The celebrated social commentator Mort Sahl would traditionally stroll on stage with a rolled-up newspaper in hand, using the articles therein to launch into an extended rap about the world condition. He would end his performance by looking out into the audience and asking, “Is there anyone here I haven’t offended yet?”
The members of the Kentucky General Assembly, which last week finally concluded the 60-day hostage-taking they euphemistically characterized as a legislative session, might find it appropriate to offer the same question. The only hands expected to rise would belong to those belonging to those benefitting from the White paternalism that has constrained the Commonwealth since its founding. All others who have sought even meager consideration from the state House and Senate can go pound sand.
The Republican-controlled legislature displayed a turgid determination to return the Kentucky of 2022 to some other, more preferable time when the coloreds knew their place and women stationed themselves behind the stove, happy as larks to serve as baby machines for their men. It was a fantasy time before homos and “trans,” whatever the hell they are, were even invented, the poor and starving were tucked away in the hollers never to be seen or heard and our kids loved Jesus but were raised stupid in some of the worst schools America had to offer.
What the Commonwealth just suffered through was something between a disaster and a crime against humanity. Lawmakers played the people of Kentucky for saps and it’ll take years to recover from this mess.
Otherwise, everything progressed rather nicely, don’t you think?
Let’s start with the lawmakers themselves. They managed to award themselves a healthy 8 percent raise for their part-time job. In 2020, when the legislature was in session for 60 days, as reported by the Lexington Herald-Leader, using Legislative Research Commission data, they collected an average of $65,339 in compensation, including pay and expense allowances, mileage and a small stipend.
Not bad, considering that per capita income in the state in 2019, the last year numbers could be found, stood at $29,029, which, by the way, was more than $6,000 below the U.S. average.
Fine.
But then consider the legislature completely stiffed public school teachers, offering no salary increase from the state over the next two years. The average teacher salary in Kentucky, according to Salary.com, as of March 29, was $57,977, about $7,000 below the national average and, coincidently, $7,000 below what the lawmakers get for their parttime job.
Now the Commonwealth’s teachers, without a raise, will have even more ground to make up and it all comes at a time of a national teacher shortage. Who’s going to want to come to Kentucky when there are greener pastures elsewhere? Even Mississippi, for crying out loud, voted to give their teachers a fat raise this year.
Not Kentucky.
It doesn’t end there. In late 2021, before the opening of the session, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, recommended that the upcoming budget include a bonus, characterized as “hero pay” in some quarters, for essential workers who risked their own health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, using $400 million the Commonwealth received under the American Rescue Plan passed by Congress.
No thanks was the answer from legislators sitting on their newly fattened wallets.
Having successfully lined their own pockets, lawmakers continued to punch down on the state’s most vulnerable. Ostensibly seeking to force lazy louts to get off their tushes and get jobs that pay serfs wages, the General Assembly acted to reduce the length of time an individual can collect unemployment benefits from the current 26 weeks to about 12 weeks, give or take.
Senate Republican Leader Damon Thayer, of Georgetown, speaking in defense of the assault, claimed there are 100,000 jobs open statewide, insisting further that, “If you are an able-bodied, healthy Kentuckian, there is no excuse for you to not have a job.”
First, let’s just note that it must be terrible for Thayer to represent so many pikers refusing to rise off the couch with Cheeto dust on their fingers and get a job, preferring to laze around and get as rich as John D. Rockefeller on the public dole. A tragedy that so many are burning hundred-dollar bills just to light their Salems these days.
Frankly, does anyone really believe there are 100,000 jobs available? But let’s operate on faith, shall we? How many of these jobs are in Magoffin County, which reported a 12.2 percent unemployment rate for March? Breathitt, Elliott and Martin counties all had unemployment rates over 8 percent. These are not jobs havens but the folks there, and their kids, have to eat. Not everyone in Kentucky has the benefit of living near Georgetown where the Toyota plant keeps them in high cotton.
And remember – all these folks once had jobs in order to get unemployment compensation so they’re not afraid to work. They lost their posts because of the pandemic or for some other reason. Otherwise, there would be no benefits for them to collect. In its wisdom, the legislature proposes to flood the market with these folks so companies can pay them a veritable pittance.
And, of course, the GA just can’t help messing around with the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps, which helps about 544,000 Kentuckians and feeds hungry kids, by establishing new eligibility rules and imposing lengthy reporting mandates.
What’s worse, in a rabid effort to end the pandemic state of emergency a mere three weeks before a federal deadline would allow it without penalty, the legislature has set the stage for forfeiting $50 million in federal SNAP funds in May and $50 million for each month thereafter while the federal government continues pandemic relief payments.
