Jonathan Chait calls Paul Ryan’s budget a “War on the Weak” and observes:

Ryan’s plan does do two things in immediate and specific ways: hurt the poor and help the rich. After extending the Bush tax cuts, he would cut the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent. Then Ryan slashes Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and low-income housing. These programs to help the poor, which constitute approximately 21 percent of the federal budget, absorb two thirds of Ryan’s cuts.

Ryan spares anybody over the age of 55 from any Medicare or Social Security cuts, because, he says, they “have organized their lives around these programs.” But the roughly one in seven Americans (and nearly one in four children) on food stamps? Apparently they can have their benefits yanked away because they were only counting on using them to eat.

Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”

Question: Is Ryan channeling Sen. Jim Lembke (unemployed workers won’t “get off their backsides”) or vice versa? Or are they both channeling Ben Stein, whose personal survey reveals that:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work.

[emphasis in original]

Nice of him to qualify his hasty generalization with the word “generally”, but Think Progress disagrees:

The current recession is a global phenomenon caused by the collective bad behavior of the world’s largest financial institutions. Before the recession, the unemployment rate hovered around six percent; it is ludicrious to say that [fifteen million] Americans suddenly got lazier and less able to work within the span of a few months.

But, to return to the subject of Ryan cutting federal revenue by extending the Bush tax cuts, a P-D letter writer pointed out: “There are two parts to a budget. One is revenue. That is not the part you cut.” More specifically, according to WillyK:

if we do nothing about spending, but just let the the Bush tax cuts die a natural death, we would halve the deficit by 2021.

Here at home, that lesson is lost on Lembke et. al., who are slashing state revenue by turning down tens of millions in federal funds already appropriated for us. They claim it’s a protest about federal overspending, though their action does not cut the federal deficit by one cent. But the Lembke loonies aren’t the only Republicans who don’t understand that balancing the budget gets harder if you cut revenue. Both chambers have voted to eliminate our corporate franchise tax, thus costing Missouri $87 million a year.

Does anybody in the state legislature besides Jeanette Mott Oxford speak up for the sanest way to increase Missouri revenue: that is, by raising taxes on the wealthier Missouri families? Our top tax bracket is $9,000. As in $9,000! That was a munificent salary when it was instituted in 1931. It was like making $300,000 in today’s economy. But as a top tax bracket in 2011, it’s ludicrous. August Busch IV is in the same tax bracket as people renting one room apartments in urban ghettos.

Meanwhile, the meanies in Jeff City are doing their best to shove more Missourians out of the top tax bracket. They’ve undone another of our citizen initiatives by ruling that minimum wage workers won’t get automatic Cost of Living Adjustments. They’re making war on unions. Ideally, Republicans would like to pass Right-to-Work-for-Less, but if they can’t get that one through the lege this year, they’ll settle for enfeebling unions by legislating that employees must give their consent before a union can use their dues for political purposes.

We can only wait to see how many of these bad ideas Jay Nixon will veto.

If Missouri workers don’t begin to notice that the GOP views them as parasites and the rich as their rightful rulers, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

On March 19th, six Democratic state representatives participated in a NOW sponsored forum where they discussed about what it’s like to serve in a majority GOP legislature during a period of radical GOPer fringism. Reps. Jill Schuupp (D-82), Jeanette Mott Oxford (D-59), Ginese Montecillo (D-66), Margo McNeil (D-78), Jeanne Kirkton (D-91) and Rory Ellinger (D-72) spoke for about an hour and a half, mostly in response to written questions solicited from the audience.

General impressions of the meeting were posted here yesterday; questions 1-3 with summaries of the discussion they engendered can be found below the fold. The remaining questions will be be covered in a subsequent posting.

Question 1.  What’s the status of Right to Work here? What’s Nixon’s position?

There seemed to be a general consensus that RTW could potentially become the law in Missouri. If the legislation doesn’t pass in the legislature – Kirkton thinks it will stall in the House – we may see it on the 2012 ballot. Kirkton observed that if it comes to a ballot initiative, supporters will have lots of money at their disposal, and because, since 1978 “people have been hard at work demonizing unions,” it may have a good chance of success.

The all-out rightwing effort to demonize unions, especially teachers unions, came up again and again. In response to the GOP argument that because tax dollars pay the salary of public employees, their union dues should not be used for partisan, Democratic, political purposes, Margo McNeil had – literally – the money quote:

Like the salary I make working ten hours a day while I was teaching didn’t count for anything, and wasn’t really  my own money to spend

Question 2. We recently voted on Prop. B in November and there’s legislation to revoke that. What’s the status, and, again, what will Nixon do?

