Big Matt Attack
Matt Bartle is not one to gloat.
Bartle is chairman of the Missouri Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which has just approved a broad ban on cloning. Bartle introduced the bill, and the committee’s 7-2 vote in favor of his measure bodes well for its future.
But rather than celebrate, Bartle, a Republican who lives in Lee’s Summit, chooses to play down the bill’s chances of becoming law.
“Nobody is standing here tonight thinking that this is end of the road by any stretch of the imagination,” he tells the Statehouse reporters who crowd him after the committee meeting adjourns.
Bartle’s bill faces formidable opposition because it would ban cloning for research purposes. Research cloning, or therapeutic cloning, is a process in which DNA is implanted in an unfertilized egg for the purpose of growing disease-fighting stem cells. Supporters of therapeutic cloning believe it’s a unique opportunity to find cures for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and spinal-cord injuries.
But the egg manipulation results in the creation — and destruction — of a blastocyst. In bedroom-style reproduction, blastocyst is the term for the rapidly dividing fertilized egg once it enters the uterus. Bartle, an evangelical Christian, and his supporters want to ban therapeutic cloning because they believe the blastocyst created in the process is a nascent human life, even if it never leaves a petri dish.
The fight over therapeutic cloning is the most recent skirmish in the abortion wars, which continue to rage more than 30 years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.
But what’s particularly interesting about Missouri’s cloning debate is the way it divides the Republican Party’s believers in free markets from its believers in God.
Chamber-of-commerce types are terrified that Bartle’s cloning ban will stifle the state’s multimillion-dollar scientific research operations, such as the Stowers Institute in Kansas City and Washington University in St. Louis.
One business leader working against the bill is Warren Erdman, a well-connected Kansas City Southern executive who served as a regional chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.
And Erdman is just one example of the muscle that’s been amassing against Bartle. “I’d like to have a list of the lobbyists that haven’t been employed to fight this bill,” Bartle tells the reporters after his committee vote.
Bartle’s skillful ability to play the underdog is one reason he has emerged as one of the state’s most dynamic lawmakers. He prides himself on making bold proposals, such as his recent call for a toll to pay for Interstate 70 reconstruction. “It’s not exactly popular to be a Republican who’s proposing a user fee,” he tells the Pitch. “But I think we got to tell people the truth: I-70 is broken.”
Bartle is most audacious with social issues, however. A few days before the Judiciary Committee voted on his cloning bill, a judge said it was legal for Missouri to limit strip clubs’ and sex shops’ ability to advertise on roadside billboards. Bartle wrote the bill that became the billboard law. And in the current legislative session, he has introduced new taxes on adult-oriented businesses that would likely force many to close.
Is Bartle just a prude with sharper suits and a better education than most morality tyrants?
He’s a Baptist, yes, but also a cum laude graduate of a Big Ten law school. Bartle says members of the media have reached for easy stereotypes — science vs. fundamentalism — in their coverage of the cloning debate. He accuses the Stowers Institute and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce of being “thought police,” and The Kansas City Star of serving as their deputies.
Certainly Bartle is a rising Republican star — one whose ascent casts new light on the differences between his party’s capitalists and its scolds.
Bartle has just won his Judiciary Committee vote.He is on his way to the Senate floor when he crosses paths with Bill Gamble, a lobbyist who represents the city of Kansas City, Missouri, and business interests opposed to the cloning bill.
Gamble, middle-aged and thickly built, gives the impression of a man comfortable plying his trade over steady rounds of cocktails. Bartle is 40 but could pass for 29. He wears wireless glasses and keeps a neat part in his hair, his scrubbed appearance resembling that of another conservative Midwesterner, the columnist George Will. Bartle even wears bow ties on occasion.
As they pass, Bartle tells Gamble that he’d rather be in Gamble’s shoes — playing defense on the cloning bill instead of offense. Gamble smiles at Bartle the way a teacher might look on a precocious student.
“All the money is against it,” Bartle tells the Pitch a few minutes later, speaking of the cloning bill. “Nearly every lobbyist is against it. A lot of powerful people are against it. You get the sense that this is something that is facing overwhelming odds.”
Bartle is sensitive to the difficult position the bill forces lawmakers to take.
