In the general election of 2000, the full impact of the term limits Missouri voters had imposed on their state Legislature eight years earlier kicked in. Ninety of the 163 members of the Missouri House elected in 2000 were freshmen. Among them was an ambitious 33-year-old real estate broker from Marble Hill named Rodney Allen Jetton.

Over the next eight years, no one would do more to alter the focus of Missouri government than would Rod Jetton. He became a friend to the business community and foe of the state’s uninsured working parents. He monetized his public service, giving up real estate and setting up a practice as a “political consultant,” helping elect fellow legislators to higher office even as he exercised life-and-death control over their legislation.

More than any other single legislator, Mr. Jetton came to embody the Republican revolution in Missouri: socially conservative, pro-business and not immune to confusing personal benefit with public good. On Friday, with their voter-imposed four terms up in January, Mr. Jetton and the rest of the Class of 2000 finished their last legislative session.

The session wasn’t all that productive, but in the Jetton era, that’s not all bad. For most of the last eight years, much of what the Legislature has done hasn’t been very good for the people of Missouri.

Mr. Jetton, a one-time high school track star and a former Marine, hit the ground running. A Republican, he was in the minority in his first two years in Jefferson City, but he worked night and day helping then-Rep. Catherine Hanaway, R-Warson Woods, engineer the GOP’s stunning takeover of the House in 2002. Ms. Hanaway became speaker in 2003. Mr. Jetton became speaker pro tem. His Jeff City roommate, Rep. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, became majority leader.

In 2005, Ms. Hanaway, having lost a race for secretary of state, became the U.S. attorney in St. Louis. Mr. Jetton signed up Mr. Crowell as a client for his fledgling consulting business and got him elected to the state Senate in 2004. Then, having raised tens of thousands of dollars for his fellow Republicans, Mr. Jetton was crowned speaker of the House.

With the state Senate already in Republican hands and Republican Matt Blunt having won the governor’s office in 2004, the revolution began. The business lobby had a long list of changes it wanted made. The first one was to make it more difficult to collect workers’ compensation. Then Mr. Jetton and his crew limited punitive damages in personal-injury suits, reduced taxes on manufacturer’s equipment, locked up records of complaints against insurance companies and passed out tax breaks for ethanol plants.

This year, they added further restrictions to worker’s comp payouts and made Missouri safe for sleazy operators in the auto business who want to sell repaired wrecks to clueless consumers.

The Missouri Automobile Dealers Association reported spending $22,000 on contributions to legislators’ campaigns, and on wining and dining lawmakers, from October through March. One of its lobbyists: the governor’s brother, Andy Blunt. During the revolution, with the Blunt brothers and Rod Jetton on your side, all things were possible.

By this fall, $22,000 will seem cheap. One of the Legislature’s last bits of business Friday was removing the limits on how much candidates for state office can take from contributors.

In the Jetton years, no industry had more success than the state’s utility companies. The lights may flicker sometimes in St. Louis and Kansas City, but Mr. Jetton and company made sure the juice always is flowing in Jefferson City. In this, they have been aided by a Public Service Commission that largely has become a lap-dog for utility interests.

This session’s poster child is Kansas City-based Aquila, which defied court orders and built a power plant in rural Cass County. Lawmakers voted to short circuit both the courts and local zoning regulations, giving the PSC authority to approve the plant retroactively. They claimed the bill saved ratepayers from having to foot the bill to dismantle the plant. But since it was built at the risk of investors, that never was a possibility.

The same bill allows utilities yet another excuse to raise customers’ bills without filing a new rate request. That way, companies don’t have to open their books to prove that the expenses they’re supposedly trying to recover aren’t offset by higher profits or increased efficiencies elsewhere.

The original idea for this extreme end-run around consumer interests came during Mr. Jetton’s first year as speaker, when a little-noticed measure called Senate Bill 179 was hustled through the Legislature. The bill was written by lobbyists for AmerenUE, who at one point included Andy Blunt, with the cooperation of other regulated utilities around the state. Details were hammered out in a meeting that was closed to representatives of consumer and ratepayer groups.

SB 179 opened the door for special “surcharges” to cover fuel and environmental costs. The Aquila bill allows yet another surcharge for bad debt. All three expenses already are considered when utility rates are set by the PSC.

