A television commercial running this evening in the Kansas City media market:

Right to work. It has nothing to do with rights or work. It’s about greed. It’s about CEOs who make around three hundred and sixty times what the average worker makes getting more. And it’s about politicians overreaching to give big out of state corporations who fill their campaign coffers more power to cut wages and benefits. Right to work isn’t right and it doesn’t work. Call Governor Nixon. Thank him for protecting our workers and opposing so called right to work law.

[Call Governor Nixon

855-463-8386

Thank him for

opposing

right to work]

[MiddleclassMO.org

Paid for by Preserve Middle Class America]

Previously:

HB 116 & 569: great moments in legislative prognostication (February 11, 2015)

Not so smart ALECs (May 12, 2015)

A reminder (May 12, 2015)

Today the republican controlled Missouri Senate shutdown a filibuster to pass ALEC promoted anti-labor legislation:

Alex Stuckey ‏@alexdstuckey

There are only 14 known previous questions raised in @MissouriSenate since 1867 #moleg #RightToWork 6:25 PM – 12 May 2015

Scott Sifton ‏@ScottSifton

Today the lines were drawn between those who stand with working families and those who stand against them. 8:20 PM – 12 May 2015

A year ago:

Dude, you’ve got bigger problems than an out of the way blog with dozens of readers (May 6, 2014)

We just received this Facebook message from someone identified as [Representative] Keith English. We have no idea if it really is him.

A Facebook message from Representative Keith English? Really?

Keith English

Thanks

RIGHT TO WORK AND

PAYCHECK IS GONE FOR 2

YEARS.. THANKS

Sent from Jefferson City, MO

[….]

It’s in the republicans’ nature.

That nice office location ain’t lookin’ so good anymore, eh?

Previously:

HB 116 & 569: great moments in legislative prognostication (February 11, 2015)

Not so smart ALECs (May 12, 2015)

From Catherine Hanaway’s “How to become Governor of Missouri” checklist:

1. Goal: Find a simpatico billionaire to pave the roads with gold.

Achievements to date:

— Nearly $1 million dollars from one donor, megabucks political meddler, Rex Sinquefield.

Next steps:

— Ask Rex what he wants; submit bill.

2. Goal: Make nice with GOP crazy wing.

Achievements to date:

— Channeled the spirit of Todd Akin; attributed poverty, depravity and pedophilia to female sexual autonomy.

— Kudos from Constitutional Party, holly-rollier-than-thou, Cynthia Davis who responds to the Akin imitation with thanks to “brave women, like Catherine Hanaway, for having the courage and moral fortitude to speak the truth” about the sluts who “who have been beguiled into making their bodies available to men outside of Holy Matrimony.”

Next steps:

— Continue talking about keeping the sluts barefoot, pregnant and under Big Daddy’s thumb.

— With the understanding, of course, none of that talk applies to educated, rich Republican women who run for office.

3. Goal: Make nice with Missouri GOP power-brokers.

Achievements to date:

Endorsements:

— Former Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator Kit Bond – will put loyalty to former employees and friends over policy differences.  

— Former GOP National Committee Missouri member Ann Dickinson – goes where Kit Bond leads.

— Very connected U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner – all in for Hanaway – and why not since she’s the GOPs A-1 talent scout for women who can mouth the Republican anti-women line without retching.

— State Rep. Ed Emery, ALEC’s main man in Missouri.

Next Steps:

— Take a loyalty oath to ALEC.

— Hit the country club circuit.

4. Goal: Squash the other main GOP primary contender, Tom Schweich, like a bug.

Achievements to date:

— Long Version: Read former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth’s eulogy for Tom Schweich to get the whole story.

— Short Version: Read TPM’s description of the way the old, political one-two works – or what Hanaway supporters and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bill McCellan want to call politics as usual.

— Issued statement after announcement of Schweich’s suicide about what a mensch he was … oops! Make that what an “extraordinary man with an extraordinary record of service to our state and nation.”

Next Steps:

— Suspend campaign, lie low and maybe State GOP Chair and former Hanaway oppo researcher John Hancock will take all the heat.

* Edited slightly; inadvertently omitted text added back under achievements on 4th point.

It seems that the State Senate is doing something to try to put the kibosh on all the recent talk about corruption in the Missouri legislature. Wednesday they approved a bill (SB11) that would close a loophole that allows lobbyists to “wine and dine” groups of legislators without reporting the individuals who drank and dined on their dime. If the bill makes it to and through the House in its present form, it would also prohibit legislators from going to work as lobbyists until after a two-year “cooling” off period.

