preconceived notions were challenged—I think the biggest thing that was a surprise really was the tyranny with which the majority can rule the House of Representatives.
In order to offer an amendment to a bill, for instance, it has to have something to do with the bill. However, if Republicans are not interested in having a public vote on a bill—say if it will harm them politically—then they will simply come up with an arbitrary way to rule the amendment out of order. Conversely, a Republican could offer an amendment that is clearly far out of order and [Republican leadership] will support the amendment in order to get it into the bill. So I guess that is not something I expected—and that has less to do with my Political Science degree and more to do with my Law degree. Sometimes I felt that the Republican Speaker Pro Tem [Bryan Pratt]—ironically—was legislating from the bench and behaving quite a bit like an activist [judge].
How often were you told by your leadership to vote a certain way?
In the Democratic caucus that happens almost never.
Even on administrative votes?
Well, on a procedural vote, sure. They never had to tell me. I understand that on a procedural vote you stick up for your caucus. That’s how as a minority you’ve got to assert your influence. On issues we are a pretty big tent in there and so there is not a lot of pressure as to how to vote.
Now with that said we have an awful lot of votes, and I’m not an expert on every one, but I will often go to people within our caucus, sometimes Republicans as well, who I consider to be more of an expert on an issue and I will ask for their advice.
Who are some of those people that you look to for advice?
On education policies, I look to Rep. Sara Lampe from Springfield who was an educator for a very long time. [I turn to] Rep. Rebecca McClanahan, she’s a nurse and I would often ask her to help me with health care issues. So those would be two pretty good examples. Rep. Jason Holsman from the 45th District is the ranking member on Energy and Environment and I will frequently get his opinion on energy bills.
You talked about how one of your surprises was that the Republican leadership does not represent Republican values. What are the signs voters should look for that indicate that a representative is no longer working in their best interest?
Boy that is a tough question. I can only look at this session. The health care proposal from the Governor, which was endorsed by the Missouri business community, it was endorsed by the Missouri Hospital Association. These are traditionally conservative groups. To me it was in many ways a conservative idea. It was, “Let’s go ahead and provide health care to the working poor, some of the working poor, but let’s do it without any increase in tax dollars, any increase in taxes on Missourians.” That was a basically conservative idea and just a really good government approach, and I believe the House Republicans in the end, with the exception of four of them, opposed that because they didn’t want a Democratic Governor to get credit for doing it.
Do you advocate then that constituents look to special interest groups for a sense of whether their representative is doing a good job?
No, not necessarily. [Voters] need to look at the policies that their representative is voting on. They can look at it and say, “Well, boy! This idea sure makes a lot of sense. Why did my representative vote against it?” When you get an answer, if you don’t think that answer makes any sense at all [vote them out]. It’s one thing if you just flat out disagree with them. That happens all the time. I have constituents who don’t agree with me in terms of my political philosophy but I hope those who don’t agree with me are able to walk away and know that I am being candid in my views. I’m not accusing the Republicans of that but I’m saying that I did have conversations with some of them where they would say, “Look! I know how things are on this and I really would love to vote for this but I am sure getting an awful lot of pressure from the Republican leadership—the Speaker and the Majority Leader and people like that—and so I don’t think that I will be able to be there.” Well, to me that is not what they were sent there to do.
Help me bring these two ideas together. On the one hand you’re saying that on an issue like health care that you should judge your representative based on how well they represent your views. On the other hand, you talked earlier about Kansas City and said that you voted perhaps against Kansas City’s immediate interests for what you perceived to be state-wide long-term interest. As a constituent, how do I weigh those two things?
Let me clarify that a little. I wouldn’t say that I voted against Kansas City’s interest because in the Budget Committee when the amendment was proposed to put, for instance, KCATA into the budget, I voted for that. I was against the 98% of that bill that had nothing to do with Kansas City.
The version that originally passed out of the Budget Committee contained some stuff for Kansas City and I was one of the people that worked to get it in there. But I didn’t think the state should spend so much money this year when we needed to save it for next. But [if that approach was going to win] I certainly wanted Kansas City to get something from that. So it is a little more nuanced an approach than [what you describe]. But going back to your question: does that contradict what I am saying about Republicans? Is that what you are asking?