“This is one of those no-win situations for people in the Legislature, me included,” he says. “It doesn’t matter which way you go — somebody is going to be extraordinarily angry with you. And those are the kinds of decisions that obviously try the souls of people in public office.”
Before the committee vote, members had worn their vexation in different ways.
Chuck Graham, a Columbia Democrat who uses a wheelchair, said he wanted to give people hope. He choked back tears as he spoke, then voted against the ban.
Chris Koster, a Harrisonville Republican, seemed to relish the fact that his impending vote remained a mystery. As if to build the drama, Koster, a former Cass County prosecutor with TV-actor looks, droned on about the challenging nature of the question and his “profound concern” that lawmakers didn’t have enough scientific information on which to base their decisions. Then he voted for the ban.
Victor Callahan, a Democrat from Independence, voted for the ban but offered no explanation (though he is known to oppose abortion rights). An hour after the committee met, a Pitch reporter went to Callahan’s office in the Capitol to ask the senator about his vote. As the Pitch explained the reason for the visit to Callahan’s aide, who sat in a tiny reception area, the door to Callahan’s office swung shut.
Matt Bartle says he became interested in cloning about three years ago, when a co-worker e-mailed him a story about researchers who had announced that they could clone a human within 10 years.
“Is this legal?” the co-worker asked Bartle.
Bartle concluded that no Missouri law prevented it.
Bartle’s interest in cloning obviously goes beyond the idea of a Dr. Evil stamping out a Mini Me. Making clones means messing with embryos.
Missouri Right to Life endorsed Bartle when he first ran for the state House of Representatives in 1998. He stood for keeping taxes low and banning late-term abortions.
Bartle is a lifelong Baptist. He attends First Baptist Church of Raytown, a megachurch on 350 Highway. Former Democratic state Sen. Ken Jacob says Bartle’s faith is genuine. “You get into his car, the Bible is right there on his car seat. The cartoons for his kids are biblical stories,” Jacob says.
Bartle grew up mainly in Columbia. His father worked for an insurance company, and his mother stayed at home. Politics and the law appealed to Bartle at an early age. He says he was intrigued by the Watergate prosecutors and the Republicans who had the courage to speak out against President Richard Nixon. He was in high school when Ronald Reagan’s election revived American conservatism.
After attending public schools in Columbia, Bartle graduated magna cum laude from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in economics. During summer and winter breaks, he collected trash. He earned a law degree at Northwestern University.
After law school, Bartle clerked for a Reagan-appointed federal judge in New Orleans. He married, moved to Kansas City in 1991 and joined the mighty Bryan Cave law firm.
“I liked the area,” Bartle says. “We really liked Lee’s Summit. Now we’ve planted our roots very deep. We just love it out here.” He and his wife, Annette, have two children.
Bartle served two terms in the Missouri House. His toughest election was in 2002, when he fought a fellow state representative in the Republican Senate primary. Bartle, calling himself the “proven conservative,” beat Carson Ross, who offered himself as more of a moderate, by about 1,200 votes. “I’m going to have to look at whether there is a role for a compassionate conservative,” Ross told the Star on election night. “Maybe they are out there, but they didn’t go to the polls today.”
The recent advent of term limits allows bright, ambitious politicians to rise quickly to prominence in Jefferson City. Bartle has added virtues.
“Matt is earnest,” says state Rep. Jeff Harris, a Columbia Democrat. Harris and Bartle graduated from the same high school and worked together at Bryan Cave. “He is intelligent. I think he’s personable. And even though we certainly disagree on probably a number of issues, I still respect him professionally, and I still would consider him a friend.”
Jacob says Bartle is bright and principled but also rigid. “You’re not going to convince Matt of anything,” he says. “His mind is pretty much made up.”
Bartle holds his beliefs so tightly, Jacob says, that he seems to want to impose them on others. Jacob recalls that last year, Bartle, presiding over the Senate as two retiring senators (each with 40 years of experience) were recognized, led a prayer from the dais that mentioned Jesus by name. Jacob, who served in the Legislature for 22 years, had heard many prayers on the floors of the House and Senate — but none as commanding as Bartle’s.
