It’s not like Rep. Bert Atkins, D-Florissant, didn’t know before he got to Jeff City that Republicans will vote against common sense legislation out of pure ideology, but seeing is believing. And he had just seen it happen again when I walked up to him Tuesday to talk about his experience as a freshman legislator.

We had both heard Republican Ed Emory expounding into the mike about the terrible idea of instituting a quality rating system for pre-schools and insisting that such a system takes parents further out of the loop in making decisions about their children’s education.

Huh?

A quality rating system would tell parents what kind of educational opportunity their child would receive at a given pre-school. Some schools cost more than others; parents need to know if that’s because a given school actually offers more than others. The QRS would give them some solid information to help them decide whether additional money would be well spent. Maybe they can’t afford a five star (or whatever the rating system would be) school, but four stars is still pretty good and perhaps they can afford that. It would take some of the guesswork out of the decision.

How is giving them that guidance taking parents out of the loop, Bert wanted to know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Republicans distrust “government intrusion,” but this proposal would not be very intrusive. Participation is completely voluntary. Even the schools operating out of someone’s home could choose to participate or not. That’s called minimal intrusiveness with maximum helpfulness. And anyway, so what if the rating system is–gasp–intrusive? So are speed limits and Sunshine laws. One man’s “intrusion” is another man’s “safeguard”.

The amendment was not stripped from the omnibus education bill that failed on Tuesday, and perhaps several Republicans voted against the bill to protect Missourians from such government intrusion.

Whatever. Bert was shaking his head. He’s seen an awful lot of such nonsense in the last four months.

To fully appreciate Bert Atkins’ candidacy, first you have to know the backstory:

In late April, Democratic Representative Bruce Darrough (HD75 in North St. Louis County) unexpectedly withdrew from the primary race for his district. The other person who had filed in the primary was Representative Juanita Head Walton’s brother, Charles.

Uh-oh. Head’s brother-in-law, Elbert Walton, uses his Unity PAC to run a slate of candidates in North St. Louis County every election year. Sometimes when one of his people gets elected to a city council or fire department board, Walton is hired as that entity’s attorney and, lo and behold, it turns out that that poor city or that poor fire board needs extensive legal work at top prices. Not that they can afford it, but they pay. Boy, do they pay.

I’ve written about Walton:

here

here

here

and here.

Walton has made it plain that he wants more African-Americans in elected office. Unfortunately, his focus on race seems to have generated some bad results: allegations of racial intimidation have been leveled at Walton and his people from time to time. Just this week, an article in the Post-Dispatch chronicled the latest complaint from a white deputy chief who was nudged pretty hard into early retirement in the Northeast Ambulance and Fire District.  

When Darrough withdrew from the race last April, North St. Louis County progressives did not have to fret long over the prospect of Walton’s brother-in-law going unopposed in the primary. Anytime a representative withdraws after the filing date, filing immediately reopens. And the man who had been planning to run when Darrough was termed out in 2010 stepped up to the plate: Bert Atkins.

No Republican is running in the general; the primary is the last stop for this district this year. And Bert is the kind of person you want winning this primary. He’s focusing on health care, full funding for schools, and protecting working people, speaking of which: Bert is a working guy; he’s a machinist at Boeing, so he’s gotten quite a bit of labor support. Of the $12,265 he had taken in at the end of the second quarter, he had eleven  $325 contributions from labor groups, one from the MNEA, and others from various local Democratic groups.

If Unity PAC is helping out Charles Head, though, I don’t see it. Head filed a limited activity report with the Ethics Commission.

But enough about crass money matters. Let’s look at what Bert hopes to focus on as a representative.

On health care he hits the same theme that most Democrats are hammering home this year: that the Republican legislature has put its eggs into the tax credits for jobs basket, with little to show for it. And they’re paying for those tax credits with Medicaid cuts–cuts that have cost the state almost two billion dollars in federal matching funds so far.

And our Medicaid policy is so stingy that even those who can get it suffer from odd quirks in it. They can apply for an electric wheelchair, for example, but not for the batteries to run it. Anybody poor enough to eke Medicaid payments out of this state is going to be scrounging for pennies on the sidewalk in an attempt to pay for batteries. Same story with people who need oxygen. They can get the apparatus but not the oxygen bottles. We’re talking here about people who live on about $800 a month. They can eat and maybe have a roof or they can breathe. Some choice.

Bert is outraged about Republican hardheartedness. He’s also distressed at what they’ve done to the funding formula for schools. When Republicans rewrote the school funding formula, they allowed less for districts than many districts were currently drawing. That didn’t mean that such districts suddenly got less money, but it did mean that they could get no raises in funding until such time as the built in annual increases caught up with them.

If District A, for example, had been getting $10 million a year from the state, the new formula might say the district was entitled to $8 million, with annual increases built in to account for inflation. Until those annual increases finally inched up to $10 million for District A, that school system would get no annual raises. Their income would be frozen for years, thus throwing the burden of new costs onto local property tax payers. (And by the way, Republicans are now howling about the unfairness of rising property taxes.) You can see the rock and the hard place wedging in our schools.

The beauty of the full funding change, from a Republican perspective, is that it’s complicated enough that few citizens will comprehend how their schools got screwed–and who is responsible.

Bert is incensed.

And, finally, he wants to stop Republican attacks on working people. He’s proud of the union movement’s commitment in this arena. Unions worked, for example, to get the minimum wage raised, even though union members make much more than the minimum wage.

Bert’s out there knocking on doors every week. He’s got eleven more days to get his message out. He says that at bottom his message is that he tries to conduct his life so that any part of it that came to light could go into a front page newspaper headline without embarrassing him–or his mother.

Maybe Charles Head feels the same way. I don’t know. All I know about him is that he has no background politically, but that he has a brother-in-law I wouldn’t trust as far as I can spit.