Missouri

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PRIMARY 9 26 GOP STEAL ELECTION GERRY DEFY CT ORDER

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SWING STATE?

see Gerry VOTER SUPPRESS

see abortion, supermajority?

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AG bailey pow target leo? FUCKERY SCHMITT BAILEY ED FUCKING MARTINTEAM RED RAGA JOHN SAUR WH, HOSKINS 2K MULES HANAWAY

HANAWAY?

SEE JOSH HAWLEY

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10/22/2026

Kate Riga and Khaya Himmelman @ Talking Points Memo: Missouri Republicans Try To Trick Voters Out of Abortion Rights

In Missouri, where Republicans just can’t get enough of siphoning off their constituents’ power, the GOP is trying to swindle voters into repealing the abortion rights they passed — and enshrined in the state Constitution — just two years ago. They’re calling the legislature-passed initiative on the ballot this cycle Amendment 3 again — the same as the last vote — but this time a “no” vote means keeping abortion rights, the opposite of the last time.

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AN 10 26

The effort by President Donald Trump to redraw the congressional districts of Missouri in order to benefit the Republican Party has been blocked in court, causing confusion among voters and leading some Republican candidates to find themselves facing a more difficult battle ahead of the November midterm elections.

The redistricting controversy has angered voters all over Missouri, including those in strongly Republican areas, while the Democrats claim that their campaigns have been given a boost by the failed attempt

Fred Wellman, the Democratic candidate running against Republican Representative Ann Wagner in Missouri's second congressional district, described the initiative as "monumentally dumb" and stated that fundraising and volunteer involvement increased following the courts' rejection of the map, according to The Guardian.

The Republicans had wanted to convert Missouri's six-to-two lead in its U.S. House delegation into a seven-to-one ratio. Acting on Trump's advice, members of the GOP approved new boundaries in September 2025 that would have diminished the district based in Kansas City and currently represented by the Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver.

However, an organized petition campaign cast the plans into question. The group called People Not Politicians gathered over 300,000 signatures requesting a referendum on the map, which then led to legal action regarding whether the districts could come into effect without prior voter approval.

The Republican Missouri Secretary of State, Denny Hoskins, at first refused to certify the referendum on the grounds that the state's petition procedure did not cover redistricting; however, in September the Missouri Supreme Court disagreed and instructed the state to use its earlier congressional boundaries.

On September 25, the U.S. Supreme Court kept the result as it was, preventing a further effort to reinstate the map which had been supported by the Republicans for the November election. The redrawn districts had already been employed in the August primaries, which caused uncertainty as to which candidates voters would encounter in November.

As absentee voting got underway, more than a million voters were affected according to The Associated Press because the authorities and the courts had given conflicting instructions as to which version of the map should apply to the November election.

Eric Leventhal, who is a voter in the St. Louis area and backed Wellman in the primary, said to The Guardian that he didn't any longer know which congressional district he resided in and described the whole thing as "dizzying and embarrassing, frankly."

At the same time, Cleaver stated that he had come across Republican voters who were willing to back him following the redistricting controversy. He described the original action as "pure, undistilled cheating."

Wellman stated that the legal reversal had made the district more competitive in relation to Wagner and had brought attention to his campaign outside of Missouri; however, the result of the election has still not been decided.

Missouri voters will also be voting on Proposition A in November, with a rejection of the legislature's 2025 map resulting from a 'no' vote and approval of the map for future use coming about with a 'yes' vote.

Even though they have suffered setbacks in the courts, Republican officials have indicated that further redistricting attempts are still possible following the midterms.

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AN 9 26

With the 2026 midterms less one and one-half months away, a chaotic redistricting battle rages on in deep red Missouri. And MAGA Republicans are continuing to fight a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the state's congressional map.

Politico's Josh Gerstein, early Wednesday morning on X, reported, "BREAKING: Missouri redistricting fight hits [Supreme Court] for 3rd time. Opponents of plan likely to shift 1 House seat to GOP say appeals court basically defied earlier SCOTUS ruling. Kavanaugh sets short fuse, orders response by 2PM Wednesday."

CNN's Aaron Blake, responding to Gerstein's tweet, posted, "There are less than six weeks until the election, and we still don't know which districts Missouri is using."

Gerstein, in Politico, explains, "Opponents of a GOP-friendly gerrymander in Missouri are again asking the Supreme Court to put the plan to rest with a definitive ruling. It's the third time the issue has reached the High Court in the past few weeks. Both of the prior trips resulted in rulings against the state's new, GOP-friendly House map, but a federal appeals court panel rekindled the fight Monday when it ordered the state to use the new map in November."

Gerstein continues, "The new emergency appeal from redistricting opponents asks Justice Brett Kavanaugh to block this week's unusual decision from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which came despite a unanimous ruling from Missouri's top court that the election should proceed under an existing map that gives Republicans a 7-2 advantage over Democrats in the state's House delegation. Kavanaugh put the latest request on a short fuse. He ordered state officials and Republican candidates seeking to stick with the new map to respond by 2 p.m. Wednesday."

Gerstein notes that although "the new pro-GOP map was used for primary elections" in August, the Missouri Supreme Court "ruled those lines never went into effect because a successful petition drive meant the new map required approval from the state's voters in a referendum prior to being adopted."

"The U.S. Supreme Court's first snub of the Republican-led effort came on September 8, when Kavanaugh turned down an emergency appeal by state officials seeking to overturn the Missouri Supreme Court's decision," Gerstein notes. "However, within minutes of Kavanaugh's order, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, granted a restraining order two GOP candidates sought against using the older lines for the general election. A challenge to Clark's order eventually reached the full Supreme Court, which put it on hold two days later."

Gerstein adds, "While no justice noted any dissent from the ruling, the justices also offered no explanation for it, which the 8th Circuit appears to have interpreted as leaving them free rein on the issue."

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Conservative columnist David French has a warning for Americans who oppose President Donald Trump: The party's recent actions in Missouri foreshadow how they plan on undermining democracy in the upcoming midterm elections.

"It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections," The New York Times columnist David French wrote on Sunday. "Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1. This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state."

French then described how Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, despite being repeatedly ordered by both the US Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court to implement a non-gerrymandered congressional map, was "brazen" in defying those court orders in order to push through a map that would benefit Trump's Republican Party.

"The secretary of state wrote an email directing that the new maps should still be used in November, directly defying the Missouri Supreme Court," French reported. "The court was not amused and immediately scheduled a hearing for Sept. 10 to determine whether to hold Hoskins in contempt of court."

After ultimately and begrudgingly complying with the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling, which the US Supreme Court reinforced, French wrote that Hoskins was found to have "engaged in 'contumacious conduct' (strong words in legalese that mean willfully disobedient or rebellious) — but that he’d 'purged' himself of his contempt through his belated compliance. A fraudulent election was averted, for now."

He concluded, "I wanted to walk through this situation in detail because it’s indicative of exactly how MAGA attempts to fix elections. It uses the complexity of the law (and public ignorance of the law) to obscure the utter brazenness of its defiance."

The Missouri incident is just one of many that indicate Trump is planning on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. Earlier in September, The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on how Trump is contemplating declaring a national emergency so he can meddle with the results.

"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Post reported. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."

Trump then told Root, "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”

"What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet in June. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña concluded. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

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AN 9 26

Republican officials aren’t giving up on the congressional map they pushed through the Missouri legislature last year, despite two setbacks at the U.S. Supreme Court and a state Supreme Court ruling that the map never became law.

Their next chance comes Thursday before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But the legal path to getting the map back in place for November appears exceedingly narrow.

Even if the federal appeals court sides with Republicans challenging the use of Missouri’s old congressional districts, a U.S. Supreme Court order blocking the 2025 map would remain in effect unless the justices themselves lift it.

And there is another problem: The Missouri Supreme Court has already ruled that the map Republicans want to use never took effect under state law.

Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Michael Wolff described that as an “insuperable obstacle.”

“The Supreme Court of Missouri is the final authority on what Missouri law is,” he said, “and the court has said that (the 2025 map) is not the law and never was, because it has not been approved by a vote of the people.”

For the Republican plaintiffs to prevail, he said, the 8th Circuit would effectively have to order Missouri to conduct an election using districts that the state’s highest court has determined are not legally in effect.

And even then, Wolff said, the U.S. Supreme Court’s stay would stand in the way.

“The chances,” Wolff said, “are between zero and zero.”

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch there is virtually no chance an 8th Circuit ruling will ultimately change the map used in the November election.

“The war’s over,” he said, “but there’s still soldiers fighting.”

Republican leaders see it differently.

Gov. Mike Kehoe, who called lawmakers into a special session last year to redraw Missouri’s congressional districts at President Donald Trump’s request, said after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened last week that he still hopes the appeals court will revive the map.

“I look forward to the 8th Circuit’s consideration of the merits of the Missouri First Map and remain confident in the legal process moving forward,” Kehoe said. “Voters deserve certainty and clarity.”

The 8th Circuit has set remote oral arguments for 10 a.m. Thursday, two days before the federal deadline for Missouri to send ballots to military and overseas voters.

The case was filed by U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin and two Missouri voters after the Missouri Supreme Court ruled Sept. 3 that a referendum petition challenging the new map was legal, sufficient and timely.

That unanimous decision put the map on the Nov. 3 ballot as Proposition A and held that the 2025 districts never took effect because a successful referendum petition suspends the challenged law until voters decide its fate.

The practical result is unusual: Missouri held its Aug. 4 congressional primaries under the 2025 map but is now preparing to hold the general election under the districts used in 2022 and 2024. Onder, Brattin and the other plaintiffs argue that switching maps between the primary and general election violates the U.S. Constitution by effectively nullifying votes already cast in the primary.

Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark in St. Louis agreed they were likely to prevail on that argument and on Sept. 8 issued a temporary restraining order preventing Secretary of State Denny Hoskins from using any congressional map but the 2025 plan.

That set off two days of legal whiplash.

The 8th Circuit initially declined an appeal of Clark’s order, noting that appeals courts generally lack jurisdiction to review temporary restraining orders.

People Not Politicians, the group behind the referendum, then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which Thursday morning stayed Clark’s order without any noted dissents.

The high court said its stay will remain in effect while the case is before the 8th Circuit and through any timely petition asking the justices to review the appeals court’s eventual ruling.

That means an 8th Circuit decision favoring Onder and the other plaintiffs would not, by itself, put the 2025 map back in place.

After the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the 8th Circuit moved quickly, ordering expedited briefs and scheduling Thursday’s argument.

Hours after the U.S. Supreme Court acted, Hoskins reversed a directive he had issued to local election officials and told them to use the 2022 map. The Missouri Supreme Court found Hoskins had been in contempt of its Sept. 3 order but said he purged the contempt by reversing course.

During the contempt hearing, Chief Justice W. Brent Powell repeatedly pressed lawyers for Hoskins on a question that could hang over Thursday’s federal argument: Whatever the federal courts decide, can they change the Missouri Supreme Court’s conclusion that the 2025 map never became state law?

“(The 2025 map) never went into effect, right?” Powell asked William Seidleck, an assistant attorney general representing Hoskins.

“Per this court’s holding, yes,” Seidleck replied.

Powell returned to the point later, asking whether a future federal ruling could change the fact that the map had never taken effect.

“As a matter of state law,” Seidleck said, it could not.

Chuck Hatfield, an attorney for People Not Politicians, told the judges he believed the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention had largely eliminated the immediate stakes of the federal appeal.

“I think we’re done, judge, as a practical matter,” Hatfield said, though he acknowledged the litigation could continue.

One of the biggest unanswered questions heading into Thursday is what position Attorney General Catherine Hanaway’s office will take.

Hanaway represents Missouri and Hoskins in the federal litigation. Her office sided with the Republican plaintiffs before Clark and urged him to block use of the 2022 map. It later asked the U.S. Supreme Court to leave Clark’s order in place.

But after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed that order and Hoskins agreed to follow the state court’s directive, Hanaway was less definitive about what comes next.

“As far as our strategy for the 8th Circuit, I don’t know, because it’s a very confusing posture,” Hanaway told reporters last week.

