An optometrist from Perryville, Republican Steven Tilley rose like a rocket through the House, becoming majority leader three years after his 2005 election to office and Speaker of the House in January 2011. The speed and force of that trajectory helped end his marriage—he announced his divorce in fall 2011, warning colleagues not to make the same mistake. This August, he resigned, explaining that he wanted to do paid political consulting for corporations and politicians. He promised it would soon be obvious which ones.
If you hadn’t resigned, you would have had to leave in January anyway, because of term limits. How do you feel about them? I think they are good. The debate could be “Are they long enough?” But the problem in my opinion with D.C. is, you’ve got people who have been there 20 or 30 years, and they have lost touch with what it is to be a normal person.
What’s the effect of serving in the legislature on your personal life? It’s horrible, and I wasn’t the best at it. One of my strengths is that I’m extremely motivated and focused, and that’s what made me successful in politics. But that comes at a price. What people don’t see, and what the Post-Dispatch doesn’t write about when they want to write bad things about people, is that most people are sacrificing financially and personally to serve in the Assembly.
You’ve obviously enjoyed these eight years, though—didn’t you hate to quit early? There’s only the veto session left. And I enjoy working on campaigns. And I didn’t want to be a paid consultant and be Speaker of the House. Some people do it, but it didn’t feel right to me.
What did all your experience as a legislative leader teach you? You learn the rules of the House: how long a bill has to sit, how bills move through the process, how you amend them. Just the basic, functioning structure of things.
Doesn’t everybody learn that? We do a freshman tour, which is a crash course. They start from "Here’s your office; here’s the days we are in session; here’s how you address people on the floor, not using their first names. You don’t walk between two people in debate. You don’t bring food on the floor.” The rules are very difficult to learn and master. Even as people are leaving, they are still learning about the rules.
Surely there’s some resource, though? Oh, yeah. Everybody gets a rulebook.
Missouri’s become far more Republican in recent years, right? We’re certainly more conservative than we were. The Democrats have become more liberal on the federal level, so that’s driven conservative voters to the Republican party. We’re a fiscally conservative state. But we’re willing to split tickets—look at the governor’s race.
How does the rural-urban divide play out? The House is made up of a majority of rural legislators—especially in the Republican party, the party that’s in power. Prop B, the puppy-mill bill, overwhelmingly passed in the cities and overwhelmingly failed in rural areas, and then we went in to fix it. Education is an interesting one, too, because in rural Missouri, an overwhelming majority feel like their public schools do a good job, and they do. But the city schools have been struggling for 20 or 30 years. Agriculture, economic-development bills—there’s a bit of envy in rural Missouri, I think, that St. Louis gets a little more of the economic pie. But I’m from Perryville, and I don’t think you’ve had a Speaker that’s fought as hard for St. Louis as I have. The economic engine of the state is in St. Louis.
How would you reform the legislature? I actually think that the system works pretty good. The perceptions are that lobbyists run the building. The reality is that if you have an issue that people call you about, that carries so much more weight than what somebody at the capital tells you about the bill.
So you have no problem with unlimited lobbyist gifts? I’d be OK with eliminating lobbyists’ gifts. I haven’t taken them for five years. But do I think it’s going to determine how somebody votes? No. As a sitting Speaker, somebody who can literally dictate whether a member has an office in the capital or not, whether he has a single committee to sit on, if I advocate for an issue and members say, “I can’t vote that way because I have a constituent…” there’s no way in the world that a lobbyist is going to dictate how they vote. If my members were strong enough to tell me no, then they can tell lobbyists no every day of the week.
What about unlimited campaign contributions? I’ve always been for unlimited campaign contributions, but complete transparency. Now, giving to nonprofits and then the nonprofit gives to a committee to hide the source—that’s different. That’s a new trend. It’s completely legal, it’s legit, but I think we should change the rules.
I’ve been told there are too many consultants running around Jeff City, and that many of them, unlike you, don’t know what they’re doing. The ones that are idiots don’t do very well. The free market will reward you if you’re good, and if you’re not, you won’t be around very long.