This, folks, is nothing short of insane.
Then there’s the effort to cut the state income tax from 5 to 4 percent with the promise to abolish it altogether and fill in the blanks with sales tax hikes, the result of which – you guessed it – benefits the wealthy over the poor. The switcheroo is expected to cost the state’s General Fund $888 million over the next two years.
Pure genius.
And then these mugs didn’t even have the wherewithal to demand that the $15 million they sent to Unity Aluminum a few years ago for a plant that never got built in Greenup County be returned post haste, money that could be used for teachers, heroes, hungry kids or, hell, even a bigger raise for the legislators themselves.
By now you should get an idea about how the Kentucky General Assembly operated this session – sticking them greens deep into their pockets while snubbing teachers, heroes, the jobless, and the hungry.
And the worst is yet to come.
Absolutely hysterical over the possibility that White school kids might discover that their forebears have been…how should we put this…less than kind to their African-American neighbors, the knuckle-draggers are placing what one referred to as “guardrails” on any classroom discussion over race, making a mockery over the teaching of history in Kentucky.
In words only a White person could script without laughing uproariously, the measure says a teacher can bring up the icky subject of slavery “but that defining racial disparities solely on the legacy of this institution is destructive to the unification of our nation.”
Hogwash, of course, all developed to cut off that-ol’-devil Critical Race Theory from entering kids’ mush-filled heads. And the new law requires students read 24 documents of some sort, including one from Ronald Reagan, to fill them with that patriotic spirit. Nowhere, of course, does it recognize that the nation’s institutions are biased against African-Americans and that White folks are standing on third base when Black folks haven’t even had the opportunity to enter the batter’s box.
African-Americans getting a voice? Wow, that’s scary.
While we’re on the subject of education, the geniuses in Frankfort further undermined the state’s public school system by not only authorizing the funding of charter schools – thus conceivably, resulting in the great, disappearing teacher pay increase – but by requiring such institutions in Northern Kentucky and Louisville. All to get back at the teachers’ unions which have, for some unknown reason, objected to the legislature’s thorough lack of sympathy for the profession.
Then, of course, there’s abortion, which to this date remains a constitutional right in this country. The legislature developed the most restrictive law in the country – so restrictive no clinic could possibly comply. It prohibits the procedure after 15 weeks and makes no exemptions for rape or incest, which is inhumane no matter how you make look at it.
A federal judge has stepped in to put the temporary kibosh on this bad boy so we’ll see where it ends up.
And where would the Commonwealth be without transgender kids to pick on? They passed a law prohibiting transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports from sixth grade through college.
Of course little thought was given to further stigmatizing young folks who find themselves in a very vulnerable and difficult situation. Really, think about it, who’s really going to be hurt by permitting a young person whose birth sex was male but who carries the sense of personal identity as a female from playing field hockey? This is hitting down of the first order and you’re smacking kids by doing so.
My God, they’re even screwing up local libraries, handing them over to local politicians who can appoint any Tom, Dick or Harry to the library board instead of choosing from a list of qualified candidates offered by the state. County governments can also hit the brakes on any expansions or construction efforts.
This is just a small slice of the inanity that consumed Frankfort over the 60-day session. They even passed a law prohibiting the governor, Andy Beshear in this case, from using state funds to challenge the constitutionality of laws they passed in state court.
No joke. Franklin Circuit Court put a temporary stop to that.
And what business is it of some yokel from Clay County or Caldwell County or Wherever County to tell the voters living in Louisville that the mayor can only serve two terms?
Good night nurse.
Talk to most close observers of these goings on and you’ll find, almost unanimously, that it was the worst session in living memory. It’s so bad it’s not even funny. A cataclysm of epic proportions. And the Commonwealth will have to wear it for at least two years.
So, is there anyone here I haven’t offended yet?
Their actions are pathetic and in most cases disgusting in my opinion. I am so proud of our governor and his attempts to make ky a progressive state. I cringe when our politicians oppose him.
Bottom 5 forever.
I don’t know why nobody pushes the question – “If Republican policies are so great, why are the reddest states such ****holes?” The least educated, most backwards, most racist, and usually poorest states are the ones that reliably go Republican. Nobody moves to Arkansas or Mississippi to chase their dreams there.
If not for our little islands of prosperity like Lexington and Louisville, it wouldn’t be worth it to live here but Republicans from Bumpkin Holler want to destroy even that.