Asked whether any path remained to revive the 2025 map, she told reporters: “As I stand here today, no.”

Military and overseas ballots must be sent by Sept. 19. Local election officials spent much of last week waiting for the courts to decide which congressional districts they should use before Hoskins’ Thursday directive put them back on the 2022 map.

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AN 926

OMG

Republicans in the Missouri legislature are now threatening to impeach all of the state Supreme Court Justices if they hold Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in contempt of court.

Ahead of the state Supreme Court's hearing on Thursday over Hoskins' order to defy its ruling against changes to the electoral maps, a group of GOP lawmakers published a letter threatening the justices, Fox2NOW reported.

On Wednesday night, 14 members of the Missouri General Assembly signed a letter arguing that Hoskins shouldn't be held in contempt for violating his order because doing so would violate the separation of powers. If the justices do hold Hoskins in contempt, the GOP officials said they'd impeach the judges.

The letter claims, "the facts are not in dispute" over the court's Sept. 3 ruling.

The Republicans issuing the threat told Chief Justice W. Brent Powell, “Should Secretary of Hoskins be held in contempt, we will petition the Speaker of the House and legislative leadership to begin impeachment proceedings against the responsible members of this Court for willful neglect of duty, incompetency and misconduct under Article VII, Sections 1 and 2 of the Missouri Constitution."

The U.S. Supreme Court already stepped in earlier this week to say it would not approve a temporary restraining order that would allow the GOP's maps to be used. Shortly before the Hoskins’ contempt hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court issued another ruling in which the justices rejected the Republican-backed maps intended to eliminate the Democratic district.

Democrats in the state responded to the GOP threat by saying that the letter was judicial tampering, a Class D felony, and that they fully intend to take those Republicans to court.

“Missourians forcefully responded to Republicans’ attempted power grabs last month by rejecting Amendments 4 and 5. They will react even worse to the GOP openly intimidating the Supreme Court as it considers whether the state’s highest election official abused his authority in defiance of the law," the Democrats said in a statement.

“This is how Democracies collapse,” said House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City. “Corrupt officials defy the courts; the courts act to hold them responsible; corrupt officials eliminate the courts.”

The chief justice issued an ominous threat that Hoskins not leave town until they decided whether he'd be held in contempt of court.

Kansas City Star editorial board member Toriano Porter wrote on Wednesday that the state has fully fallen into a "constitutional crisis.

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3 IN 1 DAY

Trump hit with jaw dropping negative poll in Missouri for the first time

2 Missouri Republicans have already lost several of its lawsuits as part of the ongoing effort to change the congressional maps less than two months before the 2026 election. Now they're facing another blow.

"Law Dork" Chris Geidner posted on BlueSky that the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in again on the temporary restraining order a federal district court issued blocking changes to the electoral maps.

It has been a tough road for Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, who got a ruling from the state Supreme Court blocking the maps. He then ran to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, demanding that they step in. They did, and Hoskins decided that the district court superseded the state Supreme Court. A law school professor explained that that isn't how it works.

Hoskins on Tuesday emailed election officials, instructing them to break the law and use the map the court ruled against. His email prompted the state Supreme Court to ask why it shouldn't hold Hoskins in contempt of court for defying its ruling. Hoskins had until noon on Wednesday to submit an excuse to the Missouri high court, but instead, he begged the district court to step in and protect him.

In the early morning hours of Thursday, they released a ruling saying that they would not.

The only higher court that can overrule the state Supreme Court is the U.S. Supreme Court, and in its ruling, it made it clear that it deferred to the state Supreme Court.

Hoskins rushed to the U.S. Supreme Court again — but on Thursday morning, they struck it down once again.

There are no noted dissents from the Supreme Court justices.

It makes a definitive ruling that the maps used for the 2026 election will be the 2022 maps, not the new ones the GOP wants to use.

KSDK News political reporter Mark Maxwell, "The U.S. Supreme Court has stayed the federal order that barred Missouri from using any map but the new one. That leaves the state court's ruling as the only one in effect. Election officials and Denny Hoskins are prohibited under court order from using HB1."

Missouri Solicitor General Louis Capozzi said that he submitted a brief to the federal judges and even gave a big thanks to President Donald Trump's Solicitor General John Sauer "and his team for filing a brief in our support on behalf of the United States."

Less than an hour later, the Supreme Court shut it all down.

Michigan State University Law School Professor Quinn Yeargain responded," This has been a stupid journey from beginning to end, and I hope that it culminates in sanctions for Hoskins and the rest of these disgusting ghouls."

Hoskins faces off against the Missouri Supreme Court in a hearing at 11 a.m. EST over his contempt charges.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, had a tough hearing before the Missouri state Supreme Court on Thursday, in which the state attorney general's office was forced to defend him against contempt charges for refusing to comply with a ruling they issued on the usage of congressional maps for the upcoming 2026 election.

Like many states, Missouri Republicans attempted to redraw lines to eliminate Democratic seats and help President Donald Trump keep as many GOP members of Congress as possible.

Ultimately, the hearing closed with Chief Justice W. Brent Powell telling the attorney general's office, "I would tell your client, the secretary of state, not to venture far from Jefferson City until this contempt ruling is decided."

It wasn't the only verbal smackdown delivered by the conservative state court.

Chuck Hatfield, counsel for People Not Politicians, the group that sued over the use of the 2026 maps, began the hearing by walking through the quickly changing legal situation, but Hoskins knowingly ignored the ruling and told local election officials not to follow the law. To him, that is worthy of a contempt ruling.

Missouri's AG's office lawyer claimed that Hoskins was in a difficult position because one court said one thing and another court said another. The reason for that, however, is that Hoskins went to the federal court when he didn't like the ruling from the state Supreme Court. He also asked the federal court to intervene to protect him from being held in contempt. The judge refused.

The justices didn't appear to buy into it, asking whether Hoskins fully understands that the law changing to the new maps, known as House Bill 1 (HB1), never went into effect. Chief Justice Powell, along with other justices, asked multiple times and in different ways whether Hoskins fully grasped that the maps were never legally changed. The AG office's lawyer appeared to play around with the admission, saying that Hoskins understands that now, but before, he was in a difficult position.

"We’re in a precarious situation," a frustrated Powell said. He urged them all to "get on the same page" and "find a way to save some of these elections so they are valid and we can sit the congressional delegation that our state is entitled to."

One justice cut in to say that they have a larger concern that the secretary of state could turn around and use maps that aren't law.

According to the attorney general's lawyer, Secretary of State Hoskins "acknowledges that this court's injunction is back in full force and effect" and is "evaluating next steps." In fact, the lawyer said multiple times that he hadn't had much time to confer with Hoskins since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling about an hour prior to the contempt hearing. So, Hoskins is still "evaluating the situation."

"I mean, it's just English," one justice said.

The justice explained that Hoskins could easily have waited until he had a final ruling on the matter as a whole, but instead, he chose the decision he wanted most and broadcast it to local officials, thereby causing more confusion. They asked what direction he had given to officials, and the AG's office said that there wasn't any.

A justice cut in to say that actually wasn't the case. The most recent message from the secretary of state's office was not to follow the law and the ruling by the state Supreme Court.

The hearing ended with Hoskins committing to telling the local officials that he lost in court and that they must comply with the 2022 maps.

As for his contempt, the justices said that he shouldn't leave town any time soon.

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AN 9 26

Missouri AG threatens 'absolute chaos' in defiance of state Supreme Court

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Missouri official begs federal court for help as he misses contempt deadline

AN 9 26

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AN 8 26

TARIFF MIZZOU

At a time when the Republican Party is fighting for life under an unpopular president, an economic analysis reveals the red state of Missouri is looking at serious problems as President Donald Trump escalates his prolonged trade war between the U.S. and Canada, according to the Kansas City Star.

Trump may have tried to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in his latest sleight to Canada, but there’s nothing symbolic about the impact of the 50 percent tariffs the Trump administration levied on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. There’s also nothing symbolic about the pain of the retaliatory tariffs Canada plans to impose on roughly 700 American products beginning Sept. 8.

“The Kansas City metro area exports about $4 billion in goods to Canada annually, including vehicles, plastics, chemicals and agricultural products," according to a 2025 study by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

“Any variation in tariffs may be sensitive,” said Ariel Dvoskin, who studies trade theory and teaches economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, “and the [50 percent] variation that we are talking about right now … would substantially affect the exports from KC.”

Dvoskin pointed out that a whopping 37 percent of Kansas City’s exported goods go to Canada, which puts this Trump-voting state in a nasty bullseye. “When you increase tariffs, of course, those who suffer first are workers because prices go up and their real wages go down," Dvoskin said.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce study identified Kansas City as one of the U.S. cities that would take the hardest hit in a trade war between the North American allies, with Kansas City the third-most vulnerable city in a prolonged trade dispute because of its dependence on Canadian demand.

The info was based on 2023 data, but Andrew DiCapua, the chamber’s principal economist and the study’s author, told the Star that the results still apply today.

“Kansas City really is at the center of this trade war,” DiCapua said. “ … It raises costs for businesses. I mean, someone needs to pay for this. Even if it’s not passed on to consumers right away, someone still needs to pay for the tariffs. So smaller businesses that rely on these supply chains are going to have to eat those costs.”

Frank Lenk, director of economic research at the Mid-America Regional Council, told the Star that Kansas City’s auto industry is among the clearest targets because vehicles are one of the region’s largest exports and much of that trade is tied to Canada. Lenk added that Trump’s trade war can also hike manufacturing costs for companies like Ford and General Motors because parts and materials move back and forth across the border before final assembly.

They can either absorb those costs and threaten their financial integrity and workers or pass the costs down to customers in a colossal wallop.

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05/14/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway insists that "we have always, in Missouri, been a pro-life state, even though we had vote that didn't show that last year." She was referencing the decision by the voters to protect reproductive rights in the state constitution.

Katy Faust claims that marriage equality "was one of the biggest power grabs of the state that we have ever seen."

Doug Wilson says extraterrestrials and UFOS are "spiritual apparitions designed to mislead and deceive" created by Satan.

MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer has secured endorsements from House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Reps. Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, and Lisa McClain in his bid for Congress.

Brad Dacus declares that the Southern Poverty Law Center is "the most dangerous private organization in the United States to our freedom, to our liberty, to our Constitution, [and] to the unity we have as Americans."

Elijah Schaffer asserts "I only want to live around white people." Why? "I hate n*ggers."

Finally, Rick Green believes that WallBuilders is widely respected because of its "intellectual consistency." Um, we would beg to differ.

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SEE STAFFER NETWORK

AN 2 26

The Missouri prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the 2020 vote in Fulton County, Georgia, has taken part in meetings since last fall with lawyers tasked by President Donald Trump to reinvestigate his loss to Joe Biden.

Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed last year as U.S. attorney for Missouri’s Eastern District, has had multiple meetings set up with top administration lawyers to discuss election integrity.

At those meetings was Ed Martin, a Justice Department lawyer who until recently led a group investigating what the president has described as the department’s “weaponization” against him and his allies, according to a source familiar with the meetings who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

White House lawyer Kurt Olsen, who has been tasked with reinvestigating the 2020 election, also was directed to join at least one of the meetings, according to the source. Both Martin and Olsen worked on behalf of Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results, and a federal court sanctioned Olsen for making false claims about the reliability of voting machines in Arizona.

The meetings reveal new details about the length of the preparations for, and people involved in, the January FBI raid on Fulton County, which election and legal experts told ProPublica was a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi picked Albus and has granted him special authority to handle election-related cases nationwide, even though his earlier work as a federal prosecutor didn’t involve election law or election-related cases. The meetings with Martin, Olsen and other lawyers for the Justice Department were described by the source as being about “election integrity,” a term the Trump administration has used to describe investigations into its false claims that elections are rigged.

Martin, Olsen, Albus and others declined to answer questions about the meetings and other detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House and the Justice Department also did not respond to questions.

The meetings came at a particularly crucial time.

Martin’s efforts to obtain election materials from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, had hit a wall. In August, he sent a letter demanding that a Fulton County judge allow him to access tens of thousands of absentee ballots for “an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice,” but he had reportedly received no reply.

