Brian Nieves

Rep. Brian Nieves (R-Washington) doesn't like his political rivals talking about his close relationship with disgraced former Speaker Rod Jetton. In his mind, that relationship is "ancient history."

Nieves said he “broke all professional association” with Jetton immediately after the former speaker’s arrest. The business relationship “is ancient history,” Nieves said.

Jetton was arrested December 8, a mere 72 days ago, and Nieves did not sever his " professional association” with Jetton until after the arrest. 

Nieves' name was listed as a client on Jetton's website at the time of the arrest, and Nieves' campaign committee reported paying Jetton thousands of dollars consulting fees as recently as September 2009. 

"For those of you that don't know, I have the great honor and privilege of serving as the House Majority Whip. And part of what that means is it's my job to go to weak-kneed, squeamish, you know, RINOs from time to time and help them to understand that its a good idea to vote for good conservative legislation."

Rep. Brian Nieves, explaining his role as House Majority Whip on Friday to listeners of Washington's AM1350 The Mouth. He did not specify which colleagues he found to be 'Republicans In Name Only.' 

Nieves said he and Griesheimer “take entirely different world views about state government.” Nieves said he is in the Legislature to limit government. “I’m likely to try to stop legislation to protect the liberties of the people,” he said. “The states are the only thing left to push back against an out-of-control federal government,” [Nieves] said.

Griesheimer made similar comments to the Missourian a few weeks ago, and noted Nieves' ties to disgraced former Speaker Rod Jetton:

[Griesheimer] said that he discussed four general issues with [Nieves] which included his lack of legislative accomplishments, his lack of concern for local issues, Amtrak funding and his association with former House Speaker Rod Jetton who Nieves had hired as a consultant.

For reasons I won't pretend to understand, twelve Republican state representatives voted against extended unemployment benefits yesterday (HB 1544).

The legislation sponsored by Rep. Barney Fisher (R-Richards) passed 143-12, and will allow more than 62,000 Missourians to receive extended unemployment benefit, and not cost the state a dime.

Jason Brown, birther Cynthia Davis, birther Ed Emery, Doug Ervin, birther Tim Jones, Andrew Koenig, Will Kraus, Mike Leara, Brian Nieves, Mark Parkinson, Tom Self and Bryan Stevenson all opposed the extension.

Here's another interesting tidbit from the EMissourian.com article flagged this morning about the now-very-public conflict between Sen. John Griesheimer (R-Washington) and State Rep. Brian Nieves (R-Union).  Remembering their meeting last summer, Griesheimer says he asked Nieves to ask former Speaker Rod Jetton to apologize for the controversial village law legislation passed in 2007.

As far as our conversations about Jetton, I wanted him to ask Jetton to publicly apologize for his role in the Village Law.

Nieves and Dieckhaus in happier times.

Sen. John Griesheimer (R-Washington) and Rep. Scott Dieckhaus (R-Washington) are not happy with Rep. Brian Nieves (R-Union).  According to a story posted at EMissourian.com and a letter from Dieckhaus, the dispute focuses on Nieves' public accusation that Griesheimer "gave him a list of 10 things he had to do to be his successor and that the first four items involved lobbyists and special interests that 'he needed to get the blessing of.'"  Video of Nieves January 16 speech is here. 

Griesheimer says Neives' story is "a bunch of bull," and Dieckhaus is calling on Nieves to apologize and "give an honest account of the meeting." Dieckhaus writes on his WashMo.com blog:

For Represenative Nieves to blatantly lie and insinuate that Senator Griesheimer is beholden to special interests or encouraged him to gain approval from any of these groups disgusts me. Senator Griesheimer and Representative Nieves did indeed meet to discuss the latter running for Griesheimer’s term-limited senate seat. Griesheimer expressed concern to Nieves about his lack of legislative action and work ethic, his lack of interest in working on local issues, his ties to consultant and former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton (this meeting took place during the summer of 2009 and centered on Jetton’s role with the “Village Law”), and a personal plea from Griesheimer to continue funding for Amtrak because of its importance to sustaining the small businesses in downtown Washington.

There was no list passed to Nieves. Why would he make up such a story? My best guess is that Nieves was trying to cast himself as the “outsider” because traditional politicians are not viewed favorably by many in the Tea-Party movement. This is the worst sort of political pandering – lying about a man of integrity to boost one’s own political stock.

Dieckhaus' full letter is here.

Image credit: ScottDieckhaus.com

I'm a bit late on this, but for your Monday morning enjoyment, here's the House Majority Whip Brian Nieves (R-Washington) offering his personal endorsement of the AR-15 assault rifle.

A few hundred conservative activists filled the Capitol rotunda this morning for a "Sovereignty Rally" to hear House and Senate Republicans rail against the allegedly unconstitutional federal health care reform legislation.  Led by St. Louis area legislators Sen. Jane Cunningham, Sen. Jim Lembke, Rep. Tim Jones and Rep. Brian Nieves, the overwhelming majority of the House Republican Caucus was in attendance and on stage, along with a few other GOP Senators and Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder.

