Divergent Ysursas have a ball

BOISE – Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa is a Republican from one of the union’s reddest states. Illinois trial lawyer Bernard Ysursa is a Democratic activist and financial booster of President Barack Obama.

But these Basque brothers from Boise share at least two things: their St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and a touch of enjoyment at the foibles of politicians from each other’s state and party.

In 2007, then-U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, was arrested in a gay sex sting in a Minnesota airport bathroom. Then Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, got busted in December 2008; federal prosecutors say he tried to sell Obama’s U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder.

“For a while there, I thought I had the upper hand,” says Bernard Ysursa, 65.

“You could start a whole prison wing with some of their politicians,” says Ben Ysursa, 60, Idaho’s top election official since 2003.

In this tale of two brothers, however, the political abyss that separates their states hasn’t muted their friendship.

Ben followed Bernard to St. Louis University law school in the early 1970s, where they lived together for a year. After golf this summer in Boise, they’ll see each other again in January with family in Jupiter, Fla., where Bernard owns a condominium near the Cardinals’ spring training home. There, they’ll celebrate the 90th birthday of their father, Ramon.

“We’re smart enough not to get too immersed in political discussions; they just lead to agreeing to disagree,” Ben said. “There’s a heck of a lot more to talk about, with family and grandkids.”

In the mid-1960s, Bernard Ysursa graduated from St. Teresa’s Academy in Boise, the local Catholic school favored by southwestern Idaho’s old Basque families. There, he was a classmate of Idaho Gov. Butch Otter. While attending the University of Notre Dame before law school, he had every intention of returning to Idaho.

It turns out, Southern Illinois, where railroaders, unions and trial lawyers have set the tone for a century, was this Idaho boy’s natural political home.

His law firm, Cook, Ysursa, Bartholomew, Brauer & Shevlin Ltd., is a powerful force in the Democratic politics of St. Clair County on the Illinois-Missouri border. In recent years, Ysursa and his partners contributed more than $70,000 to candidates like Obama, Blagojevich, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

“We support labor; we’re the opposite of Idaho on that one, on the right-to-work thing,” said Bernard Ysursa, whose clients include injury victims and chemical giant Monsanto Co., headquartered in St. Louis. “I was always on that side, even as a high school kid in Boise.”

Meanwhile, Ben Ysursa, who plans to run for re-election in 2010, graduated from Gonzaga University in Spokane in the early 1970s with a degree in political science and a Spanish minor. With a degree like that, his older brother told him, he’d better go to law school. While a student in St. Louis, Ben earned pocket money serving court papers for his brother’s law firm across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

Ben Ysursa returned to his native Idaho and has worked in the secretary of state’s office since 1974.

When Ben Ysursa was elected in 2002, he was endorsed by Democrats who called him “nonpartisan.” He ran unopposed in 2006. But he places himself firmly in the political company of moderate Republicans, something he says makes him the odd man out in his mostly Democratic family.

“I still have some basic conservative values that government is not the answer,” Ben Ysursa said. “That’s still the basic disagreement of the parties.”

And the disagreement of two brothers. At least they still have their baseball team.

“We’re Cardinals fans, not Cubs fans,” Bernard Ysursa said.