Martin explained to Steve Bannon on a podcast that aired around the time of the meetings that although the White House had given Olsen the official mandate to reinvestigate the 2020 election, “inside DOJ, myself and a couple of others have been working also on the same topic” — including getting the Fulton County ballots. But Martin described progress as a “challenge.”

Bannon, who served as Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, asked why Martin didn’t just “get some U.S. marshals to go down and seize” the ballots.

Martin suggested it was easier said than done, but agreed: “Look, we’ve got to get” the ballots.

Before long, Albus and Olsen were interviewing witnesses for their case. Kevin Moncla, a conservative researcher, told ProPublica that he spoke to Albus and Olsen a couple of times, both together and separately, around the turn of the year. He identified himself as Witness 7 in the affidavit that persuaded a judge to sign off on the raid, and the affidavit mentions a 263-page report he authored that activists believe may have justified the raid, ProPublica has reported. Moncla has a long history of working with Olsen, dating back to an attempt by Kari Lake, a Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, to overturn her 2022 loss.

Just a few weeks after those interviews, in late January, Albus was listed as the government attorney on the search warrant that authorized the seizure of roughly 700 boxes of election material in Georgia, far outside of Albus’ usual jurisdiction.

Former U.S. attorneys from both parties said it was rare for a federal prosecutor from one region to take on cases in other states or be granted the nationwide authority Albus has been given.

Under Trump, senior roles across the White House, DOJ and FBI have increasingly been filled by a small, interconnected group of Missouri lawyers with longstanding ties to one another.

Another top federal official in the meetings was Jesus Osete, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. Before joining the Justice Department, Osete worked in the Missouri attorney general’s office, where he represented the state in at least five lawsuits against the Biden administration regarding vaccine mandates, immigration and other policies. Osete did not respond to requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions.

When the FBI raided Fulton County’s election center, Andrew Bailey, another lawyer from the same political circles, was in charge. Before joining the FBI as deputy director, he had used his position as Missouri’s attorney general to pursue high-profile cases against prominent Democrats and said he supported all efforts to investigate Biden, his family and his administration.

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to answer detailed questions about Bailey.

Last year, Roger Keller, a veteran federal prosecutor from Albus’ office, was brought in to help prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud in Virginia after the original career prosecutors on the case were replaced by political appointees. After a judge dismissed the case, two federal grand juries declined to indict James again, and Keller returned to Missouri.

Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, previously served as Missouri’s solicitor general under state attorneys general Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt. He and Schmitt signed Missouri’s amicus brief supporting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Sauer later represented Trump in his presidential-immunity case, successfully arguing before the Supreme Court that Trump was entitled to broad immunity from prosecution.

Albus’ connection to the other Missouri lawyers goes back decades. Unlike some of the others, though, he has never held elected office or had a high public profile, nor has he waged culture-war campaigns like Bailey or Martin. Instead, he spent most of his career as a federal prosecutor and as a judge in a Missouri state circuit court.

Emails show Albus exchanging brief messages with Martin in 2007, when Albus was an assistant U.S. attorney in St. Louis and Martin was chief of staff to then-Gov. Matt Blunt. The emails were part of records from the Blunt administration that became public after being released under Missouri’s Sunshine Law.

In the email exchange, Albus put in a good word for a St. Louis lawyer who was a finalist for an appellate court judgeship, and Blunt ultimately selected that candidate.

Albus served as first assistant to Schmitt from early 2019 until Albus was appointed by Gov. Mike Parson to fill a circuit court judge vacancy in early 2020. Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, praised Albus as “one of the finest prosecutors I have ever met” when endorsing his nomination for U.S. attorney in December.

Lawyers who appeared in Albus’ court rated him as well prepared, professional and attentive, according to Missouri judicial performance reviews. They said he followed the evidence, applied the law correctly and gave clear reasons for his rulings.

Albus came under more critical scrutiny after Trump named him interim U.S. attorney last summer. Much of that attention centered on a fraud case he inherited when he took office. Prosecutors alleged that developers in St. Louis falsely claimed to be using minority- and women-owned subcontractors to qualify for city tax breaks, conduct the Justice Department has historically treated as wire fraud.

One of the defendants was represented by lawyer Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi.

The developers’ lawyers argued that even if the government’s claims were true, they were legally irrelevant because the Trump administration had taken the position that tax breaks based on race or gender were unlawful. Albus accepted those arguments and dropped the case. As part of the resolution, Albus personally hand-delivered to City Hall a check of about $1 million from one of the developers’ companies as restitution. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he intervened “to make it clear” his office wanted to drop charges and hand-delivered the check “to make sure they got it.”

In a letter to Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Congressional Democrats said the dismissal of the St. Louis case and other cases in which the Justice Department intervened on behalf of Brad Bondi’s clients raised “significant broader ethical concerns.” In the St. Louis case, and in a separate matter involving another Brad Bondi client whose charges were dropped, a Justice Department spokesperson said Pam Bondi’s relationship with her brother had “no bearing on the outcome.”

A spokesperson for the developers said their lawyers communicated only with the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis about the case and had no direct contact with Pam Bondi. He said the dismissal reflected “a recognition that this case should never have been brought in the first place.” Brad Bondi did not respond to a request for comment.

Weeks later, around the time of Albus’ meetings about election integrity, he posed with Martin in Martin’s office, flanked by a framed photo of Trump and a copy of “A Choice, Not an Echo,” the influential conservative manifesto by Phyllis Schlafly arguing that Republican voters were being manipulated by party elites and the media.

Martin posted the photo on X with the caption, “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”

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Although Missouri is a red state — Donald Trump carried Missouri by 18 percent in 2024 compared to roughly 14 percent in Texas — its largest city, St. Louis, is a Democratic stronghold. Tensions have long existed between St. Louis' Democrat-dominated city government and Missouri's GOP-controlled state government in Jefferson City, and those tensions escalated when Donald Trump became the Republican Party's most influential figure.

St. Louis-based journalist Devin Thomas O'Shea describes the growing tensions between that city and Missouri Republicans in an article published on March 20.

Those tensions, according to O'Shea, are underscored by Republican responses to a May 2025 tornado that killed five people in the St. Louis and inflicted considerable damage.

"In St. Louis, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been antagonistic to recovery efforts," O'Shea explains. "Neither the president nor this last year's Homeland Security director, Kristi Noem, believe that FEMA should exist. Some Senate Democrats believe Noem's pausing and delaying FEMA payments violated federal law, but the effect is that Missouri has been added to a growing list — alongside North Carolina after Hurricane Helene — of states cut loose, left to rebuild on their own."

O'Shea continues, "Noem cut FEMA's workforce by thousands to achieve this result, and if St. Louis is a test case for contemporary climate disasters, the verdict is in: You're on your own."

St. Louis City Mayor Cara Spencer, according to O'Shea, "admits that things have moved too slowly" with tornado recovery efforts "and that money has not reached storm victims."

"While some Missouri Republicans claim they are upset about FEMA's dysfunction, they are also using the tornado recovery to lash St. Louis," O'Shea notes. "This year, the GOP plans to bankrupt the city. This is not an exaggeration — in January, the Missouri Legislature turned $100 million in relief into a weapon to compel St. Louis to enact the budget policy of eliminating the earnings tax, a prime source of city revenue. It's also not an exaggeration to say that the Missouri State Legislature spent last year moving forward with the re-invasion of the City of St. Louis."

O'Shea adds, "The Republican-controlled state spends much of its legislative time trying to overturn voter referendums. State-wide, Missourians approve abortion, vote in favor of increasing the minimum wage, and reject right-to-work legislation. Meanwhile, Missouri lawmakers go to work to criminalize abortion, lower the minimum wage, and get right-to-work back on the ballot. In March 2025, three months before the tornado, Gov. Mike Kehoe rejected a 2012 voter referendum that granted local control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (STLPD) to the City of St. Louis."

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Pesticide use and cancer risk rise together across America’s heartland - Investigate Midwest

A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest.

The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states.

OKLA PREEMPT LAW FAIL?

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Red state GOP goes scorched earth to keep its gerrymandered map off the 2026 ballot - Alternet.org

Missouri Republicans have been doing everything they can to block a referendum to put the state’s gerrymandered congressional map on the 2026 ballot. The latest twist came late last month when Attorney General Catherine Hanaway accused a company hired to collect signatures for the campaign of human trafficking.

You read that right: Human trafficking.

If true, it would be a massive scandal — and a grave tragedy. But so far, the only evidence Hanaway has cited are “reports.”

After she made the initial accusation on social media, we sought clarification from her office on where she heard these allegations, what “reports” she was referring to and what led her to believe they were credible enough to seek assistance from ICE, the federal agency that enforces immigration laws.

Her office didn’t respond.

A few days later, Hanaway issued a statement announcing she had launched a formal investigation into the allegations. So we asked again for any information about the source of these claims. And this time, Hanaway’s office was quick to respond to tell us that because there is now an active investigation, no information can legally be released.

Welp…

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee seized on the news, using it in a Black Friday–themed text blast to warn Missourians not to sign petitions from a group being investigated for “improper conduct.”

At the center of the accusation is Advanced Micro Targeting — the Dallas-based firm hired by a PAC called People Not Politicians to collect signatures. The allegation is that AMT is bringing undocumented immigrants into the state to assist with the campaign.

To put it another way, at a time when many immigrants — regardless of their legal status — live in fear of being detained and deported, AMT has allegedly been able to convince some to stand outside of government buildings with clipboards.

AMT has strongly denied the accusations. According to the company, all signature gatherers are vetted through the federal E-Verify system. Every petition form lists the name of the signature gatherer, and all forms are reviewed by a notary who checks the signature gatherer’s ID.

Adding to the drama, AMT filed a federal lawsuit alleging four consulting firms are involved in an effort to pay AMT employees to abandon their work, turn over any signatures they gathered and badmouth the company — all to sabotage the petition drive.

Some employees, according to the lawsuit, were offered up to $30,000 to quit and provide “intelligence” to opponents of the referendum.

In a recording provided to The Independent by a supporter of the referendum, an individual who approached signature gatherers in Kansas City is heard identifying himself as an employee of one of the firms named in the lawsuit, Let the Voters Decide.

Let the Voters Decide, which is based in Florida, called AMT’s litigation a “bogus lawsuit” full of “absurd claims.”

And so here we are: an alleged sabotage campaign; an immigration investigation; a federal lawsuit; and a litany of procedural roadblocks.

The GOP is pulling out all the stops to keep the gerrymandered map off the 2026 ballot.

It’s understandable. Of the 27 times a referendum has been placed on the Missouri ballot, voters have rejected the General Assembly’s actions all but twice — including overturning a congressional map in 1922.

The fight over Missouri’s gerrymandered map seems destined to spiral deeper into political intrigue. What began as a dispute over lines on a map has now become a test of the state’s democratic backbone.

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Nearly all state funding for Missouri school vouchers used for religious schools

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GGL 9 25 Search Assist

The Missouri GOP is currently pushing to gerrymander the state's congressional districts, which would favor Republican candidates and potentially silence voters' voices. This effort is part of a broader strategy to maintain their supermajority in the legislature. komu.com democraticredistricting.com

Overview of Missouri GOP's Redistricting Efforts

The Missouri Republican Party is currently pushing for significant changes to the state's congressional districts. This effort is part of a special legislative session called by Governor Mike Kehoe.

Key Proposals

Gerrymandering Congressional Districts: The proposed congressional map aims to favor Republican candidates by altering district boundaries, particularly affecting the Kansas City area. This would extend districts into more conservative rural regions.
Changes to Initiative Petition Process: Another proposal seeks to modify how citizens can place measures on the ballot, potentially making it more difficult for voters to pass amendments to the state constitution.

Legislative Actions

Filibuster and New Rules: Senate Republicans used a controversial tactic to end a Democratic filibuster against these proposals. They passed new rules that prioritize House bills, allowing them to fast-track the redistricting measures.
Democratic Opposition: Democrats argue that these changes undermine their ability to propose important legislation and are primarily aimed at maintaining Republican power.