The speakers had a variety of opinions on this topic; for instance, Ellinger said that Nixon would be “hard-put” to veto the repeal legislation given his need to balance votes from all sides of the “Missourah/Missouri” divide, while McNeil thought it would be foolish of Nixon not to veto it. Montecillo thought that, given the bipartisan support behind Prop. B, the issue could potentially hurt the GOP. All the speakers noted that they got more letters on this issue than any other and that the letters were markedly bipartisan in nature.

Schuupp noted that the repeal legislation would probably pass, and although Democrats were making efforts to amend it and make it less onerous, those efforts would probably come to nothing. While indicating that she would respect the wishes of her constituents and vote against the repeal legislation, she made an interesting point in response to the common argument that the legislature should never overturn the will of the people:

The legislature, just let me say, often overturns the vote of the people. And I will say this, there are certain things, like Prop. A, that, for example, that repeals the, that forces the city to vote every 5 years on the earnings tax, that if and when I get the opportunity to change that, I’m going to vote to repeal the vote of the people. I don’t want to say absolutely unequivocably [sic], I will never override your vote, but I’m going to use my good judgment. That’s what you sent us up there to do.

Echoing a point made by Roy Ellinger about the volume of response generated by the puppy mill issue relative to the small response generated by other issues, Schuupp added:

… we have received more information on puppy mill legislation than any other piece of legislation, and I know people love their animals and I support that love for animals, but, my gosh, we have a lot of people out there hurting too and I sure wish people would – and I am not talking to this group, but the message is larger – I sure wish people would stand up and get that involved when it involves other people too.

Question 3. This week Arne Duncan, who is President Obama’s education guy, stated that No Child Left Behind was set up to make schools and teachers fail. So I’ve got a two-part question: Part 1. What is the future of House Bill 628, the Teacher Continuing Contract Act? Are there good, valid parts of it, or how can we make it better or get rid of it?

Margo McNeil, who is a former teacher and is on the Elementary and Secondary Education Committee, gets credit for the most succinct answer when she immediately declared that, “628, as it was originally written, is the worst piece of legislation I have ever seen in my entire career – I mean going back 20 years.” She added that the bill had been improved somewhat in committee, but still violated basic fairness and left teachers open to unfair punitive measures with no real recourse to outside legal appeal.

The other teacher among the Representatives, Genise Montecillo, voiced concern about how the members of the caucus would vote on the bill given the reform focus on St. Louis schools, which, she admitted, have real problems. However, she noted that within a tenure system, bad teachers can be dismissed if administrators do their jobs, and that it unfair to punish an entire profession because of lazy and incompetent administrators. “Show me one study that links poor student achievement to tenure,” she asked.

As far as evaluating teachers on a one-size-fits all system, Montecillo argued that it is difficult to effectively measure student achievement in an across the board fashion. She spoke of her experience with students with behavioral difficulties for whom “being able to sit next to a classmate for an whole class  period, that was progress for them.”

Question 3, Part 2: With education budgets being cut, why are we still wasting time on MAP testing. It consumes the time of education and educators such as teachers and counselors who would rather teach.

Ellinger spoke as a former school board members when he said that testing for comparative purposes is not a bad thing. When test scores dip, it can be used to pinpoint problems and allocate resources.

Montecillo added that while we need accountability in classes, she is concerned about how we test. We compare performance across classes; we do not test improvement over the year.

A little over sixty people from the St. Louis area gathered a week ago last Saturday at a forum organized by a local NOW chapter to hear six Democratic state representatives talk about what it’s like to serve in a majority GOP legislature in this day of radical GOPer fringism. Reps. Jill Schuupp (D-82), Jeanette Mott Oxford (D-59), Ginese Montecillo (D-66), Margo McNeil (D-78), Jeanne Kirkton (D-91) and Rory Ellinger (D-72) spoke for about an hour and a half, mostly in response to questions from the audience.

The short version of what they had to say, to paraphrase one of the speakers, is that they feel like  they’re trying to hold back the water in a leaky dam as new leaks spring up all around.  Rep. Jill Schuup (D-82) put it well:

… We go to to Jefferson city and we have all these ideas, and all these things we support, and the communities we want to represent, and the constituencies that we care about, and we get there and, being in a very small minority most of, a lot of  what I think we are doing is doing our best to keep things from moving forward as quickly as they are … it is hard to enforce the dam when there are so few of us.

