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:

Jill Schupp told me how she spent her summer vacation: campaigning for other Democrats running for state rep. Amid all the tedium of door knocking and phone calling, she did have some excitement–one harrowing moment. She and some other campaigners were leaving a parish picnic where at least a thousand people had gathered and where they had been campaigning for Cyrus Dashtaki. The car (Schupp wasn’t driving) suddenly speeded up on its own while the driver had it in reverse. It went downhill backwards through a parking lot, through an area where lots of people were walking, through another parking lot and finally down a hill where it ran into a fence. No one was hurt, all of the pedestrians managed to get out of the way, no other cars were damaged. But Schupp realized “sort of the risk that I was putting people in by just taking them around the state to do this.” The people with Schupp were rooting extra hard for Dashtaki to win because they had–and she laughed as she said–“sure been through a lot of trouble to help him.”

Unfortunately, Dashtaki was another of the fine candidates who did not prevail. As was Carl Thompson, who was running to replace term limited Rachel Bringer. Bringer, a rep who studied issues carefully, had taken it upon herself to get the freshman Democrats together each session so that she could bring them up to speed on what was happening and answer their questions. Schupp will miss Rachel Bringer, and now that seat won’t even be filled by the man that Bringer had high hopes for.

Among those Schupp helped who did get elected is Susan Carlson, who will be taking Rachel Storch’s place. Schupp characterized Carlson as “a wonderful, a brilliant attorney” who will do a superb job. Another success was Clem Smith. Schupp and some of her friends–as well as her parents–made phone calls for Smith in the primary. He was running in a safe Democratic district to replace Don Calloway, who gave up that seat to run for the senate.

This brief video will give you the flavor of some of the other races Schupp talked about: Jeanne Kirkton’s, Rebecca McClanahan’s, Courtney Cole’s, and Kelly Schultz’s.

Schupp ended her summer of campaigning for other candidates by holding a fundraiser at her house in Creve Coeur. It was well attended. Democrats, who came to listen to and shake hands with Nixon, Montee, Zweifel, and Koster, donated almost $110,000. Which, along with all the other donations Democratic candidates garnered, still meant that the Ds were way outspent.

But Schupp doesn’t blame our bad year on money woes alone. She stresses that Democrats did not work hard enough to get out a positive message. On both the state and national levels, we could have stressed the values we believe in and emphasized the disaster that stimulus funds averted. And we should have trumpeted the advantages of health care reform on the jobs front. Once national health care gets put into place in our state, not only will more people get much needed care, but more people will be employed. There will be new jobs available for health care providers as well as in the ancillary businesses that spring up to support the providers. Schupp is excited about that and thinks Democrats should have claimed their bragging rights.

But Democrats didn’t have that unified message. As a result, there will be the Heinz 57 in the House this session: 57 Democrats to 106 Republicans. Those Dems will need to be unified, she says. She has some ideas about how to achieve that. More on that later.

It’s a summer Saturday in an election year, so I guess I know what Rep. Jeanne Kirkton is doing: knocking on doors, like candidates all over the state. Last Saturday, one of the hottest so far this year, I went to the freshman representative’s house, where a group of a dozen or so activists, after socializing for a few minutes over bagels and cream cheese, were getting down to the business of divvying up canvassing assignments.

It was going to be in the low nineties before noon–and humid. So this was a hard core bunch–of all ages from early twenties to … how old would you say Rep. Jill Schupp’s Aunt Harriet is?

Maybe you’re wondering what freshman Rep. Schupp was doing (that’s her, second from the left) working for Kirkton instead of knocking doors in her own district. Creve Coeur, Schupp’s area, is after all only 51.2 DPI (Democratic Performance Index).

So it’s not like a Democrat can take that seat for granted. Except that this time around Schupp can, because, by some freak occurrence, she has no Republican challenger. Thus she’s helping out her friend in Webster Groves, which is another iffy district for us with its 52 or so DPI.

Kirkton (in the foreground) spoke briefly, making her helpers aware that she had gotten a bill passed which made property tax assessments less volatile. She said the voters in this upscale neighborhood love hearing that. When Rea Kleeman asked for more details about the law, Kirkton provided them, but she got a burst of laughter when she said that people haven’t been asking for the details. They just like the bottom line.

She knew what an experienced crew she had, so once she’d covered a few basics about organization, she let people disperse.

They picked up their walk lists and maps and got busy covering saturating the area.

There were plenty of doors where the best a body could do was leave a door knocker (maybe on another of the many century old homes in the area) and move on.

But of course, there were plenty of residents to talk to, some of them–even this fella who told Jane Bruss he leans toward being conservative–downright friendly.

Kirkton is glad for all the help she can get, this year especially. In her first run for the House, she was able to cover much more of the territory early in the year because she didn’t have to be in Jeff City until mid May. Her canvassing routine was further disrupted in May and early June because she was called upon to help care for a sick aunt.

But she’s back at it these days. She stayed out all day last Saturday–I wilt at the very thought–and Sunday afternoon. She’s out every evening. Just because she’s the incumbent doesn’t mean she can relax. Her Republican opponent, Rich Magee, is an attorney with his own practice. He’s the mayor of Glendale, one of the suburbs in that district, and he’s chair of the County Republican Committee. So he’s out knocking on doors himself, with every intention of giving Kirkton a serious challenge. In a year when Democrats aren’t expecting as strong a turnout as they had in ’08, Kirkton can’t afford to take her opponent lightly.

Jeanne Kirkton said wryly, when I interviewed her in ’08, that knocking on doors is “an acquired taste.” Conscientious campaigners like her not only acquire that taste, they wear out a couple of pairs of walking shoes before the election is over.