Public Response

Protests and Criticism: There has been significant public outcry, including rallies organized by Democrats and various voting coalitions opposing the redistricting efforts. Critics claim that the proposed changes do not address pressing issues like unemployment and economic challenges in Missouri.

komu.com democraticredistricting.com

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The Missouri Senate died at 1:42 p.m. Friday afternoon when Republican leaders refused to allow debate on a measure weakening the initiative petition process, GOP state Sen. Lincoln Hough said in an interview with The Independent.

A two-week special session to gerrymander Missouri’s congressional map and make it virtually impossible for voters to amend the state constitution ended Friday when Senate Republicans voted to cut off debate and steamroll both bills across the finish line.

Hough was one of only two Republicans who opposed every motion to cut off debate and voted against the bills.

About 20 minutes after the Senate adjourned, Hough said Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin visited his office and removed him as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Hough has been chairman or vice chairman of the committee since he joined the Senate in 2019.

“She said, ‘we are tired of fighting with you,’” Hough said. ”To which my response was, ‘did you fight with me this week, or did I just go out here and vote no on something that was handed down to the Missouri Senate and a bunch of elected members who are not allowed to talk?’”

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It was the second time Hough has bucked his party this year when it sought to deploy procedural maneuvers to shut down debate. The first came in near the end of the 2025 session in May on bills repealing voter-approved laws expanding sick leave and protecting abortion rights.

“What I’ve seen at the end of last session, and what I saw this week, is a dismantling of what the Senate is supposed to be,” Hough said.

O’Laughlin did not respond to text messages seeking comment on Hough’s removal as chairman or his description of how it occurred. As of Saturday morning, the change in the committee line-up had not been posted to the Senate website.

Hough said he is not sure if he is still a member of the committee.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “When the news was delivered to me, I didn’t ask a lot of follow up questions.”

The other Republican who broke with his party on Friday was state Sen Mike Moon of Ash Grove. Reached by text message Saturday, Moon said he had not been told of any changes in his committee assignments. He chairs the Veterans and Military Affairs Committee and the Select Committee on Equal Protection and DEI.

Moon, who has been punished by Senate Republican leadership in the past for some of his actions, declined to comment on the removal of Hough as Appropriations Committee chairman.

Lawmakers were meeting in their second special session of the year to do the bidding of President Donald Trump and gerrymander the 5th Congressional District to unseat U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat. The Senate passed the new map first, shutting off debate after letting Democrats speak against it for about four hours.

Next came the proposal added to the agenda by Kehoe to require both a majority of statewide votes and a majority of the votes in all eight of the state’s congressional districts to pass constitutional amendments proposed by initiative petition.

But along with the motion to take up the measure, state Sen. Brad Hudson, a Republican from Cape Fair, sent the motion to cut off debate before it began.

“My understanding of how this process is supposed to work is, if someone brings a bill before the body, then members are given the opportunity to have a conversation about it,” Hough said. “Maybe, I mean, call me crazy, but maybe even draft amendments and think about ways to improve something or change something.”

Republicans used several unprecedented maneuvers to muscle the two measures to final passage. The steps were orchestrated from the start to get the bills finished by Friday afternoon.

When the Senate convened, O’Laughlin presented a new set of rules intended to sidestep every opportunity Democrats could use to stall proceedings.

As a result, no senator was allowed to introduce a bill during the special session, the daily journal was never presented to the body for approval and House-passed legislation became the chamber’s top official priority for the first time in its existence.

The procedural step to shut off debate, called the previous question, is commonly used by the majority in the 163-member Missouri House, where no member can speak for more than 15 minutes on a topic, to move priority legislation.

But until this year, it was a rare move in the Senate, where the rules allow a member to speak as long as they like on any subject once they have the floor. Invoking the rule requires a motion signed by 10 senators.

The previous question has been used to move four bills this year, twice in the regular session and twice in the special session. It was also used to implement the new Senate rules.

But it had never before been used to pass a bill without any debate at all.

“It’s pretty easy to pass legislation in the Missouri Senate if you don’t have to talk about it, and you can just bring it before the body and say, we’re not, we’re not going to have any discussion whatsoever,” Hough said.

The Republican Party, he said, is suppressing every element that doesn’t walk in lockstep with the Trump White House.

“It seems that if you have any independent thought, or even just raise a question, you have a problem with this Republican Party,” Hough said. “And that is not the Republican Party that, 15 years ago when I first ran for the House, that I was part of.”

His disagreement with the procedures used to pass the legislation didn’t upset the progress of the bills. Shutting off debate requires 18 votes, and the fewest on any motion was 19.

“This is a dark day in the Missouri Senate,” Hough said. “It is a dark day when policy differences lead to the dismantling of the institution and the removal of individuals from chairmanships.”

In his seven years on the appropriations committee, Hough has shown himself as detail-oriented and able to build consensus while taking a tough negotiating position during final budget talks with the House.

With one more legislative session in his term-limited tenure, Hough won’t have to worry about pleasing leadership.

The upcoming budget could prove to be the most difficult to write in many years. When Kehoe vetoed $300 million in spending items in June, the news release accompanying the action said the state budget office was forecasting a general revenue shortfall of nearly $1 billion in the coming fiscal year.

“We’re definitely,” Hough said, “going to have some conversations about the direction of the state’s finances next year.”

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'Gut punch': Missouri workers 'disgusted' by GOP repeal of paid sick leave mandate

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Republican lawmakers’ decision to overturn a voter-approved expansion of paid sick leave means benefits Missouri workers accrued in recent months will disappear on Aug. 28.

They also placed a question on the 2026 ballot rolling back abortion rights that voters enshrined in the state constitution in November.

It’s not the first time the GOP-dominated legislature overturned voter-approved laws in recent years. But this time, the backlash could have long-lasting consequences.

In the short term, proponents of the paid sick leave law are eyeing a new initiative petition to reinstate the benefit in the state constitution, while abortion-rights supporters expect to raise millions to fend off a new ban.

But another coalition hopes to go even further.

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Respect Missouri Voters, a bipartisan constellation of organizations, this month submitted 38 versions of a new initiative petition seeking to undermine the legislature’s ability to overturn voter-approved measures.

Most would require 80% of the legislature to agree before a law or constitutional amendment enacted by initiative petition could be revised or repealed. They also would prohibit the legislature from making the initiative and referendum process more difficult.

The group’s PAC reported $200,000 cash on hand on July 1, with another $170,000 in large donations since then. That includes $10,000 from former Republican U.S. Sen. John Danforth.

“This is our one shot,” said Benjamin Singer, CEO of one of the coalition’s members, Show Me Integrity. “If we don’t act now, they’ll succeed in silencing us forever.”

Missouri Gov. Kehoe signs bill repealing paid sick leave

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Republicans have taken notice, with some pondering a preemptive strike to change the initiative petition process before any campaign gets off the ground. But others worry it may already be too late and wonder if the GOP overplayed its hand with its recent moves.

“The legislature doesn’t really seem to understand, they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest,” said James Harris, a veteran Republican consultant in Missouri. “We may be about to cross the rubicon… where the legislature loses a lot of its power.”

The showdown is decades in the making.

After Missourians approved a constitutional amendment to limit taxes in the 1980s, the Democratic-led legislature tried to make changes to the initiative petition process that were criticized at the time by GOP Gov. John Ashcroft as an attempt to silence voters. He ultimately vetoed the bill.

In 1999, Missouri voters rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed concealed carry of firearms. Despite the defeat, the legislature revisited the issue after Republicans took the majority and ultimately passed a concealed carry bill in 2003.

Voters passed a ballot measure in 2010 called the “Puppy Mill Cruelty and Prevention Act” that specified appropriate living conditions for breeding operations with at least 10 female breeding dogs. It also capped the number of animals that a business could use for breeding at 50.

Soon after, lawmakers passed a bill that peeled back key parts of the new law, including the cap on the number of breeding dogs.

The puppy mill vote inspired advocates to forgo changes to state law and instead put their focus on putting policy changes in the state constitution — making it much harder for lawmakers to make changes because it would require another statewide vote.

In subsequent years, voters approved constitutional amendments legalizing marijuana, expanding Medicaid eligibility, creating a nonpartisan redistricting plan and repealing a ban on abortion.

But the GOP supermajority wasn’t ready to quit without a fight.

Lawmakers refused to fund Medicaid expansion until the Missouri Supreme Court said they had no choice. They pushed through a ballot measure of their own, approved by voters, that repealed the nonpartisan redistricting plan.

Next year, voters will weigh in on an amendment passed by the legislature putting the state’s abortion ban back in place. The paid sick leave expansion was not a constitutional amendment, allowing lawmakers to repeal it without a new statewide vote.

“I don’t understand the legislature’s strategy at all,” said Sean Nicholson, a progressive strategist who has worked on numerous initiative petition campaigns in Missouri. “A very pro-Trump electorate spoke very clearly on abortion rights and paid sick leave in November. And now we head into a midterm, and we’ve seen in Missouri and other states that shenanigans from politicians become part of the story. The legislature has given voters plenty of motivation to double down on what they’ve already said.”

Missouri Republicans shut down Senate debate to pass abortion ban, repeal sick leave law

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Republicans, who held legislative super majorities as these progressive ballot measures have been approved by voters, have long complained that out-of-state money from anonymous sources have largely fueled these initiative petition campaigns.

They’ve vowed for years to make it harder to change the constitution through the initiative petition process, but the push always fizzled amidst GOP infighting or other legislative priorities.

The threat of an initiative petition that would weaken the legislature’s hand in the process has reignited calls for Republicans to take action quickly. The Missouri Freedom Caucus, a group of right-wing legislators who regularly quarrel with GOP leadership, is calling on Gov. Mike Kehoe to convene a special legislative session to change the initiative petition process.

“Missouri’s Constitution should not be up for sale to the highest left-wing bidder,” the group said in a statement last week. “Without immediate reform, left-wing activists will continue to use this loophole to force their unpopular agenda on Missouri citizens with a mere 51% of the vote.”

Whether Missourians will get another chance to vote on paid sick leave is still up in the air.

Missouri’s law allowed employees to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, starting May 1. By the time it’s officially repealed, 17 weeks will have elapsed. That means someone working 40 hours a week could have earned 22 hours of paid sick leave.

If workers don’t use their paid sick leave before Aug. 28, there’s no legal guarantee they can do so afterward.

The sick leave expansion was a “job killer,” said Kara Corches, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, adding that “one-size-fits-all mandates threaten growth.”

Richard Von Glahn, policy director of Missouri Jobs with Justice, which advocated for the paid sick leave ballot measure, noted 58% of voters approved the proposal. It was also upheld unanimously by the Missouri Supreme Court.

“Now workers may again face the reality of having no paid sick time to take care of their families without losing out on a check,” Von Glahn said shortly after the governor signed the paid sick leave repeal earlier this month. “This move by the Missouri legislature sets a dangerous precedent for democratic processes in our state.”

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U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is presenting himself as the rare Republican willing to fight for low-income Americans who will lose their health care or food assistance if his party makes massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. He has been rewarded with much credulous reporting suggesting he is sincere about that.

But as Missouri’s senior U.S. senator and former attorney general, it’s fair to expect Hawley to know what is happening on the ground here: an abject failure to administer federal benefits in compliance with current law.

There is absolutely no possibility that Missouri can handle additional red tape like the “work requirements” in both the House and Senate versions of Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” yet Hawley has endorsed them.

Missouri just isn’t capable of enhanced eligibility requirements. A lawsuit brought by disabled Missourians who were denied SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, proves this.

One plaintiff with cancer and COPD, lacking internet access, transportation — and, let’s not forget, food —used her prepaid cell phone minutes sitting on hold for days trying to get an application. When she gave up and paid for a ride to a benefits office, she got an application but couldn’t complete the required interview due to lack of staff. So she spent more days on hold before having her application denied for failure to complete the interview that she couldn’t get.

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That lawsuit was filed when Hawley’s fellow senator from Missouri, Eric Schmitt, was our attorney general. Instead of fixing the problem, the state has defended the lawsuit for three years.

