Last month a major tornado visited Andover, Kansas. CNN showed video of the twister bearing down on the town’s city hall. People struggle to avoid tornadoes. Buildings? Well, all they just sit their awaiting their fate. Kind of like Missouri citizens while the overwhelmingly Republican legislature is in session.
Thankful for small favors, many GOP priorities – making initiative petition changes to law or the state constitution almost impossible, restricting trans kids to the restrooms and sports team “assigned” at birth, guns in churches, and such – got caught up in the bizarre pissing contest between the Senate’s Conservative Caucus and His Accidency’s pliant House and Senate leadership. So, another session when the Republicans controlled the House and Senate with super majorities and they could have done all sorts of terrible, things to families, workers and small businesses, basically washed out.
Still, charter schools won a bigger piece of the school funding pie, voter photo I.D. came back, Kansas City had control of its police budget stolen from them, and, the legislature deemed themselves (not doctors) the experts on who may visit patients during an epidemic. Score a few points for the bad guys.
In the end the House and Senate only passed 68 items, including the resolutions to allow the governor and the state supreme court chief justice to address the legislature.
That low number hides a lot of bad law. You see, with the Senate tied up on knots by the Conservative Caucus shenanigans (though I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the book on Jim The Wonderdog read on the Senate floor) and time running out both chambers pulled out the staplers. One routine bill had 57 amendments – most all a separate bill themselves – added to mundane legislation. Better than a dozen bills had 20 or more amendments.
Sure, some of those amendments just a name plate on a bridge but some include major policy changes. For example, a bill on health care picked-up a hitchhiker forbidding pharmacists from telling their patients that horse de-worming meds really don’t kill Covid. And, a bill granting sexual assault victims more rights also got a rule about taking “pornography” out of high school libraries. “Pornography,” by the way, is code for acclaimed books by prominent black authors.
Getting less press, the GOP supermajority made Missouri a happier place for industrial polluters. While Right To Work didn’t get traction, neither did proposed protections for workers catching Covid or other ailments at work.
The Democrats in Jefferson City did what they could. Unfortunately, they used logic, common sense and law in their arguments – meaning they usually lost. (Though Senator Jill Schupp playing charades with her colleagues did lighten one painful day on the Senate floor. )
Yes, the legislature did give most state employees a raise and will increase the minimum pay for new teachers from $25,000 to $38,000 a year. Alas, even with fatter paychecks Missouri’s workers will still be almost the worst paid in the nation and new teachers will still earn much more in other states. Mixed in with the chaff may be a few more grains of wheat waiting to be revealed too. Cross your fingers.
The good news is that the tornado just missed the Andover City Hall. And, again, the most terrifying proposals in the Missouri legislature didn’t become law…this year.
Glenn Koenen
Photo source: Missouri Digital Heritage