“It was almost like an instruction,” Jacob says.
Bartle’s research suggested that nothing in Missouri law prevented human reproductive cloning. And a cloned human being is a repugnant idea to the vast majority of scientists and laypeople alike, regardless of their politics.
The National Academy of Sciences has deemed human cloning to be dangerous and likely to fail. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from a body cell, died prematurely and with a number of abnormalities.
In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences called for a ban on cloning humans. The group did not, however, call for a ban on cloning for research purposes, or therapeutic cloning.
Both endeavors begin the same way: The nucleus is removed from an egg like a pit from an olive. A donor’s genetic material is then sealed into the egg. Under the right conditions, the egg will grow into a blastocyst genetically identical to that of the donor.
If the intention were to make a clone, the blastocyst would be implanted in the uterus of a surrogate mother. In research cloning, the result is not a live birth but a harvest of stem cells, the undifferentiated supercells that can take the shape and perform the function of cells damaged by disease.
A year ago, a team working in South Korea was the first to derive stem cells from a cloned human embryo. This process holds promise because the stem cells are tailor-made to the donor’s DNA, much like an organ donated by a healthy twin.
Therapeutic cloning uses no sperm. This is a critical point for opponents of Bartle’s bill. Last month, an emissary from the Stowers Institute explained the science to the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council. Mayor Kay Barnes, already familiar with the subject, interrupted at one point. “No sperm has gotten near the egg,” the mayor said, rapping the table for emphasis.
The “no sperm” argument prevailed when the U.S. Congress considered a bill that would have made felons out of scientists who engaged in reproductive or therapeutic cloning. The bill passed the House in 2002, but a similar measure, sponsored by Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, died in the Senate. The New York Times noted that Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican with anti-abortion credentials, said his decision to oppose the ban “was not — and I repeat not — a close call.”
The debate is in many respects a battle of terminology. Following the example of some other research facilities, Stowers officials avoid using the word cloning, preferring the more technical phrase “somatic-cell nuclear transfer.” Stowers officials also do not like to use the word embryo.
But if therapeutic cloning does not produce embryos, Bartle says, then Dolly was not a sheep.
Missouri Right to Life enthusiastically supports Bartle’s ban. The group’s president, Pam Fichter, attended the Judiciary Committee meeting on the night of the vote. “It is a human life,” she told the Pitch before the meeting.
Bartle appreciates Fichter’s support, but he doesn’t want the debate framed by stereotypes.
“I will grant you, I am an evangelical Christian,” he says. “Everybody knows that about me. I’m very open about that, you know. That’s not a popular thing to be in our society, the presidential election notwithstanding. Among the business elite, that’s not popular.
“But because I am, and I’m the main proponent of the legislation, it assists them in kind of creating this ‘Hey, it’s the enlightened scientists and business leaders against the unenlightened religious folks. It’s the intellectuals against the not-so-intellectuals.’ … I’ve seen this time and again. Basically the undertext is, ‘If you have a brain and you can think, there is no way you would be against this.'”
Bartle rejects the notion that a stand against therapeutic cloning is a stand against science. He says adult stem cells — which carry none of the ethical baggage — provide opportunities to find cures, citing a recent Tufts University discovery of apparently potent stem cells coaxed from bone marrow. “That’s only the beginning,” he says. “Basically, the commercial pressures are going to force the researchers to go with adult stem cells.”
In the meantime, there are embryos to be saved. Bartle equates embryonic stem-cell research with performing medical experiments on death-row inmates.
“The whole premise of Western medicine has been based on the premise of ‘First do no harm.’ If we have any doubt in our minds whether these human embryos are, in fact, nascent human life, shouldn’t we resolve that in favor of protecting that human life and saying, ‘Hey, let’s go a different direction’?”
But the same people who condemn scientists for using embryos to develop therapies mute their criticism of couples who seek fertility treatments. With in vitro fertilization, more embryos are created than are implanted in the woman seeking to get pregnant. The leftovers are destroyed or stored indefinitely.
Groups such as the Missouri Right to Life do not hold fertility patients responsible for these embryos, however.
“Missouri Right to Life has not made any official statements concerning IVF as a process of assisting in reproduction, because IVF, per se, does not necessarily involve killing a person,” says Jim Cole, general counsel for Missouri Right to Life.