When the court found that Missouri was not complying with the law, current Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed a non-appealable order that merely requires monthly progress reports on call wait times. In January of this year, the lowest daily average call wait time was 58 minutes and the highest average was 2 hours. The maximum wait time was 5 hours, roughly 21,000 calls were dropped and 14,134 callers gave up (or ran out of cell phone minutes, or had to pick up their kids, or had to go to work, etc).

On the Medicaid front, Missouri was investigated and offered support by the Biden Administration to deal with our worst in the nation, legally non-compliant wait times for enrollment.

Individuals submitting their renewal information — online, in person, by fax, or even certified mail — regularly lose their coverage automatically because the state fails to process their documents in time.

A woman who already had coverage through MO HealthNet, Missouri’s Medicaid program, went months without prenatal care because she was unable to reach anyone to tell them she was pregnant.

When the pandemic freeze on Medicaid disenrollments expired, Missouri made a mess of the eligibility review process so families learned at the pediatrician’s office that their children had lost their health insurance despite still being eligible. Children who went without medications for manageable conditions like asthma ended up at emergency rooms.

Now imagine everyone has to navigate a dysfunctional system every six months to keep their health insurance as both versions of the bill would require. Or even once a month – as the bills would allow.

You have to take time off work to prove you are working. Or you have to use up time and cell phone minutes to try to prove you can’t work and qualify for an exemption. In a system as broken as Missouri’s, many people can’t jump through those hoops even when they treat it like a full time job.

If Missouri can’t or won’t run it’s SNAP program properly under current law – where the federal government pays all of the benefits and 50% of the cost of administering those food aid dollars that go straight into our local economies – there is no way food insecurity here won’t get significantly worse and our economy won’t take a serious hit with Republicans’ planned cuts.

Those proposed cuts include states losing at least 5% and up to 25% of their SNAP dollars depending on their “error rate” of under and over payments to households with SNAP. Missouri’s most recent error rate is 10.2%, which means we would lose 25% of our funding for being over 10%, like the majority of states. And the bill would also cut funding for administrative costs which will inevitably make our error rate worse. SNAP is an optional program, and I wouldn’t put it past our legislature to end it all together and let people starve.

As to Medicaid, instead of allocating the funding needed to run MO HealthNet properly, our legislators blame leadership issues or technology problems. Our legislature has done nothing to prepare for what the proposed Trump cuts would do to us, nor what the DOGE impoundments are already doing. They just keep passing tax cut after tax cut.

Given we are not currently capable of running our Medicaid or SNAP programs, there is no possibility that we can manage added expensive red tape.

But that’s the goal. Republicans know, because it has been widely documented, that work requirements don’t work even in more functional states. They don’t increase employment because people with Medicaid who can work are already working.

(I am setting aside the larger undiscussed issue of why working full time in the U.S. is not enough to afford health care, unlike in peer nations.)

The idea that there is $880 billion, or even a fraction of that, in “fraud, waste, and abuse,” in Medicaid is ridiculous. The savings Republicans are counting on would come from deliberately making it too burdensome for the struggling people these programs were intended to help to continue using them.

Look at Arkansas. The state implemented a work requirement and 18,000 people lost their insurance in the few months before a court determined the requirement had been illegally implemented.

Georgia enacted a program in lieu of Medicaid expansion that requires monthly eligibility paperwork. It has enrolled only 3% of Georgians with qualifying incomes, and the money spent on verifying eligibility has dwarfed that spent on providing actual medical care.

Republicans are counting on this happening on a much larger scale to offset their tax cuts. It’s an incredibly wasteful and dangerous strategy.

We burn money on processes to root out non-existent “fraud.” Then, when the people least equipped to navigate those processes can’t do so, they will lose their preventative health care and end up sicker and resorting to more expensive care at hospitals that are required by law to treat them regardless of ability to pay. Then all our premiums go up.

In Missouri, cuts will exacerbate our existing shortage of healthcare providers as more rural hospitals shutter due to lack of funds.

Hawley acknowledged that Missouri’s rural hospitals are in trouble when he opposed a different provision in the House bill, which would curtail a Republican-created and very popular state tax used to get federal Medicaid dollars to hospitals. (He has since caved on the House’s curtailment, and now only opposes the Senate’s significantly more drastic one.)

Rural Missourians will have particular difficulty navigating the work requirement due to lacking internet access, transportation, and job opportunities. And you know what makes it harder to keep a job? Losing your health insurance so you can’t manage your health conditions.

Despite there being no universe in which Missouri becomes capable of administering additional eligibility requirements anytime soon, Hawley doesn’t even object to Republicans moving the implementation deadline up from 2029 to next year. This is not a serious proposal for a functioning eligibility process. It’s a plan to take insurance from eligible people on purpose.

When Hawley was asked last week about people “inadvertently losing coverage,” he said: “We can sort that out.” How? If it’s so easy to sort, why didn’t Hawley or Schmitt sort it out when they were state officials or since?

Hawley is portraying himself as an advocate for the people by using the Trumpian tactic of telling us that up is down and a cut is not a cut. Presuming Hawley knows anything about the reality in Missouri, he knows better.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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In an unprecedented move to funnel more public tax dollars toward groups that oppose abortion, Republican lawmakers in Missouri are advancing a plan to allow residents to donate to pregnancy resource centers instead of paying any state income taxes.

The proposal would establish a 100% tax credit, up from 70%, and a $50,000 annual cap per taxpayer. The result: Nearly all Missouri households — except those with the highest incomes — could fully satisfy their state tax bill by redirecting their payment from the state to pregnancy centers.

The move comes four months after Missouri voters reversed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, and just as clinics have begun performing the procedure again after overcoming Republican obstacles.

Supporters of the bill, which last month cleared a key legislative hurdle in the state House, say it gives taxpayers more control over where their tax dollars go and allows them to support organizations that help pregnant women and provide alternatives to abortion. Alissa Gross, CEO of Resource Health Services, which runs four pregnancy resource centers in the Kansas City area, told the committee in written testimony that tax credits have led to a surge in donations to her organization and that a 100% tax credit could bring in even more.

“Our ability to impact more men and women for life as well as build healthy families has been substantial,” she said.

Critics argue the state’s support for pregnancy resource centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers, diverts tax revenue away from essential services such as health care and public education and becomes a funding stream for anti-abortion advocacy. They say many centers do little to actually help women; instead, they say they merely discourage women from getting abortions.

“A 70 percent tax credit with no cap was excessive. A 100 percent tax credit is absurd,” Katie Baylie, a lawyer and reproductive rights advocate based in the Kansas City area, wrote in testimony submitted to the committee. “It is an insult to Missourians that our lawmakers are spending time even considering this bill.”

Experts in tax policy and philanthropy said a dollar-for-dollar tax credit — for any purpose — is rare and could be much costlier for the state than intended, especially if pregnancy centers actively promote it.

...

===

rww

02/27/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Andrew Tate Is on His Way to the U.S. Thanks to Trump

The misogynist facing charges of human trafficking is on a plane back to the United States.

Angry White Men: Christian Nationalist Podcasters Interview Holocaust Denier Ron Unz

As part of a new interview series, white Christian nationalists C. Jay Engel and Andrew Isker spoke with Ron Unz about Charles Lindbergh and World War II. A well-known Holocaust denier, Unz has written that the Holocaust was a “hoax” and that Jews have a “notorious tendency to lie and dissemble.”

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: GOP Congressman: It's OK if Elon fires you since "God has a plan and purpose for your life"

> Republican Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri offered thoughtless religious platitudes to his constituents.

Janna Brancolini @ The Daily Beast: Johnson Tries to Shrug Off Anti-DOGE Town Halls as the Work of ‘Paid Protesters’

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed Wednesday that Americans who attended recent rowdy Republican town halls were “paid protesters.”

Ahmad Austin Jr. @ Mediaite: Trump Says He Doesn’t Remember Calling Zelenskyy a Dictator When Confronted in Oval Office: ‘Did I Say That?’

President Donald Trump on Thursday acted as though he had no recollection of calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Annabelle Timsit @ The Washington Post: Transgender troops will be removed from U.S. military, Pentagon says

The previous Trump administration effectively banned transgender people from joining, but the new memo says currently serving transgender troops will be discharged.

===

an 1 25

In the Missouri Legislature, State Sen. David Gregory, a far-right MAGA Republican, is proposing a bill that, if passed, would give a $1000 reward to anyone who reports someone who is in the United States illegally if the report leads to an arrest. And the bill is fueling heated debates among Missouri residents.

Gregory, who served in the Missouri House of Representatives before being elected to the Missouri Senate in 2024, vigorously defended his proposal during a hearing on Monday, January 27.

Gregory told members of the Missouri Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Public Safety Committee, "This bill seeks to create an ICE program at the state level. That's essentially all it does. This is an ICE program inside the state of Missouri."

But Democratic Missouri State Sen. Barbara Washington, whose district is in Kansas City, is calling out the bill as racist and argues that it encourages Missouri residents to file reports based on a person's skin color or proficiency in English.

During the January 27 hearing, Washington warned, "Don't tell me it is not going to happen because it is happening now."

Missouri Independent reporter Rudi Keller, in an article published on January 28, explains, "Gregory, a Republican from Chesterfield, wants to authorize bounty hunters, usually employed by bail bond businesses to catch absconders, to track down people identified in tips. And if the tip proves accurate, the person arrested would be charged with 'trespass by an illegal alien,' and subject to life in prison without parole if federal immigration authorities declined to take custody."

The New York Post's Jon Levine noted that Gregory's bill would "develop an information system for people to report violations of this act, which shall include a toll-free telephone hotline, e-mail and online reporting portal."

Washington wasn't the only person speaking out against Gregory's bill at the January 27 hearing.

Gabriella Cepeda of the Hispanic Law Students Association at St. Louis University told attendees, "This bill fosters a climate of fear, where people feel unsafe engaging in even the most basic activities beyond going to work or school. They are terrified of being profiled or targeted (for) life in prison for simply existing in the state without documentation. It is not just extreme, it's cruel and unusual punishment."

Similarly, immigrant Aura Velasquez — who has been a U.S. citizen for five years — testified, "It is inhumane to say people should be hunted like a sport. It would turn neighbors against neighbors and friends against each other."

===

an 12 24

Missouri voters enshrined abortion rights. GOP lawmakers are already working to roll them back

one month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it — or at least undermine it.

One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The result would be to classify abortion as an unlawful killing.

Another proposal, aimed at repealing the abortion rights amendment, would ask voters to ban gender transition procedures for minors, tying the two issues together, despite the fact that the amendment did not address gender surgery and gender-affirming care for transgender children is already illegal in Missouri.

Other proposed amendments include stricter abortion limits, such as restricting access to cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies. These measures would impose additional requirements, such as mandating that rape survivors file police reports to obtain an abortion.

GOP lawmakers have also introduced a measure to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution through voter initiatives, which could make it harder to pass similar measures in the future.

The legislative moves follow the Nov. 5 election, in which the amendment to put abortion rights in the state constitution won by a 51.6%-48.4% margin. Starting Thursday, the right to abortion will be constitutionally guaranteed up to the point of fetal viability, while restrictions on post-viability abortions will remain in place.

In other states where voters approved abortion rights measures last month, there were no signs yet that lawmakers would also try to counter those measures.

Even before votes in Missouri had been counted, proponents of Amendment 3, as the measure was called, had anticipated that a victory would be met with efforts to somehow undercut abortion rights.

“These people will continue to rail against abortion,” said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.

Although Missouri already has a law recognizing life as beginning at conception, stating that unborn children have “protectable interests in life, health, and well-being,” the proposed constitutional amendment would go further. It would effectively elevate this principle to the state constitution and potentially complicate not only abortion rights but the legality of in vitro fertilization and the handling of embryos.

Several states have laws recognizing fetal personhood, but Missouri would be the second — after Alabama — to enshrine it in its constitution. That could create legal and ideological confusion or even conflicts, experts say.

“You could see voters saying, ‘I support a right to abortion,’ but also saying, ‘Life begins at conception,’ without understanding that you can’t have both of those things at the same time,” said Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The author of one of the personhood measures, Rep. Justin Sparks, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, said he was emboldened by the narrow margin of the abortion rights vote.

