Thursday was surreal. Just before noon, rumors swirled that Auditor Tom Schweich had been shot and was in the hospital. Not long after, the Senate and House adjourned. At 1:30, we re-convened for a prayer service.
Schweich was a detail-oriented lawyer with a flair for the dramatic. From 1999 to 2008, he served government in a series of low-profile but highly important jobs. He helped former Sen. Jack Danforth lead investigations into Waco. He was chief of staff to three U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations. He was a Deputy Assistant to the real Secretary of State. And, he was an ambassador to Afghanistan charged with fighting opium production and helping set up a judicial system that respected the rule of law. In his spare time, he wrote three books.
State Auditor was not Tom Schweich's goal. Look at that resume again. He worked to clean up the Star Wars bar that doubles as the United Nations - and fought opium-producing war-lords in Afghanistan. Most people with that resume would turn to international "consulting" and make millions of dollars. Not Schweich. I'd dare say Tom Schweich was the most qualified state auditor in the history not just of Missouri, but our country. Schweich loved to cite the fact that he'd caught over 30 public officials in Missouri embezzling money. They were easy compared to Afghanistan or the UN.
Schweich did not set out to be state auditor. He first wanted to be a United States senator. It was only after that plan was thwarted that he settled for auditor. A lesser person may have run on auto-pilot until the election for the job they were really seeking. Not Tom Schweich. From his actions, it was obvious that he believed, whatever you do, do it well, and put everything you've got into it.
It was obvious to anyone who ever saw Schweich operate in the Capitol or speak on the stump that he longed and loved to be Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena." And was he ever. Schweich's willingness to fight did not always make him popular in the Capitol. To put it mildly, he could be a little prickly. In retrospect, it's also what made him great at every professional endeavor he tried.
Generally, people like their politicians to be gregarious. And good politicians and policy-makers like their staff members to be bulldogs. Often, the most successful politicians are those who persuade with sugar. They can convince others to do things they don't really want to do, but find a way to rationalize it. Tom Schweich never made that transition.
I will keep two memories of Schweich. The first is a perfect example of his bulldog-style that served him well and poorly. In the spring of 2012, Tom hitched a short ride with me returning to the Capitol from an event in Jefferson City. We had a disagreement over a relatively minor policy issue, and he wanted to talk about it. We started talking and it was clear that neither of us was going to budge. The closed-car meeting did not end well for either of us. He was now viscerally angry and I was as dug-in as ever.
The second memory is personal. Last spring, Auditor Schweich invited me and two other representatives to lunch in his office at the Capitol. I had never spent time with him that did not involve either a formal meeting about public policy or was at a political event with dozens or hundreds of other people. I was looking forward to it, but, based on previous interactions, did not expect to have a great time.
I could not have been more wrong. With no policy and no politicking, we saw a side of Tom Schweich that the public never saw. He was warm, affable, and hilarious. I left the room with a completely different view of him. Behind the public persona was a real person who was interesting and genuinely interested in others. That was the Tom Schweich I'm sure his family knew and loved.
Today, it appears it was all too much. Missouri has lost a true public servant in tragic circumstances. It still has not quite sunk in. The facts surrounding his death are incomprehensible to me. I cannot imagine the loss felt by his family. My prayers are with them and his soul. Rest in peace, Tom Schweich.
Defending your right to medical privacy
To what extent should government invade the privacy of law-abiding Missourians to protect drug abusers from themselves? That's the question at the heart of House Bill 130, which creates a statewide prescription drug database program to monitor nearly every prescription drug purchase made in Missouri. This database would be accessible to state public health officials, pharmacists, doctors, pharmacies, and, in some circumstances, law enforcement. I voted no for both technical and philosophical reasons.
First, the technical problems: the bill as currently drafted would permit big-box store pharmacies to use the prescription drug database for their internal marketing purposes. I know this is not the sponsor's intent or the bill's other supporters and hope they close this loophole before the bill progresses.
The bill also would allow the Department of Health and Senior Services to share the contents of the database with third-parties for "research" after it "anonymizes" the data. That sounds good in theory. In reality, once a dataset reaches a certain level, "anonymous" data doesn't exist. For example, in a study published this month in Science, an MIT scientist demonstrated how to reverse-engineer credit card databases to identify individual purchasers even after all personally-identifiable information had been removed from the database.
More important than these technical concerns, I voted no because the bill would invade the privacy rights of millions of Missourians who have done nothing wrong.
Prescription drug abuse is an epidemic. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more Americans report non-medical use of prescription drugs than those who use cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, and inhalants combined. When the House debated the bill this week, we heard several tragic stories from legislators about family members, friends, or constituents who had become addicted to prescription pain-killers. My heart goes out to those affected by drug abuse. That's why I've worked to increase drug courts for veterans and to expand access to health care for substance abusers.
But House Bill 130 takes the wrong approach. Anti-drug programs should be focused on drug abusers, and not cast a dragnet on all of society. No matter how serious prescription drug abuse is, we cannot justifiably ransack the medicine cabinets of everyone to protect the relatively tiny minority who abuse prescription drugs. The 99.9 percent of Missourians who have committed no crime, are not addicted to drugs, and are merely following doctor's orders in treatment of a painful medical condition, should not have their medical records tracked by government.
Some proponents of House Bill 130 belittled these privacy concerns, arguing that we had a moral imperative to take sweeping governmental action to protect Missourians addicted to drugs from themselves. I disagree. As I've written previously in this space, the right to privacy is central to the American identity. Unlike other countries, ours has always recognized that there are certain realms into which the government has no rightful authority to intrude. This is one of those areas. Government should not track or monitor our reading, traveling, sleeping, thinking, or writing. Nor should it track the list of legal medications we purchase at a pharmacy to treat health ailments.
Other proponents argued that, under this bill, Missourians would grow to have a reasonable understanding that their prescriptions for painkillers were not private, but instead would be shared with medical providers and government. This argument, however, says nothing about the justice of requiring Missourians to have their medical information shared with government officials without their explicit individual consent. You shouldn't have to agree to send the government information just to get medical treatment paid for with your own money.
Finally, some proponents argued that, essentially, privacy is already dead, so at least this bill would help save some lives by protecting Missourians from themselves. I reject this logic as well. Privacy is only as dead as Americans and their elected officials will allow.
There's no doubt that new technologies have changed Americans' thoughts on privacy. With the Big Data revolution, things that were unthinkable 10 years ago are routine today. Business and government have the ability to track your daily movements, thoughts, and plans from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. Your data is bought and sold by hundreds of companies (large and small) that you've never heard of. In most cases, your data is only collected if you've given your tacit or explicit consent.
The data revolution has been incremental. In many ways, Americans are like frogs sitting in the proverbial pot. Over the past decade, Big Data companies and government have slowly been using new technologies to turn up the heat. However, when given an actual choice, Missourians (and Americans) chose to jump out of the pot. Last year, 75 percent of Missourians voted to extend Fourth Amendment privacy protections to electronic communications. Still, there remain dozens of hands on the knob - and I refuse to join those who would turn up the heat.
State Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, represents Missouri's 60th District.