The rhetoric of the rally was all about the allegedly unconstitutional nature of federal health care reform proposals and the tyranny of Democratic leadership in Washington. There was much talk of "patriots" and "sovereignty" -- but no talk, of course, of what they as elected leaders would do to make health care more affordable and accessible to struggling families. 

I'll have more posts and video about the later today -- here are a few photos of the event to whet your appetite.

Over at the conservative RiteOn blog, conservative activist and website founder Chuck MacNab writes about a meeting at the offices of Sen. Jim Lembke he says he attended on Saturday.  According to MacNab, Lembke was joined by Sen. Jane Cunningham and representatives of numerous other conservative organizations and campaigns to focus on three goals for the 2010 elections.

A dedicated group of experienced conservative leaders met for about 4 hours in State Senator Jim Lembke's office in St. Louis Saturday morning, January 9. RiteOn observed a common view and single mindedness among these area leaders that, if allowed to mature, could spell big trouble for RINOS and liberals and impact the status of many who currently believe they control the Republican Party.

Three objectives emerged from the meeting:

- To replace non-conservative candidates and office holders with conservatives in the August Primary elections.

- To make certain a conservative candidate wins in the General election in November.

- To support conservative sponsored ballot issues and to defeat those issues the group opposes.

A partial list:

• Senator Jason Crowell
• Senator Luann Ridgeway
• Majority Floor Leader Steve Tilley
• Senator Rob Mayer
• Majority Whip Brian Nieves
• Rep. Sue Allen
• Rep. Tim Jones
• Rep. Shelley Keeney
• Rep. Rob Schaaf
• Rep. Shane Schoeller
• Rep. Rick Stream
• Rep. Dwight Scharnhors
• Rep. Don Ruzicka
• Mattie Ransom for Liberty School Board
• Jeff Moore for Liberty City Council

The crazy for-profit birthermercial we mentioned last week did indeed air on KSPR last week. The general manager for KY3, Inc. (which runs KSPR) said "the opinions of this particular program may be a minority of our viewers, but certainly I think this group has the right to express themselves. I don't think it's libelous in any fashion."

In his story, Catanese said the conspiracy theorists "may be a fringe movement," and the post on the story at The Turner Report described the birthers as the "lunatic fringe." While I certainly agree that the birthers' accusations are pure lunacy, it's important to remember that the alleged "fringe" includes a disturbing number of high-ranking leaders in the Missouri Republican Party.  

Pro-life legislator Brian Nieves took to the floor of the General Assembly this past week in defense of our God-given right to torture select human beings. His speech, which will forever be known as the Missouri Call to Torture, was magnificent! School children will recite it along with the Gettysburg Address in years to come. But we at FiredUp seek further clarification of his position, and thus, are asking that Mr. Nieves answer the following questions.

1. In addition to Gitmo detainees, which of the following would you waterboard?
   1. adulterers
   2. drug dealers
   3. pedophiles
   4. the Unabomber
   5. flag burners
   6. Darwinists
   7. illegal immigrants
   8. all of the above, except (a)
Read More »

Late yesterday afternoon, as GOP Leaders were running out the clock to avoid votes on health care for the working poor and autism coverage, Denny Hoskins' private prisons bill was brought up for debate. No doubt, the leadership was hoping to give Hoskins a feather in his cap to balance out some of the problems he's had in his first session. 

But during the debate on the measure, for reasons unknown, Rep. Brian Nieves thought he'd found the perfect opportunity to respond to Thursday's post about his offensive mocking of the ongoing national debate about the utility, legality and wisdom of torturing terrorist suspects and detainees. In the clip below, you can Nieves embark on a second disconcerting rant about (the first one is here), apparently upset that I'd questioned his devotion to waterboarding.

Unwilling or unable to make any progress on things that matter to Missouri families -- health care, jobs, etc -- the House took up the pressing matter of a nonbinding resolution asking Congress to ask the President to not let Guantanamo detainees come anywhere near Missouri and Kansas.

Apart from the general absurdity of the meaningless resolution (none of these now-outraged state reps were outraged when convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman was imprisoned in Springfield), the most ridiculous bit of bloviating (in my mind) came from GOP Majority Whip Brian Nieves, who (ironically) took to the floor to bemoan what he saw as the bloviating of others. In the clip below, you can hear Nieves' disgust with the fact that some people call Guantanamo detainees "suspects."  This was a particularly dumb complaint, since the resolution under consideration was titled, "HCR 16 - TERROR SUSPECTS IN MISSOURI."

And then shifted his attention to waterboarding:

Rep. Robert Cooper has withdrawn his constitutional amendment calling for the state to inspect Barack Obama's birth certificate.  As far as I know, he hasn't actually acknowledged that Obama is a legitimate President yet, but at least he's give up on writing the conspiracy theory into our constitution.

For now, anyway.

Hat tip to ShowMeProgress.com for noticing the change.