Efforts to amend the bill to eliminate or control lobbyists gifts and to cap campaign donations were discarded via procedural means or defeated through voice votes, both mechanisms that allow lawmakers to avoid going on the record in support of corrupt practices. So essentially, the Missouri Senate voted only for “transparency,” which is Missouri legislative speak for saying that now we will probably get to know more about who has bought our politicians although we can’t do much about it. Whoopeee! Oh, and special interests have to wait to buy statehouse influence in the form of ex-pols.

There is, though, one more provision that is especially interesting. The bill, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Ron Richard, would prohibit out-of-state travel paid for by lobbyists with the exception of “a nonprofit organization hosting an educational event.” Sounds benign, doesn’t it? But think again.

I suspect entities like the corporate funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) qualify as such a nonprofit organization. But ALEC also offers a “corporate-funded scholarship program” that flies “politicians across the country for ALEC conferences at luxury hotels, where they are wined and dined by lobbyists.” These meetings are often justified as “educational.” Would ALEC’s non-profit status protect the relationship it has with many Missouri legislators?  The organization claims it has ties to at least 57 Missouri lawmakers. According to NPR:

ALEC is sort of almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians, and many of America’s biggest companies. It brings them together much as a dating service would do. It sits them in rooms behind closed doors where three times a year they come together to think about what should be the next wave of state-based legislation and they have presentations from the companies that say what they would like to see done legislatively in states right across America. Then they have a vote and the legislators begin. Hundreds of state legislators across America belong to ALEC and come to these meetings.

ALEC pays for legislators to attend meetings where, as Progress Missouri puts it, “corporations hand Missouri legislators wish lists in the form of ‘model’ legislation that often directly benefit their bottom line at the expense of Missouri families,”  and  our representatives then “pass-off the bills as their own ideas and important public policy innovations without disclosing that corporations crafted and pre-voted on the bills at closed-door meetings with legislators who are part of ALEC.”

Two such ALEC-type bills have just been introduced into the Missouri House. Rep. Eric Burlison (R-133) and Rep. Courtney Curtis (D-073) are fronting classic ALEC right-to-work bills. Both bills would “disallow labor unions from charging non-union members fees for representing them when workers collectively bargain.”

Burlison mouths the standard ALEC line; he claims that he’s interested in saving “jobs” and contends that asking non-union workers to pay their share for their union-secured benefits scares off those elusive and fragile job-creators conservatives keep telling us about. He does  have a novel if somewhat logic-challenged response to the charge that right-to-work depresses wages: he asserts that his right-to-work  “might cut those wages that are ‘artificially inflated’ by unions, but denied the policy might hurt an employee’s bottom line.” Hnnnh? Curtis, on the other hand, claims that his interest in right-to-work stems from concerns about racial discrimination by unions – in spite of the fact that in hearings on the bill African-American labor union members contested his assertions.

Neither of the sponsors acknowledge a debt to ALEC. However, Progress Missouri analyzed both bills, HB116 and HB569, along with similar ALEC model legislation and the resemblance is notable. Burlison has been explicitly identified as one of the Missouri ALEC acolytes.

If my reading of the provision concerning out-of-state travel is correct in regard to corporate-funded entities such as ALEC, the legislation that the Missouri Senate just passed would do nothing discourage lawmakers like Burlison who are willing to shill ALEC wares in our statehouse. The 47-57 Missouri lawmakers with ALEC ties will continue to attend ALEC meetings, often on the ALEC dime, and bring home ALEC’s wishlist which they will then visit on the unsuspecting citizens of the state.

Apropos of the efforts to amend his legislation to make it strong enough to be meaningful, Senator Richard asserted that “ethics bills had died for the last four years because they attempted to cover too many issues.” If that is the case then his bill should pass easily since it does practically nothing except possibly, in some cases, shine a little more light on who’s making it big at the corporate swap-meet in Jefferson City.

*Paragraph beak added between 2nd and 3rd paragraph from the bottom.

   

“…We have to understand that right now the corporate interests are running this place. You have ALEC, you have the Koch brothers, you have Sinquefield, and they are throwing huge amounts of money and the common folk are getting lost…”

Henry Grubb, the Democratic Party candidate in the 53rd Legislative District, spoke at a meeting of Johnson County Democrats last night:

Henry Grubb (D): Um, I’m gonna tell you a story about why I ran, uh, and I’ve told this and I think the Democratic club down here heard it, but there are a lot of people that didn’t.

