Missouri State News

Vol. 2, No. 1--Pre-Summit, January 2005

The Progressive Caucus of Missouri was busy this month working on election reform issues. We joined the rest of the nation in calling U.S. Senators in an attempt to stop the Electoral College vote from being accepted without debate.

We called; they debated! We are now celebrating Barbara Boxer for her courage to start the debate on the Senate floor and to vote against the tide. We are also grateful to those Senators who stood with her after she took her courageous stand. We hope that each and every person will send a fruit basket full of oranges to Senator Boxer and thank-you cards to all of the other Senators.

We also wish to send a message of gratitude to Representative Conyers, without whom none of this would have happened. His letter was signed by several members of the House and, in the end, more than 30 members of the House joined him in refusing to vote for the status quo. Let's send that man and all of the Representatives who stood with him a very large fruit basket loaded with oranges.

In addition to working on the nation wide Senator-calling plan, we have been distributing orange arm bans and encouraging people to wear them in the name of FREE and FAIR elections.

We know election problems are yet unsolved. Recognizing the problem is only the first step. So we are supporting the efforts of our local DFA group, Change for Missouri, who are drafting election reform petitions. These petitions specify our demands for a change in election laws and they must be hand-signed. They will be available to the entire country via a blank petition that can be printed from the Change for Missouri website or our website in the near future. The completed petitions can be mailed to the address on the bottom of the petition. Change for Missouri plans to deliver them to Washington, D.C. once they are collected.

The Missouri Caucus has been reaching out to more people across the state and we have started to get responses. We hope this means we will begin new relationships with folks from other groups across the state.

Finally, we are gearing up for the Midwest DNC Regional Caucus, which will be held in St. Louis, MO on January 15th. We have requested meetings with the Missouri committee representatives and are making plans to make our views known if the requests are denied.

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