“A clear mandate has not been achieved,” he said. While the amendment had strong support in metro St. Louis and Kansas City and in the county that’s home to the University of Missouri, “the vast majority of the rest of the state voted in a different direction,” he added. “So I think it’s fair to again bring the question up.”

But state Sen. Tracy McCreery, a Democrat also from the St. Louis suburbs, noted that Sparks was going against the will of voters in the St. Louis area. “I find that even more disrespectful of the voters,” she said. “It wasn’t just voters that tend to vote Democratic that voted yes on Amendment 3. It was also Republican voters and independent voters, and I think that’s getting lost in this discussion.”

The measure to link abortion and transgender rights reflects the campaign before the election, when abortion opponents conflated these topics. Critics said this strategy seeks to distract from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by capitalizing on voter discomfort with transgender issues.

While GOP lawmakers push these measures, the legal landscape around abortion in Missouri is already shifting. On Wednesday, a Jackson County Circuit Court heard arguments in a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri that seeks to strike down Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and other laws that regulate abortion. The lawsuit followed the passage of Amendment 3. Planned Parenthood said if it wins in court it plans to resume abortion services in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia on Friday.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has acknowledged that the amendment will legalize most abortions when it goes into effect, but he has said he intends to enforce remaining restrictions, such as a ban on abortions after fetal viability, a 72-hour waiting period and parental consent for minors.

Lawmakers are also pushing to raise the bar for passing constitutional amendments. Now, a simple majority is enough; that has allowed Missouri voters to bypass the legislature and pass progressive amendments that lawmakers oppose. A new bill would ask voters to pass a constitutional amendment requiring not just a statewide majority but also a majority of voters in five of the state’s eight congressional districts — a change critics argued would give disproportionate power to rural areas over urban voters. It would then be harder for voters to approve measures that don’t align with the priorities of the conservative politicians they tend to elect.

Earlier this year, a similar effort to make it harder to amend the constitution failed after Democrats in the Senate filibustered it.

Sparks criticized the Republican leadership in the General Assembly for allowing the failure, pointing to a Republican supermajority in both houses that could have passed the measure.

“We hold all the power,” Sparks said. “We hold all the procedural levers of power, and we can shut down debate in both houses any time, any day, for any bill we choose to.”

Florida shows how a higher threshold for voter initiatives might play out. In 2006, the state raised the bar for constitutional amendments to 60%. This year, a majority of voters — 57% — supported an abortion rights amendment, an even bigger margin than in Missouri, but not sufficient in Florida.

It’s not clear yet, though, whether any of the measures have enough support in Missouri’s General Assembly.

Lavender said that the campaign supporting abortion rights significantly outraised its opposition during the election. “It’s going to be difficult to overturn,” she said. “You’ll have the same money that supported it now going up against you.”

---

thom an 10 24

...

— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail.

They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’”

They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”

— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…

---

an 6 24

Trump supporters at the Missouri Republican Caucus on Saturday attacked fellow attendees who supported the former president's opponent, a prior member of the "grand old party" reported.

Former Lincoln Project veterans affairs adviser Fred Wellman, an ex-Republican and current Democratic campaign consultant, reportedthe aggressive development on social media. Wellman also recently hit retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser who played a prominent role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with a sanctions bid in a defamation lawsuit.

IFrame Content

On Saturday, Wellman conveyed information he said he received via text about the caucus in Missouri.

"I have a friend who attended the Missouri Republican Presidential Caucus today," he wrote Saturday. "They asked Nikki Haley supporters to line up in the middle of the auditorium and were booed and screamed at by the Trump supporters."

He continued: "They attacked fellow Republicans. Feel like democracy to you?"

...

Quoting a reported follow-up text from the source, Wellman then said, "The woman who spoke for Haley couldn’t stop shaking and crying. It was so scary.”

Someone in the comments wrote to Wellman, "Those Dale Carnegie courses didn't take..." He responded, "Nope. Do you think those folks will vote for Trump in November?"

===

---

AN 5 24

judge has ruled that Darrell Leon McClanahan III can remain on the 2024 Republican primary ballot in Missouri's gubernatorial race, despite the party's efforts to remove him.

The Daily Beast reported that McClanahan, who was outed as a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) earlier this year, prevailed against the Missouri GOP's legal challenge on Friday after a ruling by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Cotton Walker. In his decision, Walker ruled that while Missouri Republicans were free to criticize McClanahan as much as they liked, he wouldn't grant their petition to strike him from the ballot based on their argument of not properly vetting him first.

"I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” Dave Roland, who is representing McClanahan, told the Associated Press. "I think the case got filed because the Republican Party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose."

McClanahan's ties to the KKK came out after the Missouri-based publication Riverfront Times published photos of him from 2019 using a white power gesture next to a hooded man with a burning cross in the background. A separate photo shows McClanahan standing next to a klansman while holding a copy of the KKK's newsletter. The gubernatorial hopeful has since distanced himself from the group, but maintains that he is "pro-white." The photos were initially obtained by the Anti-Defamation League.

"The Missouri GOP knew exactly who I am," McClanahan wrote in a tweet in response to a separate tweet from the Missouri GOP condemning him.

McClanahan suggested that state Republican leadership made racist remarks to him in confidence, namely that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft — one of the eight other Republicans vying for the gubernatorial nomination — told him in 2020 that "the Blacks are a problem."

"I have forwarded my email communications with the GOP to media and will to any other media that request it," he added, alluding to "recorded conversations" he had with Missouri Republican leaders he decried as "a bunch of Anti-White hypocrites."

The far-right activist confirmed the photos of him at the cross-burning, but maintains that he was granted honorary membership in the KKK for one year but is no longer a member. He downplayed the photo of the event as a "private religious Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning."

Term-limited Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) will not be seeking reelection this year, meaning the primary to replace him in the predominantly Republican state is particularly crowded. Other high-profile Republicans seeking the GOP nomination include Ashcroft, Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe and Missouri state senator Bill Eigel.

Missouri's gubernatorial primary election will be held on August 6.

Click here to read the Beast's full report (subscription required).

---

crm

retaliation gop dysfunction

{---}:

an 2 24

So far this year, state Rep. Mazzie Christensen has filed 11 bills, ranging from changes to statewide education and public health policy to narrow legislation designed to help a small county in her district.

State Rep. Adam Schwadron has filed 12 bills, including his top priority to create a state fund to defray costs of security enhancements for nonprofits at elevated risk of terrorist attacks in Missouri.

Up until Thursday, more than a month into the legislative session, Christensen and Schwadron were the only Republican lawmakers who filed legislation this year who had not had any bills referred to committee by House Speaker Dean Plocher.

The pair also share one other thing in common: They were among the loudest voices within the House Republican caucus calling for Plocher to step down from leadership amid a litany of scandals.

With Plocher’s future still uncertain as he remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, Christensen believes he’s using his power as speaker to retaliate against those who spoke out...

---...

===

AG bailey pow target leo?

court > AG 7 23

https://www.alternet.org/missouri-supreme-court-abortion-ballot/

in deep red Missouri, abortion rights activists have been fighting to get an abortion initiative on the ballot. But Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been holding it up.

On Thursday, July 20, however, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ordered Bailey to let the measure go forward. The initiative would ask Missouri residents to vote on whether or not abortion should be illegal in the state.

The justices, according to the Associated Press, were critical of Bailey, describing his arguments against the measure as "incorrect" and "misleading."

Missouri resident Anna Fitz-James, a plaintiff in the case, is being represented by the Missouri ACLU. And the justices ruled that Bailey was violating her constitutional rights by holding the measure up.

The justices wrote, "Until the official ballot title is certified — a critical step being held up solely by the Attorney General's unjustified refusal to act — Fitz-James cannot challenge that title in circuit court or circulate her petitions. Fitz-James' constitutional right of initiative petition is being obstructed, and the deadline for submitting signed petitions draws nearer every day."

The Missouri ACLU applauded the Court's ruling.

In an official statement, the Missouri ACLU's executive director Luz María Henríquezi seemed to be referencing Bailey when she said, "While today is a tremendous victory for Missourians and the right to direct democracy, it is clear that some who hold office will not hesitate to trample the constitution if it advances their personal interests and political beliefs."

===

https://www.alternet.org/spray-painting-brick-of-lead/

SoS

~ trans

===

an 4 23 no lnx

Missouri Republican defends letting adults marry 12-year-old kids

Brad Reedand Raw Story April 12, 2023

Missouri State Sen. Mike Moon (R) this week defended the rights of parents to marry off children as young as 12 years old.

The Springfield News-Leader reports that Moon made the remarks during a contentious debate over banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors in which Democratic State Rep. Peter Meredith accused him of hypocrisy for supporting the bill despite positioning himself as a champion of parents' rights.

"I've heard you talk about parents' rights to raise their kids how they want," argued Meredith. "In fact, I just double-checked, you voted no on making it illegal for kids to be married to adults at the age of 12 if their parents consented to it!"

Meredith went on to accuse Moon of making it legal for a 12-year-old to be "raped by an adult" as long as their parents agreed to let it occur, which prompted an angry response from Moon.

"Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12?" he asked Meredith. "I do. And guess what? They're still married."

As the News-Leader notes, "Moon's support of child marriage in some instances has been long documented," as in the past he has discussed "a couple he met in college who had married one another at age 12."

Watch the video below or at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Nearly 50 million people are enslaved around the world: report ›

Tennessee GOP drafts 'completely ridiculous' bill to eliminate age requirements for marriage ›

West Virginia Republicans vote to keep child marriage legal ›

roe’s demise triggers Missouri law forbidding pregnant women from finalizing a divorce

Alex Henderson

July 20, 2022

Under an old Missouri law from 1973, a woman cannot get a divorce finalized if she is pregnant; she can file for divorce, but it won’t be finalized as long as she is pregnant. In 2022, abortion rights defenders...

---

1 23

missouri judge sides with GOP governor to block Medicaid expansion and override the will of voters

Alex Henderson

June 24, 2021

In 2020, voters in Missouri approved a ballot measure that called for Medicaid expansion in the midwestern state. But on June 23, a judge ruled that the voter was unconstitution

===

missouri clothes 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/you-brought-this-floor-lady/

mythical late term abortion BS

https://www.alternet.org/minnesota-lawmakers-partial-birth-abortion/

===

madigan: split on civil war, still fighting?

lots of bad stuff in heartland aleckochalypse?

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/19-is-raging-in-a-missouri-county-with-low-vaccination-rates-report/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/poll-missouri-senate-eric-greitens/

===

2010 Ginni Tea Party JNZ

http://www.blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/14/group-allied-with-ginni-thomas-think-tank-threatens-armed-insurrection/

i think 404?

Group Allied With Ginni Thomas' Think Tank Threatens Armed Insurrection

wayback no vid lnx

posted by Adele Stan

Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief. July 14, 2010

Group Allied With Ginni Thomas’ Think Tank Threatens Armed Insurrection

Liberty Central, the think tank founded and fronted by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sure seems to like men with guns.

It was troubling enough to find, as AlterNet reported last week, that Liberty Central is allied with Gun Owners of America. (Our call for comment to Liberty Central’s spokesperson was never returned.)

Further exploration of the Liberty Central Web site finds the group claiming among its “friend” organizations the Missouri Sovereignty Project, whose Web site features a video (posted below) called “Don’t Tread on Me” that shows several libertarian and right-wing figures threatening armed insurrection against the government if certain unspecified actions are taken. There is talk of usurpation of the people’s power by the state.

Among them is Michael Badnarik, the 2004 Libertarian Party presidential candidate. The words, “WHAT SIDE WILL YOU STAND?” appear in gold on a black screen, and then Badnarik appears.

:{:{}:

“I sincerely hope that enough people have crossed the personal line in the sand where they will join forces with the rest of us,” Badnarik says, “so that a small number of us are not required to use force and use of arms.”}:

Later in the video, which is a trailer for a full-length DVD, a man who is not identified but appears to be standing in front of a government building, says, “The time when you have to defend yourself from the government is when the law becomes lawless…” After a few frames of a hip-looking woman with pink hair saying that she will never “take a mandatory vaccination,” the editor takes us back to the scene of the man in front of the government building. “There might be shootin’ that day,” he says.

