Dear Editor:
Should I take my state representative, the Honorable Jay Barnes, seriously?
In a recent homily to constituents he muses on why he and other Republicans overrode our governor's veto supporting a minimum wage pay increase for home health care workers. Barnes says it was not about whether increased pay was good or bad. Is this a joke? That's all it is about. Expounding on "the rule of law," the French guillotine and anarchy, he portrays himself and Republicans as heroes of the American Revolution. That's heady puffery and conceit.
Name any elected Missouri Republican legislator supporting a minimum wage for workers? Hard to do.
Republicans stand with the Chamber of Commerce and other business front groups working to keep worker wages at slave labor levels. "A living wage" is not acceptable to them.
American wages have not kept pace with productivity for decades. Since the Great Recession unemployment has forced more workers to take jobs at lower wages. Millions of Americans are working far under their educational and training level. This is mostly based on political decisions. For example, Missouri Republicans declined ACA Medicaid expansion knowing from many sources that they were denying thousands of Missouri citizens health care sector jobs. Not to mention denying health care to thousands of Missourians. It was another victory for "Republican party first, the people second."
Missouri suffers a "monocracy," one party rule. Polls show 70 percent of the public supports an increase in the minimum wage, which includes more than 50 percent of Republican voters. Yet, when city governments in St. Louis and Kansas City recently voted to increase the minimum wage in their cities, our Republican Legislature intervened. They made new rules outlawing city governments from making such rules.
This is Barnes's "Rule of Law" based on Republican ideology. Still he treats us to a fanciful comparison from a movie concerning Thomas More. He compares laws that presumably come from God with laws enacted by Missouri Republican politicians, the tools of American corporations. Politicians who seek to provide increased salaries for working Missourians Barnes implies are agents of the devil. Plus, they are no better than the anarchists that sent one another to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
I could be speechless! Will this fanciful rhetoric resonate with Tea Partiers and Trump voters? Why not? Trump recently implied Ted Cruz's father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Republican fantasy has few limits, some rules.
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