The comparison that came to my mind as I listened was the famous last stand at the battle of Thermopylae where a small Spartan force valiantly defended the Pass of Thermopylae from the larger force of invading Persians. As Rep. Margo McNeil put it, the GOP is “at war with women, the working class and the middle class and with public education.” But, unlike Wisconsin, she added “if we walked out, they’d keep going … We have to stay, we have to fight the fight.”

The other major theme was the sense that Missouri’s real problems, especially endemic unemployment, are either being addressed unrealistically or being shunted aside. The GOP-dominated legislature plays backup for the Chamber of Commerce and pitches to those who can still get fired up by wedge issues. As Margo McNeil remarked, about the GOP efforts to fix the economy, “Fix-the-Six is like deep-six the working class.” Kirkton added that:

Our attention is not focused on what we said we would do which is create jobs …. We have the English only bill, we have the abortion bill, we’re overturning prop B probably next week … we also have bills that are attacking teachers.

Add the anti-Sharia bill and you get the point of Rep. Tallboy’s (D-37) remark, quoted by Kirkton, that “we’re running out of groups to pick on.” This effort to divide people and the misguided economic policies that are being proposed, as Mott-Oxford observed, “will condemn us to mediocrity in every way … bigotry will cost in terms of jobs.”

Well said, and sadly, too true.

Questions and summaries of answers will be given in subsequent posts:

When Rep. Will Kraus, R-Dist. 48, switched into anti-gay mode and ranted about the “homosexual agenda” on the House floor early this week, Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford, R-St. Louis, thought she might slow him up a bit by asking: “Could you tell me what that agenda is? I didn’t get the memo.” As she told me, “When I get up in the morning, my agenda is usually to check my e-mail, do my leg loosening exercises, and make sure Dorothy’s mom’s meds are laid out.”

Don’t think your question fooled him for a second, Ms. Oxford. He-e-e knows. HE-E-E knows what your agenda is, lady. … And he’s not going to dignify your smart-ass inquiry with an answer. But he and Jane Cunningham and Sally Kern know what you’re up to.

The Republican obsession with gays would be almost cute, if it weren’t so dangerous.

Let me illustrate by giving the backstory on Kraus’ rant. He was protesting a bill introduced by Sara Lampe, D-Springfield, to undo the zip-a-lip legislation Jane Cunningham got enacted on the anti-bullying issue. Cunningham got all horrified that school districts conducting anti-bullying training were often specifying as part of that training that threatening gays was not a very civil way to behave. So Cunningham got a bill passed saying that such training could not specify categories of people that ought not to be bullied–like people of a different race, ethnicity, religion … or sexual orientation. Cunningham’s take was that handing out the vague advice that bullying is bad ought to be sufficient. Let people extrapolate from that for themselves.

To counter the notion that such vague advice works well enough, Oxford told me about a junior high student in her district who wore a rainbow belt buckle to school and got told that she was going to get her ass kicked at the bus stop. That was scary enough to get the girl to mention the threats to a couple of teachers, to no avail. So the girl asked Oxford and Scott Emmanuel to accompany her in a visit to her principal.

For all the good that did. The principal asked the girl if she had told anyone she was gay, and the girl said she had told one person that she thought she might be. The principal’s conclusion: then the threats are your own fault. You should have kept the information secret.

So much for extrapolation.

Except that I have a wee bit of extrapolating to do. Considering, as Sean at Fired Up! pointed out a week ago, that 16 House Democrats have yet to see even one of their bills so much as assigned to a committee, isn’t it surprisingly kind of the Republican leadership to let Lampe’s amendment make it as far as the floor? It’s not like it had a prayer (if you’ll excuse me for bordering on heresy) of passing, even after Lampe weakened it to say that each school district could decide for itself which categories to mention or leave out.

Could it be that House Republicans wanted an excuse to get publicly angry and righteous for the troops back home? And then publicly vote the amendment down?

Mind you, that’s just a guess.

From MNEA lobbyist Otto Fajen:

“We’re the people you hire to protect you from the people you elect.”

From Rep. Chris Kelly, D-Columbia:

“Oh, I’m sure we and all Missourians will be better off when we pass that “Freedom to pray” constitutional amendment.  After all, it is just a much simpler alternative to health care.”

From Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford, commenting on the House Republicans’ refusal to accept $100 million in free Medicaid funds a year because that would be offering “welfare” to “able bodied adults”:

“It’s funny what we call welfare and what we don’t. When we help millionaires and billionaires build a baseball stadium, we don’t call it welfare.”

Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-O’Fallon) was caught flat out lying about her statement that fathers aren’t nurturers.

