The Missouri Senate should debate Majority Leader Ron Richard's ethics bill this week - perhaps as early as today.
"There's enough nonsense in this building going on - not necessarily with meals - and I'm going to try to clear this up before somebody's indicted," Richard, R-Joplin, told reporters last week.
The Senate's Rules, Joint Rules, Resolutions and Ethics Committee - which Richard chairs - passed a committee substitute last week with a recommendation that the full Senate pass it.
The measure proposes a number of changes to current state law, including:
• Barring Missouri lawmakers, and candidates for the General Assembly, from acting as paid political consultants for a candidate for state representative or state senator, or for the candidate's committee.
• Adding any school district superintendent or school board members to the definition of "public official," and modifying the definition of "elected local government official lobbyist" to include individuals who are employed specifically to attempt to influence an action by an elected school district official.
• Requiring a two-year "cooling-off" after a lawmaker leaves the Legislature, before that lawmaker could become a lobbyist - but only for members who begin their first term in January 2017, so it wouldn't impact any current General Assembly member.
"When we get to 2016, people are going to have a choice to make - if they want to go lobby, then go lobby," Richard explained. "If they want to be a state rep or a senator, be a state rep or a senator."
Federal law already contains one- or two-year restrictions (depending on the job currently or recently held) on U.S. representatives, senators, their staff members, Cabinet officials and senior staffers in a president's administration and on some executive and legislative branch employees.
And some kind of cooling-off period also is included in some of the initiative petition proposals that have been submitted to Secretary of State Jason Kander's office for a possible statewide vote next year.
Some lawmakers and interest groups especially have been perturbed that former House Speakers Rod Jetton, R-Marble Hill, and Steve Tilley, R-Perryville, were being paid as political consultants while still working as the chief House official.
But state Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles, isn't sure he likes the restriction in Richard's proposal.
"I don't like the section that would bar a legislator, or a term-limited legislator - someone who can no longer serve - from being able to continue to work for the interests that they pursued while they were in the Legislature," he said Monday night.
Dempsey also told reporters last week: "There's a number of good people who work here, who have dedicated themselves and a great part of their lives to public service - and are going to be barred from seeking future legislative office at the state level who, I think, still have a passion.
"They have to find other means to support the things that they care about. And I don't see anything unreasonable about that."
Dempsey said, in spite of public opinion, lobbyists at the Capitol play a very important role.
He noted the work of lobbyists for the American Cancer Society and other "very worthy organizations."
"It helps to have someone to talk to, in addition to the things that you're reading, or the research that you may do," Dempsey explained. "Your job as a legislator is to go get the full story - not just listen to one side, but to go listen to folks on the other side of the issue.
"And some issues have more than two sides."
Still, Dempsey said, his unhappiness with those restrictions doesn't mean he won't support the bill, or vote for it, if they stay in the proposed law.
Richard also acknowledged that a number of people think any ethics law must restore campaign finance limits that lawmakers dropped in 2008. But he'll oppose any effort to add them to his bill.
"If they want to do it, have them get a signature petition and send it to a vote of the people - and let them decide," he said.