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. 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.

The only North St. Louis County race for the House that is still in contention features an art teacher in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, Margo McNeil, attempting to retain Clint Zweifel’s seat against Republican T. R. Carr, the mayor of Hazelwood. Carr isn’t fessing up to his dark secret, namely that he’s the Republican in the race. Constituents find themselves faced with a choice between Democrat McNeil and Mayor Carr. Period. He could be a Whig for all that his literature tells you.

Let T.R. Carr sweep his party affiliation under the rug–who could blame him this year? McNeil, though, is a Democrat and proud of it: something of a policy wonk, in fact. When I mentioned that I don’t vote for sales taxes because they’re regressive, Margo had the facts about Missouri’s antiquated tax system at her fingertips. She mentioned that it was initiated in  1931, when $9,000 take home pay a year was as munificent as making $300 thou in current dollars. McNeil is not pleased that people making a measly $9,000 a year are taxed at the top rate.

McNeil has had years to accumulate her knowledge of policy. She was one of the founders, in the eighties, of the Missouri Women’s Network, a group that kept track of pending legislation and lobbied legislators. In fact, back in the day (before internet), she was in charge of the “post card alert” program that let the group’s members know when crucial legislation was scheduled to be heard. Then in the nineties, she devoted her efforts to the MO NEA.

You know you’ve got someone with a sense of this state’s legislative history if she can remember when post cards were as high tech as it got. Still, knowledge of the issues is all well and good, but only if a candidate can get elected. And Margo is facing someone with far more name ID than she has. He’s been the mayor. She’s … served on the Community College Board. That disadvantage is balanced out by the fact that she’s trying to keep Clint Zweifel’s seat, and Clint is very popular in that district. In 2002, he won the seat by an eyelash, but in 2004, he got 69.5 percent of the vote. That tally was so daunting that nobody even challenged him in 2006.

What’s more, Zweifel and Charlie Dooley have sent out mailers loudly proclaiming her to be the Democrat in the race, and Charlie even walked the turf with her. She’s got support from labor, women’s groups, education groups, and the Sierra Club. Their support is showing up on her balance sheet. The eight day before election report says she’s raised $91,901 all together, with an astounding $25,250 in the last reporting period alone. She’s been spending it, too. She’s down to just $1,601.

Carr has been less well funded, with a total of $44,905–$11,325 of it raised in the last reporting period–and 24,240 on hand. Looks like he’s planning a big last minute blast of … something.

Whatever that may be, my money is on McNeil to hold this seat for the Dems. Not by 69.5 percent. But if she just gets in by half an eyelash, she’ll prove herself.

This race isn’t going to be a blowout, so if you live anywhere close to her, feel free to offer your services. And if you live halfway across the state, well, there’s always ActBlue.