You seem to be granting yourself a lot more leeway in your vote than you are granting the Republicans.
No, I am saying that in my conversations with some of the Republicans, I feel like they didn’t vote the way that they really believed was good. And that is different. I don’t know how a constituent necessarily makes that determination; that is a difficult determination to make. The difference is that I am saying I will give an accurate answer to a constituent. They may disagree with me but I hope that they know that I am telling them exactly what I thought about it. Whereas I feel like there are people who made some votes for purely political reasons and they probably will not return to their district and explain that they made the vote for a political reason.
And that is not what you do when you vote with your caucus on procedural votes?
Well nine times out of ten procedural votes don’t affect policy. What they affect is whether or not we go onto another bill. A previous question vote just means we end debate and move on to the next thing. If my party wants to keep saying what we think on an issue, I am going to vote to make sure we get to keep making our argument. I don’t think that is the same thing at all.
You talked about this a little bit earlier but let me ask straight out, how does a freshman member of a minority party have—or plan to have—legislative successes in the House?
You’ve got to be pretty creative. There are three or four things that I count as legislative successes this session and I got all of them in very different ways. You’ve got to have some different approaches.
For instance, my military families bill, I got that through by just really working with the Veterans Committee and trying to develop a good relationship with the Chairman and with the carrier of the bill, both were Republicans. On that one I would say that I picked an issue where people consider me to have, even as a freshman, credibility and to know something about it. So I picked something that I felt I could have backed, and something that is generally less partisan.
Another one would be the money that is now in the state budget for low income children with cancer to receive health care coverage. That was something where I posed a question that is politically difficult to answer no to. I said let’s pay a little bit higher premiums for our own [State Legislature] health insurance and in return give health care to children with cancer. I created something where I felt like even people who disagreed with the idea of giving health care to those kids would find it difficult politically to oppose that.
Then on the Budget Committee I worked to get a prosecution program for domestic violence restored. I just tried to make the best argument. Committees sometimes are the best place to get things done because you build closer relationships with the people on the committee. You are able to make more of an argument.
You wrote in an email to constituents that Senate Republicans make laws and House Republicans make news. What does that mean?
Well, I’ll give you an example. Representative [and Speaker Pro Tem] Bryan Pratt is running for the State Senate and probably in his district offering $1 billion reduction in taxes is a pretty good political move. But it is not a good policy for the state. The Speaker of the House [Ron Richards] went on Fox News and said, “You know, it’s not even legal to do this with stabilization dollars but we want,” now I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “we want to keep the majority in the State House so we are going to go ahead and do this because it is good stuff, good politics.” The Senate Republicans basically dismissed it out of hand before they even proposed it. I mean they pretty much laughed at it and just said, “No. That is silly. We are not going to do that.”
[House Republicans] understood it was just political and they knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere in the Senate. Three weeks before, the Majority Leader in the House [Steven Tilley] said that any House bill that had not passed by the end of that week had no shot of becoming law. But we still had this huge debate over it and they got all of these headlines out of it because what they really wanted were the headlines. To my knowledge, it never even came to the floor of the Senate.
Representative Pratt got up and offered another amendment to make the tax cut permanent. So it wasn’t just using our stabilization dollars, it would be a permanent slash of a half billion dollars out of the state budget. Now if he didn’t already know that it was never going to become law when he started, he definitely knew that making it permanent would keep it from ever becoming law. But it is good politics, I guess.
So House members are free to put up symbolic issues because there is less threat that it will actually become law?
I don't know if I’d say that. I guess I would just say that I am sometimes frustrated by the way that we adopt symbolic measures in government. Sometimes symbolism is necessary but at a time like this when we have over 200,000 Missourians who are out of work and we have the potential to put 35,000 people back [to work] and give them active health care again, we’re having what is essentially an exhibition game debate in the House about a $1 billion tax cut.
If you could change one thing about the legislature, what would it be, assuming you cannot change party leadership?
