Jerry Nolte

State Representative Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) announced that he is going to run for Congress almost a month ago via Facebook, but no one really seems to care. 

My name is Jerry Nolte; I am the Republican Representative from Missouri’s 33rd District and I am running for the Fifth District Congressional seat.

I would like the opportunity to meet you in person. Join me at Ponak’s Mexican Kitchen & Bar, Tuesday, June 28th from 3:00 pm to closing. They are located at 2856 Southwest Blvd. Kansas City...

Maybe he’ll explain to the entire 5th District why he wants to gut a minimum wage law that passed with 76 percent support statewide.

The Post-Dispatch has a good story today the General Assembly's attempt to overhaul Proposition B, which now sits on Gov. Jay Nixon's desk. I was particularly interested in this breakdown of St. Louis area-legislators who voted against the will of their constituents. 

Across the state, there were at least four Senators and thirteen Representatives who voted contrary to his or her district's position. 

• In the Senate, Victor Callahan, Bob Dixon and Rob Schaaf voted to overhaul Prop B -- and for the the emergency clause that would prevent a future referendum.  (The proposal to add an emergency  clause failed in the Senate, and is not part of the final bill approved by the House and Senate.)  Scott Rupp also voted for the overhaul, but opposed the emergency clause. 
• In the House, Jamilah Nasheed, Jerry Nolte, Noel Torpey, John McCaherty, Kurt Bahr, Paul Wieland, John Diehl, Doug Funderburk, T.J. Berry, Terry Swinger, Paul Curtman, Bill White and Melissa Leach voted against their constituents' wishes.

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In related celebrity endorsement news, Ellen DeGeneres is calling on Gov. Nixon to veto SB 113 -- on her website and on her syndicated talk show. 

America should be more like Russia, and small-minded House Republicans know more about road safety than auto insurers and the Missouri Highway Patrol.

Listen to Zach Wyatt's exchange with Rep. Chris Kelly (D-Columbia) about Jerry Nolte's (R-Chamber of Commerce) xenophobic legislation, recorded on the House floor earlier today:

“Farsi? Is that a language that Farsinians speak?”

Nolte and Gatschenberger

Reps. Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) and Chuck Gatschenberger (R-Lake St. Louis) both say they want all of Missouri's drivers to take their driving tests in English because they're concerned about safety, and not because they think xenophobia plays well with voters back home.   Nolte's bill to do this, HB167, was approved by the House Rules Committee yesterday, and will be debated by the full House soon. 

If there is an honest concern with safety from Nolte and Gatschenberger, then why aren't they listening to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, whose members know a thing or two about the current system and what causes unsafe driving conditions?  Here's an overlooked passage in the the Columbia Daily Tribune story that informed the world of John Cauthorn's (R-Mexico) hatred for Teh Spanish:

The Missouri State Highway Patrol conducts written tests of would-be drivers in 12 languages, including English, said Capt. Tim Hull, director of the public education and information office. The languages include major European languages such as Spanish, French, Italian and German, as well as Chinese, Greek, Korean, Russian, Vietnamese, Japanese and Bosnian.

If a driver cannot pass the road test, they may hire, at their expense, an interpreter from a state-approved list, Hull said.

With road sign colors and symbols based on an international standard, Hull said, the patrol sees no safety issues for drivers who are not well-versed in English.

Safety “is the reason you want to make sure the driver understands the test they are taking,” Hull said.

The GOP move to make roads less safe is also opposed by the hippies at the Missouri Catholic Conference and Catholic Charities.

The Post-Dispatch editorial page has an impressive snapshot this weekend of the things our legislators are focusing on that do little or nothing to improve the lives of working Missourians.  The Editorial Board calls them "mean" pieces of legislation -- "[A] truly mean bill creates hardship for classes of people without sound public purpose. A truly mean bill is based on prejudice, not fact. A truly mean bill is gratuitously nasty." 

BOTTOM LINE: The Mean Girls & Boys Club is after the working poor, immigrants (legal and illegal), non-English speakers, children, more children, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, non-Christians, workers rights, their own colleagues and maybe cancer patients.

And Missouri wonders why it has trouble attracting jobs.

Bills that made the cut include the push to gut the state's voter-approved minimum wage law, provide drivers' tests in English only, deregulate child labor, drug test TANF recipients in a poorly-conceived manner and disenfranchise tens of thousands of Missourians to help GOP electoral efforts.  

The best part of the editorial, though, may be the R.J. Matson cartoon embedded here.  Some of the likenesses are fantastic, and others are a little harder to figure out.  But based on the article and art, here is the cast in the cartoon above, from left to right: Kevin Elmer (R-Nixa), Brad Lager (R-Savannah), Bill Stouffer (R-Napton), Jane Cunnigham (R-Chesterfield), Jack Goodman (?) (R-Mt. Vernon), Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone), Steve Cookson (R-Fairdealing), Doug Funderburk (R-St. Peters), Kevin Engler (R-Farmington), Stanley Cox (R-Sedalia), Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D-University City).  

Yesterday, without debate, the House International Trade and Job Creation Committee passed Rep. Jerry Nolte's (R-Gladstone) bill (HB61) to overturn Missouri's minimum wage law that was passed by voters in 2006.  Nolte's proposal would completely eliminate the cost of living adjustments approved by 76% of voters in 2006, tying Missouri's minimum wage to the already inadequate federal standard.

Never mind all that talk about state sovereignty and respecting the will of the voters. 

Politico's Dave Catanese: "At least one GOP state lawmaker was taken by Rep. Sam Graves' brief flirtation with the Missouri Senate race...Jerry Nolte for Congress was formed on Feb. 2."

In 2006, 76 percent of Missouri voters supported a plan to increase the minimum wage to $6.50 and tie any future annual increases in the minimum wage to changes in the Consumer Price index. 

However, Rep. Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) and some of his fellow Republican colleagues think  that (as Roy Blunt would put it) "the Federal Gubmint" is a better authority for setting Missouri workers' wages than voters in the state.

According to the Associated Press, Nolte filed legislation prohibiting the Missouri minimum wage from rising above the federal one. The bill has the backing of several other Republicans, as well as a coalition of business groups.

I guess competitive wages might have been the only thing Nolte and his fellow Republicans weren't thinking about when they pushed legislation last year to enforce Missouri's "constitutional sovereignty and the sovereignty of its citizens under the Tenth Amendment." 

World-renowned scientist Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) sponsored a forward-thinking and well-researched resolution last week (HCR 32) calling for Congress to reject any cap-and-trade legislation to reduce climate changing emissions. 

In addition to expressing concern with the modest increases in energy costs that would come from such a system -- costs that would be nowhere near what Republican leaders and their industry allies have promised -- Nolte's resolution follows the lead of Missouri's top climate change denier, Blaine Luetkemeyer, in criticizing the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.