Cole says that, from what he understands, Missouri fertility clinics do not destroy the leftovers, in part because of a state statute that says the life of each human being begins at conception.
“There may be other questions to consider about freezing embryos, but freezing them does not appear to be equal to killing them,” Cole says.
These “other questions” can apparently wait for answers, as long as infertile anti-abortion couples still need science to help them make babies.
Bartle likes to startle liberals with a list of the major democracies that have banned therapeutic cloning: Germany, Norway, France, Switzerland, Australia, Canada.
“What I will welcome,” he says, “is when the same forces that are on the left side of the political spectrum speak up as they did in Europe and did in Canada, and that really hasn’t happened yet — at least not yet in Missouri. It may be that we don’t have enough out there to even be heard.”
Some on the left do oppose therapeutic cloning. There are feminists who worry that the need for eggs will result in the exploitation of poor women. The executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, a women’s health advocacy group in Boston, wrote a recent editorial in The Boston Globe that raised concern about the “substantial risks to women’s health posed by the extraction procedure,” which requires donors to take powerful hormones.
There are environmentalists who worry about fooling with Mother Nature. “Cloning of any kind is a step toward genetic engineering — toward improving human beings. In other words, toward leaving the nat-ural world behind,” Bill McKibben, the author of The End of Nature, wrote in a 2002 New York Times op-ed piece.
But whereas Bartle talks about welcoming the left, he does not appear to extend much of a hand in that direction. The three Democrats who co-sponsored the bill oppose abortion rights. (Victor Callahan was one of them.) The lone female sponsor is Norma Champion, a Springfield Republican whose late husband edited the magazine of the Assemblies of God church.
“I wanted everybody to co-sponsor my bill that possibly could,” Bartle explains. He says he had an informal meeting with the Sierra Club on the topic. But the Missouri Sierra Club tells the Pitch that it has no position on therapeutic cloning.
Bartle says the cloning debate is “more mature” in other countries. Other countries’ solutions, however, do not necessarily look like Bartle’s. Canada prohibits cloning but allows research on embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, despite the howls of the religious right. The United Kingdom allows therapeutic cloning, but only under strict government supervision.
The debate in the United States, in contrast, has been more of an all-or-nothing proposition.
“We feel like there’s a third way that hasn’t been pursued,” says Marcy Darnovsky, the associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a liberal group in California that opposed that state’s decision to invest $3 billion in stem-cell research. Darnovsky says her group would rather see the United States follow the direction of Canada or the U.K. than pass legislation like Bartle’s.
As much as Bartle would resent being characterized as a prissy fundamentalist, some of his actions point squarely in that direction.
The taxes and regulations he wants to put on strip clubs and adult video shops, for instance, would put many of them out of business. His bill would require any “sexually oriented” business to charge a $5 entrance fee and close at 10 p.m. Strip-club patrons would not be allowed to tip the dancers. The state would impose a 20-percent tax on gross receipts. (Bartle would give the money to schools.)
Bartle’s bill aims to stop what he calls the “aggressive, in-your-face expansion” of sex shops around the state. But it would also affect businesses such as Valentine Video in Westport.
“We would have to shut our doors” if such a bill became a law, says Kelly Boessen, Valentine’s manager.
Valentine Video rents mainstream titles, but X-rated films count for more than half of its revenues. “We’re right next door to Blockbuster,” Boessen says. “Our niche is kind of adult films.”
Dick Bryant, a Kansas City lawyer who represents adult businesses in their court fight against the Bartle-written law that limits billboard advertising, says Bartle’s new proposal is “just ridiculous.”
Bartle says the law is needed because adult businesses have become more brazen, especially in rural areas along highways. “Let me tell you, if you’re from outside the state of Missouri and you drive into Cooper County and there’s a men’s bathhouse over here on one corner and there’s three or four smut shops, what do you think? I wonder if that’s reflective of that community’s values.”
The sex trade along I-70 is a mixed bag. The billboards for Passions, a store that sells videos and sex toys at two locations along the highway, are reserved, their blue-and-red color schemes reminiscent of Dairy Queen’s.