To give some context, Davis proposed a scholarship for stay at home moms to go back to school after their children are older. Sounds great, but she excluded stay at home dads from the same legislation. This wasn’t a simple oversight, either – she actually was quoted as saying men aren’t natural nurturers, in part because they can’t breast feed.

And now she’s lying about saying that:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3359217&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

And remember, this is the chair of the the House Children and Families Committee, the one Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford can’t serve on because certain colleagues found her “offensive.”

Jeanette Mott Oxford is the ranking Democrat of a committee she’s not on. Word.

Despite the pressure from House Democrats for Republicans to put her back on the Children and Families Committee, despite her thirty years experience as an advocate for children, the poor, and working-class families, and despite the fact that other Democrats turned down the appointment before Ron Richard found someone willing to fill the slot, Richard has kicked her off Children and Families where she has served for four years. And he won’t explain why.

Since being on that committee was Oxford’s top priority for this legislative session, and since none of the other Ds on it have ever served there before, the Democratic leadership registered its outrage by appointing her the ranking Democrat, even though she only “serves” by staying in touch with other Dems–you know, the ones who actually get to attend the committee meetings.

Normally, a situation like this wouldn’t arise, because Democrats would get to choose which of their number would serve on given committees, but Children and Families is one of the 26 committees that Rod Jetton converted from a Standing Committee to a Special Committee, so that Republicans would have complete say-so over the members. Richard converted 18 of the 26 back to Standing Committees, but not this one. People are puzzling over why he so adamantly wants Oxford off of there.

Democrats have heard that Richard’s Chief of Staff, Jeff Brooks, said the GOP caucus finds her “highly offensive.” Richard and Brooks deny that Brooks said it, but even if he did, who knows what he found offensive? Sylvester Brown, a Post-Dispatch columnist, explored the question today and quoted Joan Briccetti, an arts management consultant who lives in Mott Oxford’s district:

“Knowing the gentlemen in Jefferson City, I’m not surprised. They might have problems that she’s a woman, a lesbian, a liberal, that she’s overweight or a combination of all those things,” Briccetti said.

Considering who the new head of the committee is, the lesbian issue looks likely. Cynthia Davis, family values wingnut extraordinaire, now heads the committee. Reports I hear are that she’s a sweet natured person but that, ideologically, she’s out in left field. No wait. What I mean is that she’s so far out in right field that she’s jumped the bleachers and left the stadium.

When I talked to Representative Oxford earlier this week, she mentioned that the former head of the committee, Ward Franz, had been a fair person to work with, that he gave Democrats a chance to express their opinions.

Well, she’s not getting a chance to express her opinion in that committee these days. Maybe that is because Davis objects to her lesbian lifestyle–as many on the internet assume. Brown again:

Liberal organizations and gay and lesbian groups across the country are spreading the story, via the Web, about a Missouri politician who was punished because of her lifestyle.

Or maybe Cynthia Davis has nothing to do with it. Whatever the real reason, Ron Richard is unlikely to cave and let Jeanette onto the committee. He’s pulled up stubborn and maintains that he finally settled on appointing Mike Corcoran  because “he’s one of my favorite guys.”

Fine. You want to feed us that nonsense? Go ahead. But I thought you prided yourself on being tough, on being a “bad actor” when people push you too hard. Really? How much harder are we going to have to push before you abandon that weak-assed lie?

Is new House Speaker, Republican Ron Richard, less partisan than Rod Jetton? Hell, yeah. A raging bull would probably be less partisan than Jetton. Less devious, for starters.

Take the “special committee” issue, for example. The difference between standing committees and special committees is that standing committees work on issues that need attention every year, whereas special committees deal with one-time topics. Usually, a House Speaker appoints one or two special committees per session. For example, a special committee was formed in 2005 when the school funding formula had to be decided.

And the rules specify that the Speaker appoints all the members to a special committee. Standing committees are different: each party decides which of its own members will serve on them. When it came to creating special committees, Jetton was a sailor on a drunken spree. He had 26, almost all of them converted from standing committees. Those moves allowed him to shuffle Democrats off of any committees where he thought they might prove inconvenient.  

Ron Richard has reduced those 26 to 8. Much better, don’t you know. But even so, six of those used to be standing committees. Democrats tried to get those six changed back, to no avail. But Richard did allow Minority Leader Paul LeVota to choose his own appointments to the special committees, subject to Richard’s approval. And in “subject to his approval” lay the rub. He ousted Democratic members off five of what used to be standing committees and substituted other Dems.