When Rep. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur, won election last fall to her first term in the House, her predecessor, Sam Page, advised her to be on the floor whenever it was in session, learning the ropes. She and three other progressive freshman women from St. Louis spoke to the West County Dems on Monday, and she commented on his advice:

So I think each one of us actually were among the few who were always on the House floor, always paying attention, trying to not only hear the debate but follow the processes. And I think it served each of us well.

Even if they paid attention, though, Jeanne Kirkton says they were lucky if they could keep from being caught flat footed.

Hmm. Reminds me of the way congressional Republicans kept the pharmaceutical bill open on the House floor into the wee hours of the night till they could twist enough arms to pass their bad legislation.

The Dems got Congress back not too long after that fiasco, and–with redistricting looming after the next election–2010 is the year it has to happen in Missouri.

Did freshman Democratic representatives Margo McNeil, Florissant, and Jill Schupp, Creve Coeur, even serve in the same legislature this year? It doesn’t sound like it when they describe their committee experiences. They and two other freshman Democratic women from the St. Louis area–Vicki Englund, South St. Louis County, and Jeanne Kirkton, Webster Groves–spoke Monday at the West County Dems meeting about the committees they served on. McNeil loved the Health Care committee she served on because it actually got some useful legislation passed.

Our house sits on a three acre tract, and if I could leave 2 1/2 acres of it behind and transport the building from Ferguson to Webster Groves, it would be worth almost twice as much money. Location, location, location.

Webster Groves (HD 91) isn’t top tier wealth, but it’s affluent. And it’s been in Republican hands for as long as Jeanne Kirkton, who’s lived there for 28 years, can recall.

Kirkton’s just a quiet spoken, retired nurse–who bids fair to wrest that prize from GOP hands.

She’ll face either Randy Jotte, an ER doctor at Barnes, or Joan McGivney, who’s been on the city council and the school board. Jotte, by far the better funded (with $29,940 in receipts at the end of the first quarter as opposed to McGivney’s $8,007) is a social conservative (anti-choice, anti-stem cell research) in a district not known for being hard right on social issues. McGivney, who is pro-choice, might fit the demographics better.

Kirkton, with $38,340 has slightly more money than the other two put together, so this race isn’t the classic they’ve got the money/we’ve got the shoe leather contest. In this case, Kirkton, who is well funded because she’s popular among local progressives, has also got a new pair of tennis shoes and the will to wear out several pairs.

Jeanne says that door knocking is “an acquired taste”. She has so far finished knocking on doors in Oakland and almost all of Glendale, and she’s heading into Webster. “I will get through this district more than once.”

Until 2006, Webster was a safe seat for the Rs:

2000: Fares(R) 54.1, Webb(D)45.9

2002: Fares (R) 57.5, Sifton (D) 42.5

2004: Fares (R) 82.6, Henry (Green) 17.4

But last time around, Jim Trout came within a hair: Fares–50.7, Trout–49.3. He lost by 149 votes out of 17,275–against a well established incumbent. Now it’s an open seat. And there’s this to consider, as well: Jeanne ran for Gibbons’ state Senate seat in 2004. She lost the race 51.9 to 46.4, but in HD 91, she got 51 percent of the vote.

Tally up the reasons why Republicans should worry about HD 91: Kirkton has sufficient money, an acquired taste for hard work, a shot at an open seat, a big Democratic year, a winning vote total in that district once before, AND she clearly is principled.

The issue she is most fervent about, of course–since her husband is a doctor and she’s a nurse–is health care.

The thing that kills me about single-payer is that it’s the most fiscally conservative way to manage health care, and yet the conservatives scream and scream about it. It’s ironic.

Granted, Webster Groves residents aren’t in the habit of going without health care, but don’t think they’re not feeling the bite. Putting the issue in terms of what makes fiscal sense will sell, with lots of them, especially when she pleads for compassion as well:

Just imagine if you have a young child who wakes up with a bellyache. Should you watch him suffer, or should you go to the ER and be billed two or three times as much as people with health coverage. It’s immoral.

Jeanne says that if she could do any single thing as a state rep, she’d want to at least make sure that all children had health care.

Coming in as a close second on her agenda is the environment. She’s been on “about every environmental board you can name” and is especially proud of having convinced her fellow city council members to create a green task force, a sustainability commission that will get going this summer. She gets goosebumps thinking about the possibilities. The city posted openings on the nine member commission and is being flooded with applications from a range of highly qualified people.

Finally, like a true Democrat, Kirkton is concerned about public schools. She recognizes the need for more school funding and the need for smaller class sizes. She says: “Almost every adult can remember a teacher who made him feel special.” The larger the class sizes, the less likely that those important relationships will happen–or just that a student will get help when he needs it. Vouchers, it goes without saying, are not the way to improve education, in Jeanne’s book.

Considering that Jeanne’s done such yeoman work at raising funds, I asked her what she thought of public campaign finance. It’s an issue she’s paid attention to. Without hesitation, she said that Maine’s and North Carolina’s public financing system is putting candidates where they ought to be: at people’s doors instead of on the phone raising funds.

If and when Jeanne takes that seat this fall, the Republicans will have Mike Gibbons to blame. Kirkton got involved in politics because she attended the Million Mom March in 2000, became good friends with Stacey Newman and Jill Schupp, and worked against the concealed weapons bill with Stacey. When Gibbons cast the deciding vote to enable concealed weapons–despite the fact that 80 percent of his constituents opposed it–she was furious. Somebody ought to challenge that man, she kept saying. And finally, her friends started saying, “Why not you?” Why not, indeed? she finally decided.

She lost her 2004 challenge to Gibbons. But she built name recognition in her House district, and now Jotte or McGivney, whichever one it turns out to be, is going to face a tougher race than Kathlyn Fares ever had to.

I’m not saying the race is a slam dunk, but Republican leaders have got to be uneasy about this formerly safe seat.