Missouri lawmaker used Bingo spinner to prove point, but his colleagues didn’t love it

State Rep. Scott Cupps strolled into a Missouri Capitol hearing room wearing a sport coat made of old quilts and toting a hand-cranked Bingo ball spinner. 

The jacket was a gift from friends back in his Shell Knob district, commissioned by his grandmother’s old quilt club. The Bingo spinner, procured from “the nuns at St. Mary’s Hospital” in Jefferson City, was how Cupps planned to decide which bills would take another step toward becoming law — and which would continue to languish. 

Cupps is chair of the House’s legislative rules committee, a gig that historically acts as equal parts rubber stamp and bottle neck for legislation. It receives bills after they’ve cleared another legislative committee, checks them for possible errors, then shuffles them along to the calendar of bills eligible for debate by the full chamber or sends them back to their original committee for changes. 

Some bills glide through. Others get hung up. The chair, usually in consultation with the speaker of the House that appointed them, gets to decide. 

And after being appointed chair of the committee this year by fellow Republican House Speaker Jon Patterson, Cupps — fulfilling a promise made to his friends by always showing up to hearings donning his quilted “rules chair jacket” — has made it abundantly clear he’s not interested in being a rubber stamp.

“If they wanted someone that was going to go through the charade of what a rules chair has been in the past, of rubber stamping my friends’ stuff and not communicating with the committee at all, that’s not me,” Cupps said. “That’s just not my personality.”

So Wednesday, upset that his committee has so far only been assigned one Senate bill, Cupps announced he would allow only five House bills to progress for every Senate bill his committee was assigned. 

And to ensure he couldn’t be accused of playing favorites, he let the Bingo balls decide. 

“We’re going to do things just a little bit different than we have in the past,” Cupps told the committee at the start of the hearing, adding: “And because there’s some bills on our agenda that I like and some I just absolutely hate, but I don’t hate the sponsor, I figure let’s just give everybody an equal, fair shot.”

Cupps gave one bill, which targeted nondisclosure agreements in childhood sexual abuse cases, the “free space,” to use Bingo jargon, because it has bipartisan support and is too important not to move along. 

Five others were then chosen at random using the ball spinner. 

His motivation, he said, is that at this point in the session, with only six weeks left before the legislature adjourns for the year, most House bills are never going to get through on their own. 

They’ll likely only succeed as amendments to Senate bills. So why spend time vetting a bunch of House bills unless the committee is also doing its due diligence on the Senate bills they’ll be attached to? 

“​​I want to be in a spot where my committee, not me, but my committee, gets to have input on some of those discussions,” he said, “and it’s hard to have input on those discussions if you don’t have some of the Senate bills that could eventually end up on the governor’s desk.”

The reaction, Cupps said, wasn’t terribly surprising. 

Lobbyists were incredulous. Lawmakers were furious. Cupps was accused of making a mockery of the legislative process. 

Cupps said he’s trying to prove a point.

“Yeah, there’s been some shenanigans,” he said, “but I am just trying to keep trash off the (debate) calendar and really focus on bills that mean something to my colleagues and their constituents, not some out–of-state lobby group. And focus on the bigger picture of how they fit into Senate bills that will ultimately be how they become law.”

Not everyone is convinced of Cupps’ noble goals, though. 

He originally wanted to be named vice chair of the powerful House budget committee, an appointment that would put him in line to be the committee’s chair in two years. 

But Patterson went with state Rep. Bishop Davidson instead. 

Getting passed over didn’t sit particularly well with Cupps, and his disappointment seemed to manifest into legislation. 

In February, he began to file bills that would rename every bridge in the state after Davidson; change the name of Taum Sauk Mountain to the “Bishop Davidson Summit”; change the name of the Katy Trail to the “Bishop Davidson Trail”; and change the name of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to the “Bishop Davidson Curriculum Distribution Department.”

So far, none of the bills have been assigned to a committee. 

“I’m just trying to get the guy the credit he deserves,” Cupps said, brushing off a question about whether he was acting out of frustration and noting that one of Davidson’s bills was among the five passed out of committee after being chosen using the Bingo ball spinner. 

“Proof that we’re just trying to be fair,” he said. 

State Rep. Keri Ingle, a Lee’s Summit Democrat who has served on the rules committee for seven years, said in an interview the day after the Bingo hearing that “it’s infrequent that I see something in this building that surprises me. And yesterday was rather surprising.”

There appears to be, Ingle said, “a lot of internal conflict within the Republican conference, specifically around some of the chairs of the committees, and I think that that is now spilling out into public.”

But the intent of the rules committee, Ingle said, seems to have always been to either slow down bad legislation or allow further negotiations. By that standard, Cupps’ “crazy displays” are unusual, but the outcome isn’t. 

“I remember my first two years when the rules chairs, Holly Rehder and Rocky Miller, ran rules in a very specific way and held Senate bills and House bills until the (prescription drug monitoring bill) was heard in the Senate,” she said. “And so I know that, historically, it has been used in such a way.”

And the committee has taken action on lots of bills this year, Ingle notes. According to the House website, Cupps’ committee has passed 103 of the 143 bills it has been assigned so far this year. 

For his part, Cupps said the Bingo-ball method was not intended to be disrespectful. He considers Patterson a close friend and believes the speaker knew what kind of chairman he would be when he appointed him. 

“I sure am not going to speak for the speaker, because I do consider him a friend,” Cupps said. “But I will tell you, I believe that he knows me well enough that appointing me meant he wanted someone who was going to use the rules committee as a way to actually vet not only individual pieces of legislation, but what the legislation it actually potentially could turn into.”

Patterson may not have known “exactly what he was getting into,” Cupps said with a laugh,”but I don’t think he’s shocked and flabbergasted.”

Through a spokesman, Patterson declined comment. 

The rules committee is scheduled to meet again Monday. 

Unless the flooding in his district keeps him from making the trip , Cupps will be there with his “rules chair jacket” and Bingo ball spinner. He’ll convene the hearing using a gavel he’s dubbed “liberado” — another gift from longtime family friends, adorned with shotgun shells and rifle cartridge casings from his great-grandfather’s general store and held together by a cultivator shank that used to belong to his dad. 

The committee was assigned another Senate bill on Thursday, so five more House bills may very well continue on in the process. 

“We have the best committee in the House,” Cupps said. “It might sound like I am saying that in jest, but I really believe that. We communicate well together. We have people from very diverse backgrounds with knowledge in different areas. So when we’re talking about actual legislation that we might turn into law in the state of Missouri, hey, let’s allow us to be part of that conversation.”