Here's a legislative report sent out last week by a rep in KC:
In the Missouri House of Representatives this past week, I witnessed the most undemocratic display of behavior I've ever experienced in my life. It was truly sickening!
We debated House Bill 1526 on both Wednesday and Thursday of last week. This bill would prohibit school boards from using seniority or years of service when laying off teachers. Even if school boards valued teacher experience and wanted to include seniority as part of the criteria for laying off teachers, it would be illegal for them to do so. By a margin of 5 to 1 my constituents who contacted me about HB 1526 urged me to vote against this bill. I did vote NO on it.
Words can't adequately express what I'm about to describe, but I'll try to do my best. On Wednesday the House engaged in a very spirited debate over House Bill 1526. One of the last speakers on the bill screamed that the opponents of this bill didn't care about kids. While a number of mostly Democratic Representatives were still standing at their microphones, waiting for recognition to speak on the bill, the Speaker called on a Republican who immediately moved to close debate and vote on HB 1526. It only takes a majority to close debate and since there's 106 Republicans and only 57 Democrats, you can probably guess which side won this one. Every single time there's been a motion to close debate:
*Democrats have been waiting at their mikes for recognition to speak and
*The vote to close debate has passed, almost always along party lines.
Bear with me, but I want to explain the voting process in the House. We cast our votes electronically by way of buttons at our desks - we can vote: yes, no, or present. There are two gigantic electronic voting boards at the front of the chamber. Our names with our respective votes flash on the voting boards as soon as we cast our votes, so it's really easy to follow how everyone is voting.
As the voting progressed, the NO votes surpassed the YES votes on HB 1526! By the time everyone in the chamber had voted, there were 88 NO votes and 70 YES votes. Normally, the voting board would have been closed and the Speaker would have announced that the motion to approve HB 1526 had failed.
But, the Republican leadership wasn't going to lose this one and that's when the twisting of arms commenced. Majority Floor Leader Tim Jones and other members of the Republican leadership confronted those Republicans who had voted NO right there at their desks in the chamber. At one point, four of them surrounded the desk of one Republican man - it looked like they were just hounding him. That man finally switched his vote from NO to YES and then left the chamber in tears. The Republican leadership, although they looked more like a gang, had reduced a grown man to tears. It was truly humiliating to watch.
The voting board was kept open for almost 15 minutes. As soon as the Republicans had switched enough votes to pass the bill, the voting board was closed with a vote of 80-78. This was the first vote on the bill and it just needed a majority for passage.
Since all bills require two votes for final passage, we took the second vote on Thursday. It requires a constitutional majority to pass - that's 82 votes, so the Republicans needed to switch two more votes.
Deja vu - the same thing happened on Thursday. After everyone had cast his/her vote, the Republicans didn't have the required 82 votes, so the voting board was kept open and the arm twisting began again. We watched as the votes flipped, until they finally reached 82. I thought that the voting board would then be closed, but the Republicans wanted one more vote than the required 82. So the voting board was kept open until they coerced one more Republican into changing his vote from NO to YES. Once the count hit 83, the voting board was closed. Then the Speaker declared that House Bill 1526 had passed by a vote of 83-76.
Ironically, prior to debating HB 1526, we had passed an anti-bullying bill for our children in our schools. As we watched the Republican leadership coercing its members to change their votes, one of my colleagues remarked to me that we needed to pass an anti-bullying bill for the legislators. She made a good point!
Some of my colleagues who have served in the legislature longer than me told me that this wasn't the first time the Republicans had kept the voting board open while they twisted arms to change the votes to their liking. But this was the first time for me and it made me angry, as well as sad, to watch this spectacle.
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