Time Magazine article features Jane Cunningham, friend of the working child

I have been writing a considerable amount, especially in the days after the Joplin tornado, about the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, which targets all teachers as loathsome human beings and would have made it virtually impossible for us to have contacted all of our students on a timely basis after disaster struck.

But the Amy Hestir bill is not the one that has garnered the most attention for Mrs. Cunningham. In an article on a nationwide push to roll back child labor laws, Time Magazine notes that the worst of these bills was sponsored in the Missouri Senate by Mrs. Cunningham:

Earlier this year, Missouri considered a more Dickensian proposal. A bill there would have removed state restrictions on employing children under the age of 14, along with limits on how many hours children could work per day. It would also have ended routine state inspections of companies employing children.

The sponsor, State Senator Jane Cunningham, insisted that she was just trying to "put back some common sense" in the law, and that, "We're not doing students any favor by telling them, 'You cannot work.'" Of the proposed Missouri bill, Jay Leno quipped on The Tonight Show, "Well, yeah, why should the 10-year-olds in China be getting all the good factory jobs?"

The scariest thing about Jane Cunningham is that in two years she may be taking her peculiar brand of conservative politics nationwide since she is widely expected to mount a run for the Congressional seat currently held by Todd Akin.