The subject of health care brought out the worst in Mr. Jetton’s muscle-bound philosophy that only the strong deserve to survive. In 2005, he teamed with Mr. Blunt to pass a bill that cut more than 100,000 people off Medicaid and slashed benefits for about 300,000 others. No longer would they be provided with such “optional” products as wheelchair batteries, breathing tubes and crutches.

There was some irony in this; earlier in his life, as a student at Southwest Baptist University student, Mr. Jetton enrolled his wife and infant child in the Medicaid program, which paid for the birth of his first child. “It was very helpful,” he told the Post-Dispatch in 2005.

The Legislature’s most draconian curbs on doctor-prescribed medical equipment have since been overturned. But Mr. Jetton’s “protect the powerful, punish the poor” ethos still is going strong. In this year’s session, lawmakers boosted fees paid to health care providers by $130 million — the second consecutive year that payments were hiked.

Doctors and hospital administrators, whose businesses benefit from higher fees, hold key positions in the Legislature. One legislator-physician, Rep. Bob Onder, R-St. Charles, is leaving the state House to run for U.S. Congress. His campaign consultant: Rod Jetton.

There’s no question that Medicaid reimbursement rates were too low. But at least 772,000 people in our state have no health insurance, and hundreds of thousands more lack access to basic care. Legislators this year could find no money in the budget to provide desperately needed dental care to poor Medicaid patients.

Even Mr. Blunt saw the errors of the 2005 cuts, proposing the “Insure Missouri” program to cover about 55,000 working poor parents. It would have taken effect in March; within three years, it would have covered as many as 200,000 people.

But the idea quickly ran into a wall of disdain in Mr. Jetton’s House. Lawmakers in both the House and Senate came up with their own versions of Insure Missouri, neither as pragmatic as Mr. Blunt’s. The Senate plan probably could have won approval if it had gone to a vote in the House. But it was held hostage by Mr. Jetton and physician-legislator Rep. Robert Schaaf, R-St. Joseph.

Conservative social causes came front and center during the first Jetton years. More restrictive measures were placed on abortion providers and a same-sex marriage ban became part of the state constitution. Needed construction projects at state universities got caught in the crossfire over stem cell research.

This year, the big cause was illegal immigration. Even though Missouri’s population of undocumented immigrants is negligible, and even though they don’t qualify for most public benefits, the Legislature decided to re-deny them access to benefits they can’t get.

And then there were those nasty “activist judges.” The Legislature long has provided miserly funding for services needed for swift and sure justice, most notably the public defender system. This year, it unsuccessfully tried to strip six judgeships from the St. Louis circuit court, the most clogged in the state, hoping to add judges in more favored districts.
Fortunately, another pet cause — putting partisan politics back in the process of selecting judges for the state Supreme Court and the appellate courts — went nowhere.

In the end, so did the effort to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot to require voters to present photo identification. At first Mr. Jetton ordered a rush on the voter ID measure, but but in the end, he thought it was more important to a favor for a contributor.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Mr. Jetton’s last days in the Legislature was that work on voter ID, as well as work on such causes as abortion restrictions and illegal immigration, was held up by a Jetton sweetheart deal that even his GOP colleagues hated.

A year ago, Mr. Jetton had engineered a stealth amendment to an economic development bill that benefited developer Robert W. Plaster of Lebanon, a major campaign contributor and hunting buddy of the speaker’s. The amendment allowed a single person — in this case, Mr. Plaster — to incorporate land near Table Rock Lake as a “village,” thus bypassing local officials in Stone County.

Other developers began trying to take advantage of the “village law,” causing local officials around the state to complain to their legislators. Their effort to repeal the village law caused a logjam and filibusters during the last week of the legislative session. Mr. Jetton finally relented at 4 o’clock Friday morning, but only after cutting a deal that gives Mr. Plaster more time to set up his village.

By then, even some of his fellow Republicans were sick of him. Still, by dragging his feet Rod Jetton may inadvertently have saved the people of Missouri from several other lousy laws. It’s not much of a legacy for the star of the Class of 2000, but it’s all there is.

This post has been edited to reflect a correction. A provision that would have allowed utilities to place a surcharge on customer bills for bad debt was dropped from the final measure that received Legislative approval.