I went down to the, uh, to the veto session last September and I was not in favor of the tax cuts and I was standing up in the stands, I was up in the gallery. And there was a young, well, there was, the legislator that stood up and she was opposed to the tax cuts and she had been an elementary teacher, obviously in her previous career. And she said, we have to, uh, not have these tax cuts because it’ll hurt the children. And people started laughing all around. There’s some pretty rough people in the crowd that day and they started laughing at her. And I was like, oh, this isn’t good. And about three legislators later a gentleman, using the term loosely, got up and spoke and he was, uh, he was in favor of the tax cuts. And he used her voice, with his male adult voice, and he mocked her. And he did, we shouldn’t do this because. And everybody in the place started laughing. Speaker Jones didn’t, didn’t cut them off very quickly, kind of let it roll. And I was like, Oh my god. I was, I was disgusted at how, it wasn’t really mean, but it was snarky. It was snide like you get from sophomores, all right.

And I taught high school for thirty-one years, I’m on the Odessa School Board, and I’ve been on board for fourteen years, not consecutively, took time off for a while, uh, and I left there going, why would anybody, Gary [Grigsby] or I, in our right mind really want to be down there? And about Thanksgiving some people in the Odessa area and the Lexington area came to me and they asked me to run. And my first reaction was, why? Why would I want to run? And, turns out that a very good friend of mine who served on the Odessa School Board, he’s also the head of a labor organization in Kansas City, said, Henry, if you don’t run your just gonna leave it to the people like that who are down there. And I went, guilt trip city here we come. And so, that’s why I’m running,

And, and I can tell you all about the things that I’m for. Uh, I could probably roll over on Gary and say I’m for everything that Gary’s for and I think that’s pretty good.

We have to understand that right now the corporate interests are running this place. You have ALEC, you have the Koch brothers, you have Sinquefield, and they are throwing huge amounts of money and the common folk are getting lost. Did you know that the biggest economic class in America now are the working poor? Now think about that for while. When people that are my age graduated from high school there were all those good, good paying jobs. You didn’t need a high school education. Well, you know what? They’re not there anymore. And the Republicans don’t care. The Democrats do.

And you have to send people like Gary and myself down to Jeff City to try and make a difference.

And that’s the kind of person we all want representing us in Jefferson City.

In 2012 GOP Rep. David Hinson ran unopposed for his 119th district seat in the Missouri House. just as he did in the general election for his first term in 2010. He’s since shown himself to be one of those Republicans who’s got the 21st century GOP looney tunes down chapter and verse. Name almost any one of the divisive, radical, right-wing issues that have come up in the Missouri House, tax cuts for rich folks, lame-brained, faux-constitutional gun legislation, stopping the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, or any of the reams of anti-women, anti-choice legislation to hit the lege, Hinson’s likely been a sure vote for it. This summer he’s been keeping busy stumping for Amendment 7, the regressive sales tax that he and his colleagues are pushing to pay for transportation infrastructure – after they deigned and delivered a hefty income tax-cut for businesses and wealthy Missourians. Send enough like Hinson to Jefferson City and Missouri will soon be in the same sad shape as Kansas.

Poor 119th you may be saying, and, by extension, poor Missouri. However, unlike in the past, folks in the 119th will have a real choice this year. An active cadre of local Democrats got together to try to identify and draft good, progressive candidates and managed to persuade one of their number, local activist Susan Cunningham, along with some other great progressives, to step up.

At this point I need to let you know that Cunningham, who is running for Hinson’s state rep seat, has in the past posted on the front page here at SMP – remember Sarah Jo? If you are worried about bias, though, let me remind you that we at SMP make no secret about our preference for progressive politicians and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I support Cunningham’s candidacy and am eager to share what I have learned about it during a recent phone conversation with her.

When asked why she’s running, Cunningham honed in on the damage being done by the brand of politics espoused by her opponent – although she was far more polite and considered than such a statement implies. She cited changes in the Republican Party to explain her personal journey from the politics of the old-time, pragmatic “business” Republicans she once embraced to her current home in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She described her growing awareness of the economic and social wreckage that has resulted as the Republican party she once knew morphed into the radical entity that has been slowly evolving since the time of Ronald Reagan, a process which she characterized as “culminating in a dangerous flirtation with anarchy.”

According to Cunningham, the most important issue facing Missouri as well as the nation in general is that of growing economic inequality, an inequality that is fed by proponents of free-market rhetoric employed as a tool of corporate interests. However, she does not approach greater inequality and the corresponding decline of the middle class as an intellectual abstraction. She is disturbed by the deterioration she sees in the quality of life for real people in Missouri. It is the failure of rigid conservative ideology to deal with the actual problems that face the people of her district that motivates her candidacy. She points out that in her relatively poor, semi-rural district, 13-15% of the population lacks health insurance. Nevertheless, David Hinson has gone along with the relentless GOP efforts to derail the law in Missouri while offering no alternatives to help the uninsured. She also points to the outsize influence of ALEC in Missouri GOP politics as one of the obstacles to resolving the problems of growing inequality (see some of her past writing on ALEC here, here and here).