For example, one low profile committee regulates professional registration. It deals with licensure for doctors, lawyers, anybody that needs to be licensed. Big deal, you might say. But actually it is, because the members get to know a lot of professional people around the state and that makes it easier for them to raise campaign money. Jason Kander and Vicki Englund, both freshman legislators who are on the House Democratic Campaign Committee, were blocked from the professional licensing and registration committee. They were replaced by Democrats Charlie Norr and Michael Spreng, who is term limited out in 2010. Finish Richard’s line of reasoning for yourself, then: Kander and Englund will work to raise money for House Democrats, therefore ….

Richard also knocked LeVota’s choice off The Special Standing Committee on Emerging Issues in Agriculture (read: Committee on CAFOs). Tom Shively, who opposes CAFOs, was replaced with Rachel Bringer, who supports them.

The Special Standing Committee on Workforce Development and Workplace Safety (formerly the Labor Committee) lost its union Democrat, Mike Frame, in favor of Democrat Terry Swinger from Caruthersville. Not exactly a hotbed of union sentiment, Caruthersville.

Richard took T.D. El-Amin, from the city of St. Louis, off the Special Standing Committee on Urban Issues and replaced him with Vicki Englund from South St. Louis County.

And finally, Jeanette Mott Oxford, of St. Louis City, was removed from the Children and Families Committee. Oxford has twenty years experience addressing childhood poverty and public health issues. She is being replaced by Belinda Harris, who doesn’t want to be on the committee, because it’s not her area of interest and her plate is full already. In fact none of the other Democrats on the committee have served there before, so institutional memory will be sacrificed.

Oxford is appealing that decision. We’ll see. But let me just ask, what is the point of keeping someone with experience and interest in children’s issues off that committee?

Look, Ron Richard and Charlie Shields got bent out of shape–like the press–about Nixon banning cell phones in his office.

Richard told reporters he doesn’t like Nixon’s rule but will respect it — for now.

“But I didn’t stage a walkout like the press” was going to do [when asked to leave their cell phones outside], Richard said. “I’ll stand by this. I’ll work with anybody until I can’t work anymore, and then I can be a pretty bad actor. But I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m still pretty open-minded.”

Could we have a little perspective here? Speaker Richard, if you’re going to profess your interest in bipartisanship, then quit already with the power plays on special committees that shouldn’t be special. Or if you won’t go that far, at least ease up on the tough talk over cell phones. It’s a non-issue.

State rep Jeanette Mott Oxford has this two cents to put in on the Kinder pay scandal:

You know what really frosts me about this?! A while back (a year or two I think) the Family Services Division of the Dept. of Social Services won a $5 million bonus from the feds for the state of Missouri for their excellent performance on food stamp applications. I spoke with the State Workers Union (Local 6355 – of which I am a member), and we agreed that it would only be fair for some of that money to be given to the workers who earned the bonus for MO. We were told that Office of Administration can’t make temporary raises or bonus checks work for state workers. So why can Kinder get it done for his staff, when hard working FSD members can’t get a little bump that they deserve and need?

Well! It just makes me really mad.

Technically, the answer to Jeanette’s question is that state law forbids bonuses, meaning money for services already performed. Kinder arranged in advance to boost those salaries for the “staggering workload” his aides took on when another aide went on leave to work for a campaign. Never mind that the legislature wasn’t in session so that the workload was lighter than usual. Picky, picky.

The mistake those Social Services workers made was that they busted butt without a promise of more money, out of the goodness of their hearts and concern for folks struggling along on food stamps.

Kinder has zero tolerance for suckers like that.

In a letter to her constituents, Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford (D-St. Louis) wrote:

One of the most disgusting political tricks I have ever seen happened on April 30. While debating a bill to eliminate corporate taxes, a series of bogus amendments were offered that promised to restore Medicaid coverage to the 180,000 people who have been cut off since 2005. The mechanism to do so was a tax increase that borrowed some of the language from my own tax reform bill (House Bill 2131), but without the refundable tax credit portions that lower tax burden for about 60% of Missourians. It quickly became apparent that this was a purely political maneuver intended to secure a roll call vote that could become ammunition in negative campaign ads. Those who voted yes could be accused of voting for a tax increase; those who voted no could be accused of voting against restoring health coverage to persons on Medicaid.

I was outraged that a topic as serious as the Medicaid cuts could be turned into a shabby political trick. I grilled Rep. Muschany and Rep. Hunter about their amendments and then delivered a shaky, but heart-felt speech.

Click to listen to her pungent remarks:

I don’t know who interjected the remark about “preserve our decorum in the chamber”, but I’d guess it’s some irony-challenged Republican. It is indecorous to smugly present an amendment that mocks the suffering of those kicked off Medicaid–no matter how gentlemanly your demeanor is while you’re doing it.