That changes my answer. If I could change one thing, I would like to see—and maybe this is violating your exclusion there—but I would like to see more bipartisan cooperation. We have pretty close numbers in the House; 89 Republicans to 74 Democrats. So there should probably be some Democratic committee chairmen. There should probably be some more deference to the minority—and I would say this regardless of which party was in charge—but a little bit more deference to ideas from the minority.
For instance, I think something like eleven Democratic bills passed this year out of 160 or whatever. Now I’m not sure if that number is exactly right but I remember that while Democrats have 46% of the seats in the House, only about 10% of the bills referred to committee were Democratic. So I would like to see the current people in charge show a little more deference to the actual will of the state.
Do you think the state legislature could draw lessons on that from the US Congress?
I don't know because I am not an expert in what Congress does. So I can’t really say whether they have something to model or not. I don’t pretend to really know that system well enough.
Where would you like to be in five or ten years?
Oh, I don't know. I’d like to think I’m doing a really good job as state representative. With term limits I guess I won’t be able to do that in ten but I don't know. You mentioned earlier being a political science major and like any other nerdy political kids at American University, I thought, “Well, I could run for this and I could run for that,” and then I actually ran for office and I saw how incredibly difficult it is. I learned very quickly that if you are fortunate enough to be elected to the position you seek that you better just concentrate on doing a really good job at that. If you are ever going to ask people to give you a promotion they are going to wonder about whether you did a good job before. So that really is my focus.
You wrote on your Twitter account, “If you like George Bush, you’d love the Missouri House Republicans.” What does that mean?
I actually wrote that during the debate over whether or not to create that permanent $1 billion tax cut and I just viewed it as a very Bush-era inspired tax cut.
You know, Missouri voted for Bush twice and for McCain, and in 2008 the Republicans picked up seats in the State Senate. Are you concerned about being out of touch with statewide voters?
No, because they also elected Jay Nixon governor by a 19 point margin. They voted for Democratic state representative candidates with 100,000 more votes than Republican ones in the last election. Unfortunately, there are places where the map is drawn in ways that are not advantageous to Democrats. If you look at the election that last time, voters narrowly supported McCain but Bush’s approval rating before the election was pretty low. There were an awful lot of people voting for John McCain in spite of George W. Bush.
So do you think there is a silent majority of Democrats in Missouri?
I do. And I don’t think they are silent. I mean they voted for Jay Nixon with a huge margin. I think they voted for [Treasurer] Clint Zweifel with a huge margin and [Secretary of State] Robin Carnahan and [Attorney General] Chris Koster. Robin Carnahan is poised to become a US Senator in 2010. When that happens, assuming [Auditor] Susan Montee gets re-elected, Missouri will then have only one Republican statewide office holder in [Lieutenant Governor] Peter Kinder.
So then it’s the votes for state legislature that are the anomaly?
Yeah. If you look at what the Governor did, the Governor campaigned on a few things. The Governor campaigned on economic development, health care and higher education. These were his top three. He got a great higher education compromise done, he had a great proposal on health care and he had a really good jobs plan.
The Republicans went along with his jobs plan, which I give them credit for. I think we did a really good bipartisan thing on the jobs plan, and that was one of the things that I felt really good about this session. On higher education [the Republicans] pretty well went along on that and I give credit to that. Then finally on health care they completely blocked it. Those are the three issues that the Governor campaigned on and one of them, which was a major issue, they completely blocked. So I would argue that they are out of step of what people want.
What is your advice for people that are considering running for office?
Well, one, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons and, two, make sure that your family is on board with the idea. Those are the top two.
In terms of how to go about actually winning an election, make it personal. Get to know as many people as you can and knock on a lot of doors. Don’t knock on the doors with the intention of getting votes. Knock on doors with the intention of making friends. That is what I did. I tried to make as many friends as I could and in order to make friends you’ve got to spend time with people. If you really truly care what people have to say and you believe, as I do, that behind every door is a person with a unique story and it is interesting to learn those stories, they will make you a better legislator. You just make a lot of friends. On Election Day, all your friends go out to vote for you and you win.
Easy.
It’s easy.
And to think you wasted four years in political science class.
I know. Right?
Of course. But the House Republicans were unwilling to accept it. So my biggest surprise was the way that House Republicans became a roadblock to progress, even progress pushed by Senate Republicans.