Cunningham points out that while the free-market theology espoused by so many current Missouri Republicans frequently serves corporate interests, it has actually had a negative effect on overall economic growth and prosperity. She returned to the example offered by the ideologically motivated opposition of almost all Missouri Republican lawmakers to the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which, she points out, would utilize federal funds to create jobs as an offshoot of offering healthcare to uninsured Missourians, jobs that the state will forfeit if the legislature persists in its obstinacy.

What Cunningham proposes to take the place of government by “corporate water carriers” is one which relies on “citizens having a fair shot at the kind of success that builds a strong economic foundation.” This, she claims, is what patriotism should be all about. She offers as an example that it is not patriotic to evade taxes. She cites the failure of tax-cuts to create prosperity in states such as Kansas and the need for revenue to restore Missouri’s diminishing quality of life. Real patriotism, she says, is exemplified by all citizens paying their fair share, to which end she proclaims that she is a “proud, patriotic, American taxpayer.”

Cunningham understands that the Missouri legislature is likely to remain in GOP hands. Consequently, should she take the 119th seat from Hinson, she would see one of her main tasks to be shedding a little light on what our government is actually doing. She noted that she would not be shy about calling press conferences when necessary. She believes that her background as an educator will permit her to effectively explain the consequences of bad policy and make it clear “why 99% of voters do their own families a disservice when they choose Republican candidates.”  

Even if Cunningham does not win in November, she believes her campaign will have justified itself by helping educate the citizens of her district about issues that have up to now been presented to them mostly from a one-sided, right-wing perspective. But she is, nevertheless, optimistic about her chances in what many view as a heavily red district. She points out that the Democratic performance index, or D.P.I., defined as the “percentage of the vote an average Dem can expect in an average election based on voting history,” is 43-47% for the 119th district. What these numbers imply is that the election could come down to issues of party turn-out, which means that Cunningham has lots of work to do.

Fortunately, Cunningham won’t have to do it alone. She reports that in a departure from elections in the recent past, the state Democratic party apparatus has offered guidance and continues to assist her – guess I wasn’t too wrong when I speculated earlier that Roy Temple might make a difference when it comes to rebuilding the Missouri Democratic party. But that’s not all. Cunningham’s also garnered a respectable set of significant endorsements:

–American Federation of Teachers

–Franklin County Democratic Club

–Franklin County Labor Club

–Molli’s List

–National Women’s Political Caucus

–Planned Parenthood

–Sierra Club

If you want to learn more about Susan Cunningham, take a look at her campaign homepage where you can find links to campaign information, her blog and campaign newsletters. Here is the link to her campaign Facebook page; it’ll give you a good idea about what Cunningham’s all about. If you’re so inclined after reading this post, you can go directly to her ActBlue page and leave a donation to make sure that everyone in the 119th district learns that they really have a chance to chose something other than the radical Republican candidate come November.  

Oopsie.

Governor Jay Nixon vetoed SB 508 today. In his veto message [pdf] he pointedly made reference to a major error in the bill due to its cut and paste origins from a right wingnut American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) template:

Governor of Missouri

[….]

July 7, 2014

TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI

Herewith I return to you House Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 508 entitled:

[….]

I disapprove of House Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 508. My reasons for disapproval are as follows:

House Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 508 contains a number of worthwhile provisions that can become law with my action on other legislation. However, this legislation does not receive my approval due to a significant drafting error.

House Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 508 would impose additional restrictions on the licensure of an individual as a “navigator,” one who provides information or services in connection with eligibility, enrollment, or the program certification of any health benefit exchange operating pursuant to the Affordable care Act. Section 376.2004.6 of the bill would require an applicant for a navigator license to submit two full sets of fingerprints to the Missouri Highway patrol “for the purpose of obtaining a state and federal criminal records check under section 43.540 and Public Law 92-554 [sic].”

The bill’s reference to Public Law 92-554 should be to Public Law 92-544. This mistaken reference to Public Law 92-554, which deals with alcohol abuse and prevention, instead of to Public Law 92-544, which deals with federal criminal records, was included in model legislation developed by the American legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) entitled the “Navigator Background Check Act,”….

[….]

It appears that in copying and pasting from the ALEC model act, the General Assembly failed to correct this incorrect reference to Public Law 92-554.[….] While some may believe that such an error is “close enough” for a model act, it cannot be allowed to become the law of this State. Particularly in an area of the law that is subject of ongoing litigation, a glaring defect such as this cannot simply be ignored. Accordingly, this measure does not receive my approval.

In accordance with the above-stated reasons for disapproval, I am returning House Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 508 without my approval.

Respectfully submitted,

s/

Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon

Governor

Heh. If they were in junior high school the General Assembly would get an “F” on the assignment. Come to think of it, they are still in junior high school. And they deserve the grade.