“…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.