There does seem to be an inordinate amount of action around Boonville, where there is indeed a men’s bathhouse called Mega-Plex — though from the outside, it’s the least X-rated-looking of the sex businesses that stretch from Kansas City to Jefferson City. A banner hanging from the metal building describes Mega-Plex as merely a 24-hour “men’s private spa and fitness center.”
Cooper County is a live-and-let-live kind of place, says Gerald Ulrich, owner of First Amendment Video, which is near Mega-Plex. “We’ve got two Baptist churches, and they don’t have a problem with me,” Ulrich says.
Ulrich is openly gay, a Vietnam veteran and the part-time mayor of Bunceton (population 361). He says Bartle’s proposed taxes amount to moblike extortion of a “mom-and-pop operation.” He tries to be community-friendly, Ulrich says, closing the store at 10 p.m. “If I see somebody try to get in another man’s booth or another person’s booth, out they go, and they don’t get to come back.”
Bartle says it is not realistic public policy to try to outlaw places like First Amendment Video. (There’s the concept of free expression and all.) But government can restrict certain business activities, he says.
“And the problem is,” Bartle says, “rural Missouri in particular has no experience, nor do they have the financial or legal tools in their toolbox that big cities do. That’s why you see what you see up and down our highways.”
Bryant, the lawyer, says local governments are not as helpless as Bartle says they are. Existing laws allow restrictions on certain businesses — where they can locate, what hours they can be open, what people can do inside their doors. Johnson County, Missouri, he notes, already charges adult businesses a 5-percent tax.
Besides, Bartle has not always supported the idea of local control.
In 2003, he voted in favor of a bill that checked county efforts to keep out industrial hog lots. The bill contained a provision prohibiting counties from enacting health ordinances stricter than state law. “What that does is take away the ability of counties to protect their own citizens from the ills and documented impact of CAFOs [contained animal feeding operations],” says Ken Midkiff, a former Sierra Club lobbyist.
The Republican-led Missouri House and Senate passed the bill, but then-Gov. Bob Holden vetoed it. Midkiff expects a similar piece of legislation to return now that a Republican is governor.
Confronted with his hog-lot vote, the normally articulate Bartle struggles to square it with his current effort to rid a different scourge.
“That’s interesting,” he says. “That’s interesting to lay those two issues side by side. You know, that’s, that’s, that is interesting. I hadn’t thought about it. There probably is some inconsistency there.”
He pauses.
“The whole concept, the whole concept of not in my backyard, you know, you weigh it out. And maybe it does in, in my mind, you know. I guess my rationale for doing something like that is that, you know, eating pork, you know, a lot of folks feel like that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and something we’ve been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years. And that, you know, the sex-smut-shop industry is not on par or co-equal with a food-production industry. But, you know, I think, I think I could be criticized for being inconsistent there.”
Bartle is not the only one dealing with inconsistencies. Warren Erdman is working to make Missouri hospitable to all kinds of scientific research even as he works to put Republicans in office.
Doubt that the two are mutually exclusive? On the night the Judiciary Committee passed the cloning bill, Bartle credited the 2004 presidential campaign with “bringing this issue to the forefront.”
George W. Bush favors the kind of broad cloning ban that Missouri is considering. During the campaign, Republicans criticized John Kerry for his support of therapeutic cloning — even first lady Laura Bush piled on. “We don’t even know that stem-cell research will provide cures for anything — much less that it’s very close,” she said while campaigning last August.
Yet Erdman worked for Bush’s re-election at the same time he and other civic leaders dreaded the prospect of Bartle introducing his cloning ban in the Missouri Senate.
Erdman, a Kansas City Southern vice president, is a former chief of staff for U.S. Senator Kit Bond. The Kansas City business community values his political experience. He sits on the board of the city’s leading development agency, the Economic Development Corporation, and is chairman of the Downtown Council’s political action committee.
On September 18, 2004, after listening to a presentation by Stowers Institute President William Neaves, the Economic Development Corporation board voted unanimously to oppose efforts to criminalize embryonic stem-cell research.
