GOP SPLIT COULD DOOM TAX-CREDIT PROPOSAL
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - JO MANNIES [4/20/2006]

"St. Louis lawyer Ed Martin figures that his side has only another week or so before time will run out and it'll have to regroup for 2007.

Besides chairing the city Election Board, Martin is state coordinator for the Alliance for School Choice. The alliance is one of the supporters for a bill before the Missouri Legislature that would set up a pilot private school tax-credit program for students in the St. Louis, Kansas City and Wellston school districts.

The measure -- which now calls for about $40 million in state tax credits for student scholarships -- may hit the state House floor within the next few days. But even supporters concede that they don't yet have the necessary 82 votes to get it passed.

State House Speaker Pro Tem Carl Bearden, R-St. Charles, who is one of the sponsors, says that it's unclear if enough changes can be made to make the bill palatable to enough additional legislators before this legislative session ends on May 12.

Bearden ties the problem, in part, to a rare split within the Republican ranks. He adds that his side also can't count on many Democratic votes, despite all the publicity over the discord within the predominantly Democratic and largely urban Black Caucus.

A very public confrontation last week between Black Caucus leaders who backed the bill and caucus members who opposed it led to a change at the top. Former chairman Ted Hoskins of Berkeley was ousted, as was former vice chairman Rodney Hubbard of St. Louis.

Their replacements -- chairman John Bowman, D-Northwoods, and vice chairwoman Connie Johnson, D-St. Louis -- both oppose the bill.

But both also add that they're not making a big issue of it within the caucus during the session's final weeks. Members can vote on the measure as they see fit, Johnson and Bowman said in a conference call Wednesday.

Still, despite all the uproar over the caucus split, Bearden says he never counted on collecting more than a handful of votes from caucus members.

And even though St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay backs the bill, the vote-counters expect his endorsement to bring in only a few like-minded, white Democratic legislators from heavily Catholic areas in the city where private school vouchers or tax credits have long been popular.

The upshot, said Bearden, is that he expects the bill to end up with support from no more than 10 Democratic legislators. As it stands now, he added, that's not enough.

The real roadblock for the bill, he and Martin say, is the Republican division -- which appears based on geography as much as philosophy.

On one side are many of the state House's suburban Republicans, who generally embrace the idea of vouchers or tax credits to help families send their children to private schools. That view contends that competition for public dollars would force public schools to change how they operate. Those legislators generally represent districts where residents send their children to a mix of public, parochial and private schools.

On the other side are rural Republicans, whose districts have few or no private schools and whose residents fear that a tax-credit program could take money away from rural public schools to primarily benefit urban children. The local superintendents and school boards tend to share that view, and are vocal about it.

The issue has put those rural school district leaders on the same side as state teachers groups and labor unions -- another rare Missouri coalition.

Bearden says that rural-school/teacher/union partnership has put as much pressure on legislators to reject the bill as the highly publicized cadre of pro-voucher groups lobbying for it.

"There are outside forces on both sides of this issue," he said.

Most of the attention has been on All Children Matter, a pro-voucher group that has honored Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, and spent close to $200,000 in 2004 in an independent ad campaign to help his bid for governor. It also has directed more than $150,000 in donations or independent campaign efforts on behalf of more than two dozen members of the state Legislature. They include Hubbard, Hoskins, and state Rep. Tom Villa, D-St. Louis.

Lately, All Children Matter has been an active and generous player in Missouri's special legislative elections. For example, it spent more than $17,000 to aid Republican Scott Rupp of Wentzville in his successful April 4 bid for the 2nd District state Senate seat. And that was despite the fact that the group previously had donated to his conservative Democratic opponent, Wayne Henke.

Some Democratic activists privately welcome a floor vote on the school tax-credit bill, saying it could help their party in the fall. They point to Colorado, where voters threw out rural Republicans who had supported a similar measure.

Bearden doesn't necessary agree with that political assessment. But he does acknowledge that the bill's chances of winning legislative approval this session are narrowing. "If it's going to happen," he said, "It's going to have to happen pretty quick."

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