If money's right, bills get passed

It's not February yet, so there's still plenty of opportunity ahead for the kind of special dealing and back room shenanigans we've come to expect in our state legislatures.

In fact, it's those session-closing legislative end times in April or May when the fast ones are pulled in Topeka and Jefferson City.

We were reminded of this only yesterday in a front-page article. The story examined the National Rifle Association's successful campaign to win special status for gun manufacturers and shooting ranges in state after state.

The NRA wants to exempt gun makers from liability lawsuits when their products are used in the manner for which they were designed. In other words, to shoot people.

Second, the gun lobby believes it unfair that shooting ranges be subject to the same nuisance ordinances almost everyone else must obey.

Under pressure from the gun lobby, 27 states have passed liability shield laws, while 44 now exempt shooting ranges from nuisance regulation.

But I'm not going to get into all the pros and cons of that. Because the most interesting aspect of the story is how so little debate has preceded passage of these laws.

It's that way with any special interest legislation -- when the money's right.

Consider how Kansas came to pass the shooting range exemption last year.

For the third time in four years, the measure was headed nowhere. Senate Bill 117 was bottled up in committee and unlikely to come up for a vote when, all of a sudden, Sen. Kay O'Connor did an end run late in the session.

The Olathe Republican shrewdly tacked the measure onto an unrelated piece of legislation when she thought no one was looking. It passed.

How'd she do that? By telling no one of her plans. Not the constituents who live next to a shooting range in her district. Not the Lenexa city officials whose job it was, prior to passage of this bill, to regulate the shooting range.

And certainly not fellow senators who she felt sure would vote against the exemption. She waited until they were out of the Senate chamber to make her play.

That the legislation passed surprised almost everyone, including managers of the Lenexa shooting range, whom O'Connor was supposedly trying to help. They hadn't asked her to.

I will grant you that there's nothing unethical about O'Connor or any other legislator using the process to get their way.

But let no one think it was right or that O'Connor was fighting on behalf of her constituents. Far from it. She was helping out a special interest at the expense of the people who elected her. Because of that, Lenexa Mayor Joan Bowman was gauche enough to suggest that O'Connor was working on behalf of an outfit that's given her campaign contributions over the years.

I figure O'Connor believed, in that wrong-headed way of hers, that she was doing the right thing.

But it is worth noting that O'Connor received $2,500 in campaign contributions from the NRA. Of that, $2,000 came in during the 2000 election campaign.

That may not seem like a lot of money. But I checked campaign records on file with the state and learned that O'Connor is the leading recipient of NRA funds in the Legislature.

"They didn't buy my support," O'Connor says. "There was no quid pro quo."

Maybe not, but I'd say the NRA got what it paid for, just the same.