The Stowers Institute is a research facility near the Plaza endowed with more than $2 billion from American Century founder James Stowers and his wife, Virginia. The institute wants to expand. But if Missouri makes somatic-cell nuclear transfer punishable with prison time, the institute would “have no other choice but to go elsewhere,” according to a statement Stowers recently released.
Erdman attended the September board meeting. In fact, he spoke of the Downtown Council’s efforts to vet statewide candidates on the basis of their positions on life sciences.
A few days after the meeting, the Pitch asked Erdman if championing Bush and championing Kansas City’s status as a research center were incompatible. Erdman said the two were “apples and oranges.”
Erdman noted that in 2001, Bush allowed federal funding for existing stem-cell lines (which had been derived from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization). “The president has said what federal funding can and cannot be used for,” Erdman said. “The matter we’re talking about is whether or not that research should be made illegal in Missouri. They are separate issues, and they are not inconsistent.”
Bush did approve funding for the existing lines, though scientists today dispute the assertion the president made at the time that “more than 60” lines existed. The number is actually 22, according to recent press reports.
More significant, Bush’s support of a broad cloning ban is apples and apples compared to what is happening in Missouri.
Pressed on the matter today, Erdman tries to plead ignorance. “I’m unaware of the president’s involvement in somatic-cell nuclear transfer,” he says.
The president might not have uttered the phrase somatic-cell nuclear transfer in any address, but he has spoken out against cloning, and therapeutic cloning is somatic-cell nuclear transfer. “It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of the chamber,” Bush said in 2002, while the Senate considered Brownback’s bill. Bush’s comment appeared in a story The Washington Post ran on the front page (headline: “President Presses Senate to Ban All Human Cloning”).
After conceding that he might disagree with the president on the topic, Erdman suggests that he and other Republicans opposed to Bartle’s bill are heroes.
“You ought to be delighted I’m taking that position,” he tells the Pitch. “I’m putting myself out on a limb.”
Erdman will continue to play an important part in the drama; he has the ear of Gov. Matt Blunt. Once he took office, Blunt tapped Erdman, who donated more than $2,000 to Blunt’s campaign, and another man to lead a commission on making state government more effective.
It appears that Bartle has the votes he needs to get the cloning ban through both houses of the Legislature, putting the bill on the governor’s desk. Blunt has said that he does not oppose therapeutic cloning.
But if the young governor — who campaigned on a promise to represent Missouri “values” — sides with his anti-abortion supporters, the people who care about economic development in Kansas City may decide that, with friends like Erdman, who need enemies?
Matt Bartle runs.
He tries to run 20 miles a week, though it’s difficult when the Legislature is in session and he stays up until midnight answering e-mails. In off-election years, he trains for marathons. “One of my goals in life is to do all the big marathons. I’ve done New York and Chicago. I want to do Marine Corps [in Washington, D.C.]. Grandma’s up in Minnesota is a fantastic run. Rock and Roll in San Diego.”
Bartle wants to run for higher political office as well. It only makes sense. Former Sen. Jacob imagines that Bartle does not feel intimidated when he looks at his Senate colleagues. “He looks around the room and says, ‘I’m smart enough, and I’m right,'” Jacob says.
And he’s clearly burnishing his conservative credentials. The list of bills he has sponsored is long. Bartle says he’s responding to what he hears people telling him to do. The sex-shop tax is not a blatant attempt to score political points with certain voters, he argues, because he has “already scored whatever political points there are to be scored” on the issue by going after the billboards last year.
Still, looking at his proposals, it’s not hard to find evidence of political opportunism. One bill seems designed to rouse voters suspicious of liberal causes, real or imaginary. The bill would amend the state constitution so that it recognizes and preserves an individual’s right to hunt and fish.
Bartle says the amendment is needed because it is “a long-term goal” of animal-rights organizations to outlaw hunting and fishing. He admits, though, that no groups are clamoring for such a ban right now in Missouri.
“This is one where you look out a decade and you anticipate,” he says.
However the cloning debate ends, Bartle will be able to say he stood for principle. Rumor has the business community looking for a strong Democrat and a strong Republican to oppose him in 2006. Bartle says he welcomes the challenge. “I think that will be excellent,” he says. “I’ll take my case to the people, and I’m very comfortable doing that. And then the people can decide.”