The Missouri Sovereignty Project promotes its own involvement with the film and urges Web site visitors to purchase a copy, with this line appearing above the video player:

The Missouri Sovereignty Project was privileged to be part of this excellent production. Go here to buy your copy.

The film was written by William Lewis and Gary Franchi, directed by Lewis and produced byFranchi. They’re the team that brought you the film, “Camp FEMA,” a propaganda vehicle for a favorite right-wing conspiracy theory that asserts the government is creating internment camps for the unlawful detention of ordinary Americans.

Both “Camp FEMA” and “Don’t Tread on Me” feature 9/11 truther Alex Jones. (Lewis has two 9/11-themed productions of his own, “911 Ripple Effect,” and “911 In Plane Site.”) But more fascinating — and disturbing — than that is what his latest endeavor, “Don’t Tread on Me”, tells us about what’s going on in state legislatures around the country.

“Don’t Tread on Me” features four Missouri state legislators and one Oklahoma state senator who appear to be allied with the Patriot movement and comfortable with a call to arms.

Really, should the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice — one of the most powerful government officials in the United States — be fronting an organization officially allied with groups that state their support for taking up arms against the government?

As we reported last week, Larry Pratt, executive director of Liberty Central “friend” Gun Owners of America, recently appeared to call for war on the U.S. government at 2nd Amendment rally convened on the grounds of the Washington Monument on April 19th — the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. (Pratt also addressed a meeting of white supremacists in 1992.)

Yes, it’s Ginni Thomas’ First Amendment right to associate with whomever she pleases, and it’s the right of all of her organization’s featured “friends” to state their views. But is this a morally okay thing? Isn’t it a kind of dangerous thing? Then why no outcry from progressives over this?

Liberty Central is the latest addition to what I call Tea Party Inc. — the coalition of AstroTurf groups, right-wing media and insider king-makers bent on harnessing the energy of the grassroots Tea Party movement. Tea Party Inc. has oodles and oddles of money that it’s dying to spend in the upcoming 2010 election, and in all sorts of activities (like the 2nd Annual September 12 Taxpayers’ March on Washington).

As Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel reported last week, Ginni Thomas says she’s seeking, through Liberty Central, to bridge the gap between the grassroots Tea Party movement and the established players in Washington politics.

The big money groups of Tea Party Inc. have so far pledged to spend at least $61 million in the congressional mid-term elections. Does anybody care that the lady building the bridge between them and the grassroots has a power pedigree and is aligned with armed, anti-government forces?

Here’s the trailer for “Don’t Tread on Me,” as featured on the Web site of the Missouri Sovereignty Project, which is listed as a “friend” of Liberty Central, the think tank headed by Ginni Thomas.

The people interviewed in the trailer are not identified on-screen, but the cast list is as follows: Alex Jones, Michael Badnarik, Oklahoma State Rep. Charles Key, Richard Mack, R.J. Harris, Edwin Vieira, Missouri State Rep. Cynthia Davis, Missouri State Senator Brian Neives, Missouri State Senator Gary Nodler, Missouri State Senator Jim Lembke, Stephen Shute, Jason Littlejohn, Randy Stufflebeam, Justin Sane, Josh Carter, Tom DeWeese Thomas Grady, James Lane and Tracy Ward.

lnx

Liberty Central, the think tank founded and fronted by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sure seems to like men with guns.

{{http://web.archive.org/web/20100722050519/http://www.libertycentral.org/

....

===

jon s salon an 7 22

A right-wing group in Missouri has launched a "woke heat map" documenting instances of "wokeness" in an attempt to fight back against "critical race theory" and alleged "grooming" in schools across the state.

The group, dubbed "Liberty Alliance," says it is "committed to fighting back against the Woke agenda that is permeating all across Missouri."

"The first step in fighting back is uncovering their crazy ideas – from Critical Race Theory to grooming toddlers with sexually explicit books," the organization states on its website. "That is why we have officially launched the Woke Heat Map – an interactive tool designed to expose the insane actions of the radical Left. This map will alert Missourians of craziness happening in their own communities."

"‘Liberty Alliance’ has launched a ‘Woke Interactive Map’ to warn MAGA about instances of woke behavior in a particular community. The site will alert people if either: 1. CRT, 2. Woke Extremism, or 3. ‘Action by a Crazy Leftist’ has taken place," Ron Filipkowski tweeted.

"This is the “Genderbread Person” & the latest example of the insanity that’s in Missouri schools," Eric Schmitt tweeted. "We launched The Students First Initiative to empower parents & bring transparency back to Missouri schools. This was submitted by a Fox C-6 parent We’ll keep exposing the extremism."

Another Twitter user added, "A reminder that on college campuses, anyone that doesn’t fall in line with the left are censored Where are you at @SLU_Official? These actions continued into the night and no one has been punished for vandalizing a peaceful #prolife @SLUSFL display #FreeSpeech [Students for Life]"

Liberty Alliance's map isn't the first of its kind. Over the years, numerous right-wing groups have created rankings, watchlists, and cluster maps to keep track of the left's alleged influence in healthcare and education as well as Corporate America.

Last October, Salon reported on a custom Google map created by trans activist Erin Reed that provides those seeking hormone replacement therapy with the names and locations of nearly 800 informed consent clinics throughout the country.By February of that year, Reed told Salon, her map was repurposed by anti-trans activist Alix Aharon as a resource for organizing protests against doctorswho provide gender-affirming care. That new map, called "The Gender Mapper," was quickly taken down over apparent copyright infringement. However, a new one has since appeared in its place, cataloging roughly 200 clinics in total.

On its website, The Gender Mapper accuses "Big Gender" of testing "experimental medication" on "confused and vulnerable children."

"GenderMapper volunteers work in secret, around the world to collate evidence and document what is occurring," the site adds. "Gendermapper volunteers are unsung [sic] heros- and data is our truth."

Right-wing groups have also sought to crack down on left-wing "indoctrination" on college campuses.

Notable among them isTurning Point USA, a conservative youth advocacy group, which runs a "Professor Watchlist" designed to keep right-wing students abreast of "college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom."

"The project," its website says, "is comprised of published news stories detailing instances of bias, propaganda, or speech infringement on college campuses."

The site allows users to submit tips and search for professors by name or university. Some professors on the list include activist Angela Davis, linguist Noam Chomsky, author Ibram X. Kendi, and former FBI Director James Comey.As of 2016, there were roughly 200 academics on the list.

In the private sector, conservative are similarly hounding companies that engage in "woke" actions, arguing that Corporate America is prioritizing political correctness over profit.

Alliance Defending Freedom has its "Viewpoint Diversity Score," a 50-company index that "evaluates corporate policies, practices, and activities to determine whether companies respect their stakeholders' freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief as a standard part of doing business." The list specifically breaks down each company's support of free speech in the market, the workplace, and the public square, analyzing everything from political giving to DE&I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies.

On the index, companies like Facebook and Meta – which face baseless accusations of anti-conservative bias – have notably lower scores than most.None of the firms included on the list score higher than a 35 out of 100.

"The results of our inaugural Business Index reveal that there is much work to be done. Company scores ranged between 2% and 35%, with the average overall score an abysmal 12%," wrote Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of corporate engagement for ADF, in The Wall Street Journal. "The poor showing confirms that there is an alarming trend among major corporations to favor virtue-signaling even at the expense of fundamental American freedoms."

Corporations have no legal obligation to promote free speech, a constitutional right designed to protect Americans from governorship censorship and coercion.

===

miz ppr

Letter to the editor: BLM has director it deserves

Save

The mission of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is simple: "To sustain the health, diversity and productivity of public lands for the enjoyment of present and future generations."

For two years this mission was challenged by the appointment of Acting Director William Perry-Pendley. Mr. Perry-Pendley was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate and proudly advocated the sale of public lands to private entities.

The absence of response from U.S. Sen. Steve Daines was almost deafening.

Today, we stand at a crossroads to save the mission of the bureau. Over her career, Tracy Stone-Manning has clearly shown her ability to create a healthy balance between public land conservation and the desire of private entities to use the land's potential resources. I'm thrilled she was confirmed as director.

However, as Stone-Manning was working her way through the process, Sen. Daines had a lot to say in opposition to her confirmation.

This makes no sense at all if we wish to retain our Montana motto of "Last Best Place," rather than reminiscing on these lands in the past tense. I'm more than relieved that common sense prevailed and the BLM will have the director it deserves.

Pauline Tait,

Billings

missouri judge sides with GOP governor to block Medicaid expansion and override the will of voters

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/medicaid-2653529375/

In 2020, voters in Missouri approved a ballot measure that called for Medicaid expansion in the midwestern state. But on June 23, a judge ruled that the voter was unconstitutional.

If the expansion went through on July 1, it would expand Medicaid to roughly 275,000 adults in the Missouri. But Republican Gov. Mike Parson, in May, announced that the expansion wouldn't be funded, and Missouri Democrats slammed Parson for defying the will of the voters. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of three Missouri residents with chronic health conditions who cannot afford treatment.

But Judge Jon Beetem of the Cole County Circuit Court sided with Parson, ruling, "The court concludes that the state's refusal to enroll plaintiffs and other eligible individuals in the MO HealthNet program is not unlawful. Notwithstanding a majority vote of the people, an initiative which does not comply with the limits of the Constitution cannot stand."

According to CNN reporter Tami Luhby, Chuck Hatfield — an attorney representing the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit — said he plans to appeal Beetem's ruling all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court.

When Parson announced, in May, that the Medicaid expansion lacked funding, the Republican governor said, "Although I was never in support of MO HealthNet expansion, I always said that I would uphold the ballot amendment if passed. However, without a revenue source or funding authority from the (Missouri) General Assembly, we are unable to proceed with the expansion at this time and must withdraw our State Plan Amendments to ensure Missouri's existing MO HealthNet program remains solvent."

In the United States, millions of people who are either self-employed or do not have health coverage through their jobs have obtained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare. But Luhby notes that some uninsured Americans find themselves in a "coverage gap" — a problem the Medicaid expansion in Missouri was designed to address.

Luhby explains, "More than 2 million uninsured adults fall into the 'coverage gap,' meaning their incomes were too high to qualify in their states but too low to make them eligible for Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, which are open only to those earning more than 100% of the poverty level in non-expansion states."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/rush-limbaugh/ legis 86 racism

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/missouri-gop-leaves-gov-mike-parson-in-political-bind-amid-vote-on-senate-medicaid/

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an 220

gOP Missouri state rep proposes bill criminalizing public libraries’ drag queen story hours

Susan Grigsby / Daily Kos

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/right-wing-review-boards-in-missouri-would-pave-way-for-arresting-librarians-over-books-deemed-inappropriate

no lnx

Right-wing ‘review boards’ in Missouri would pave way for arresting librarians over books deemed ‘inappropriate’

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams January 17, 2020

The Missouri Library Association says it is monitoring a bill put forward in the state House by a Republican lawmaker, which, if passed, could create committees across the state with the power to jail librarians for distributing material the panels deem “inappropriate.”

Under the Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act (H.B. 2044), locally elected “parental library review boards” would be permitted to unilaterally remove books they decide are sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate for young readers from library shelves.

Libraries that allow children to borrow books that have been banned or whose access has been restricted would risk losing state funding, and librarians could be ordered to pay fines of up to $500 or sentenced to jail time for up to a year.

The Missouri Library Association (MLA), a non-profit which advocates for library service and librarians, said in a statement and on social media on Wednesday that it “will always stand against censorship and for the freedom to read, and therefore opposes Missouri House Bill 2044.”...

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an 1219

‘People have died as a result’: Residents of rural Missouri are furious with greedy corporation for closing their only hospital

Now let’s do this everywhere’: Kansas City, Missouri approves free public transit for all

Common Dreams

Lawmakers in Kansas City, Missouri took a “visionary step” on Thursday by unanimously voting to make public transportation in the city free of charge, setting the stage for it to…

"Deeply disturbing’: Missouri health director reveals he tracked Planned Parenthood patients’ menstrual periods

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

pallid sturgeon, a bottom-dwelling fish found in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, has survived since the days of the dinosaurs, but it might not survive Missouri’s Republican politicians.

Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) sponsored an amendment that made it into legislation Trump signed in October, America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, S.3021, to block efforts to help young pallid sturgeon that suffocate and die in the dead zones of the industrialized Missouri River.

“For the sake of landowners, businesses and taxpayers, I believe we must halt these activities until the Corps can prove more harm will not be done to Missourians,” Graves said.

The new law blocks plans by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a dozen areas in the river below Kansas City, Mo., for just-hatched pallid sturgeon to feed and grow in slower, shallower water. Six major dams built on the 2,341-mile river between 1933 and 1964 created dead zones with very little oxygen where the young pallid sturgeon suffocate and die. Thefish, which can grow to 80 pounds and live 60 years or more, were listed as endangered in 1990.

Louisiana Governor Signs Anti-Choice Bill as Missouri’s Last Abortion Clinic Is Set to Close

Louisiana on Thursday became the fifth state in the nation to enact a six-week abortion ban, when Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards signed a bill that offers no exceptions for rape or incest. Meanwhile, Missouri is poised today to become the first state in the nation without a single clinic providing abortions, as a judge in St. Louis weighs a last-minute legal challenge to plans by state officials to revoke a medical license for Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic. On Thursday, St. Louis police arrested 17 activists at a state office building as they held a sit-in protest demanding a license renewal. Hundreds more protested outside, chanting “My body, my choice!” This is Kawanna Shannon, director of surgical services at Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic.

Kawanna Shannon: “State of Missouri, please keep your fingers out of our vaginas. Planned Parenthood also does vasectomies. Those men are able to come in with no hassle, no problems, no concerns, and they get their vasectomy free of choice, with no hurdles to jump over. And then a woman comes in, raped by a whole motorcycle gang, and you make her wait 72 hours to think about it.”

Five other states have only a single clinic offering abortions: Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia. Later in the broadcast, we’ll speak with Laura Kaplan, author of “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service.”

Part of the fabric of life’: Missouri House passes minister’s bill allowing Bible to be taught in schools

Republicans continued to attack democracy as the Missouri GOP fights to roll back voter-approved sunshine law

Last November, Missouri voters overwhelmingly passed Clean Missouri, a constitutional amendment to extend the state’s open records laws to the state legislature, which has long been exempt from them. It…

“Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties.

Trump Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras dissented from an opinion by two other Republican-appointed judges in late November and argued that Missouri’s lobbyist registration and disclosure law violated the First Amendment as applied to an unpaid conservative lobbyist. The majority strongly disagreed with Stras’ attempt to expand the reach of decisions like Citizens Unitedand explained that the state’s interest in transparency and public disclosure of who is trying to influence legislation clearly warranted the minimal burdens imposed by the law.

Ronald Calzone is the president, director, and unpaid lobbyist for Missouri First, a conservative nonprofit organization that regularly lobbies members of the state legislature. He filed a First Amendment challenge to the Missouri lobbying registration and disclosure law. The law simply requires filling out a form and paying a $10 fee once each year, as well as filing additional reports concerning lobbying-related expenditures. The district court rejected his claim that the law was unconstitutional as applied to him as an unpaid lobbyist, and he appealed.

In Calzone v. Summers,Judges Steven Colloton and Bobby Shepherd, both appointed by President George W. Bush, affirmed the lower court decision, but Judge Stras dissented. The majority explained that it was improper to consider Calzone’s additional argument that he makes no lobbying-related expenditures, as Judge Stras did in dissent, because that argument had not been raised below or even in the court of appeals until oral argument, noting that Stras’ view to the contrary was “unfair” to the lower court and to the state. All three judges agreed that Citizens Unitedrequired “exacting scrutiny” of the law as applied to Calzone, but Stras claimed that the state’s interest in “transparency” was not enough.

The majority strongly disagreed, explaining that based on precedent, there was a strong interest in disclosure of who is “pressuring and attempting to influence legislators.” They also noted that even unpaid lobbyists could offer “things of value” to legislators, raising the state interest in “avoiding the fact or appearance of public corruption.” The burden of complying with the law was “minimal,” they stated, particularly if Calzone did not make lobbying-related expenditures as he claimed in the court of appeals.

Overall, the majority concluded, the state system was “precisely that which we have previously held would satisfy” the requirement that such a disclosure law have a “substantial relationship” to the state’s interests. Stras’ dissent, on the other hand, would have further extended efforts in Citizens United and similar cases to misuse the First Amendment to undermine important public disclosure laws.

Tags:

Confirmed Judges Confirmed Fears David Stras Fighting Big Money in Politics lobbying money in politics

JEFFERSON CITY

Ron Calzone has been walking the hallways of the Missouri statehouse for years, meeting with lawmakers and their staffs, testifying before legislative committees and advocating for the conservative causes he holds dear.

But he swears he’s not a lobbyist.

True, he’s founder, director and sole officer of a nonprofit called Missouri First, a group that includes legislative lobbying to influence public policy in its charter.

Calzone never withholds his affiliation with the group when speaking with elected officials. But he is unpaid, never claims to be speaking on behalf of the organization and never gives legislators gifts of any kind.

Thus, he doesn’t believe he should have to register with the state ethics commission or submit reports detailing all of the ways in which he has attempted to influence legislation.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit disagrees.

In a 2-1 ruling on Wednesday, the court found that Calzone’s activity qualifies as lobbying, and the government’s interest in transparency means even an unpaid lobbyist must register and file lobbying reports.

Calzone’s attorneys say the decision is a significant strike against the constitutional right to petition the government and have vowed to appeal. They argue that the court’s interpretation of Missouri lobbying law could end up being expansive enough to require everyday citizens to register as lobbyists or face the possibility of a complaint that could lead to criminal penalties.

“The problem is that every year dozens of groups go down to the Capitol for lobby days, and they have people designated to speak on behalf of these groups,” said David Roland, one of Calzone’s attorneys and director of Litigation for the Freedom Center of Missouri, a libertarian nonprofit that advocates for government transparency.

“And there is no principle distinction between that and what Mr. Calzone does. None,” Roland said. “They are volunteers, but according to this ruling, those people should have to register and report as lobbyists.”

Calzone’s legal drama began on Election Day in 2014, when a complaint was filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission alleging that since 2000, when he founded Missouri First, Calzone had violated state law by lobbing members of the Missouri General Assembly on behalf of Missouri First without registering and paying registration filing fees.

In September 2015, the commission found probable cause that Calzone had violated two state laws and ordered him to register as a lobbyist, file all required reports, cease and desist from attempting to influence legislation until after filing an annual lobbyist registration and other required reports, and pay a $1,000 fine.

Calzone sued to overturn that decision, with the case eventually landing in the court of appeals.

In upholding the commission’s decision Tuesday, the court said the state has “an interest in transparency, which includes avoiding the fact or even the appearance of public corruption and knowing who is attempting to influence legislators and public policy.”

“Though the lobbyists may not be receiving money, unpaid lobbyists could still offer things of value to legislators, creating a sufficiently important governmental interest in avoiding the fact or appearance of public corruption,” the court ruled. “Furthermore, the government and the public have a sufficiently important interest in knowing who is pressuring and attempting to influence legislators, and the ability to pressure and influence legislators is not limited solely to paid lobbyists.”

Dissenting from the majority opinion, Judge David Stras wrote that the ruling appears to apply to all sorts of citizens who might attempt to influence lawmakers. That would seem to include citizen “lobby days” at the Missouri Capitol, when Missourians travel to Jefferson City on designated days to lobby lawmakers specifically on behalf of groups such as labor unions, professional organizations and advocacy groups.

“The law seemingly sweeps up all unpaid political advocacy by anyone who acts on behalf of someone else, no matter how often it occurs and regardless of purpose,” Stras wrote.

The ruling “endangers the free exchange of ideas,” Sras wrote, and could lead to ethics complaints being weaponized against political adversaries.

“Indeed, a political adversary, an unscrupulous government official or even a legislator tired of being held accountable could simply submit a complaint to the (Ethics) Commission accusing a politically active citizen of lobbying... without first registering as a lobbyist,” Sraus wrote. “It may just be simpler for a citizen to skip a lobbying day or pass up the opportunity to call a legislator rather than having to complete tedious paperwork or risk sizable fines and criminal penalties.”

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https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/red-state-victory-voting-rights-federal-court-protects-hundreds-thousands-new-voter

Voting rights advocates won a major victory in Missourilate on Friday, when a federal district court ordered the state’s Driver License Bureau to promptly forward address change information for an estimated 200,000 people who recently moved to election officials to update voter rolls before the midterm election.

This technical snafu—where one state agency has not been sharing its latest information with another; in this case, the driver bureau not sharing the latest address information with statewide election officials—is not simply bureaucratic bungling.

It is willfully turning what should be a simple matter—transferring data—into a potential voter suppression tactic. That’s because it could complicate the process for hundreds of thousands of people in states with close races, starting with U.S. Senate contests.

Slightly different variations of this problem have surfaced in Missouri and Arizona.

In Arizona, civil rights groups have been frustrated by its state Motor Vehicle Division refusal to forwarded address changes for an estimated 384,000 people to election offices. That number comes from people who did not check a box on a form agreeing to forward the change of address information, a Secretary of State spokesman said Friday, adding officials were going to fix that problem after the November 2018 election.

Unlike Missouri, voting rights activists in Arizona did not win a court order after suing. As a result, the affected individuals could face a more arduous task of casting a ballot that would be counted—as their voter information on file will not be accurate—unless they take proactive steps between now and the state’s close of voter registration. But, of course, these individuals are probably not aware there’s even a potential problem.

At issue in Missouri, where Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill faces a tough re-election bid, is whether or not a sizeable number of the estimated 580,000 voters who move within the state every year will have their voting credentials updated as part of getting news driver’s licenses. A 1993 federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, called the motor voter law, requires state agencies to offer voter registration services.

“Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that DOR [Missouri Department of Revenue that oversees driver’s licenses] is failing to provide Missouri residents with the opportunity to register and update their registration information during various license and identification card transactions,” the voting rights attorneys saidthis spring.

“Over 580,000 Missourians move within the state each year—approximately 200,000 of who move to a new electoral jurisdiction,” they explained. “When a voter’s registration information does not reflect their current address no matter whether they have moved within the county or not, the voter must cast a provisional ballot; and, if a voter has moved to a different election jurisdiction, their vote is discarded entirely.”

Late on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian C. Wimes ordered the driver agency to fulfill the NVRA’s voter registration obligations, and ordered the state to send voter applications to people who got a new license in the past year.

“There is no dispute among the parties that ‘ensuring qualified voters exercise their right to vote is always in the public interest,’” the court held. “While the Court is cognizant of the extreme nature of preliminary injunctive relief, the circumstances of this case suggest the public’s interests in the right to vote, and ensuring that state processes follow federal law, outweigh the public costs for Defendants to comply with a preliminary injunction.”

The court ordered the state to act quickly, citing an October 10 voter registration deadline in Missouri for the November 6 election. In contrast, in Arizona, organizations like Mi Familia Vota will be scrambling to urge people to check and possibly update their voter registration information before that state’s October 9 close of registration.

Missouri Becomes First State to Regulate the Word 'Meat'

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whoohoo did brownback implosion in next dr kansas affect?

https://www.alternet.org/missouri-right-work-proposition-defeated

on Tuesday night,voters in Missouri defeated Proposition A, a referendum which would have allowed a "right to work" law to go into effect in the state.

This marked the first time a right to work law has ever been defeated by popular vote. It is an enormous setback for Missouri Republicans, who had made imposing this law a signature policy goal after winning full control of the state government in 2016.

Right to work laws, which currently exist in 27 states, ban labor unions and businesses from negotiating a "security agreement" in bargaining, in which a union may collect "agency fees" from workers who are not a member of the union. Since unions generally represent all workers in a workplace, not simply their own members, these fees cover the cost of bargaining for nonmembers and prevent free ridership — and lead to wage increases. Corporations and right-wing politicians, however, have painted these fees as a threat to individual freedom and sought to pass laws banning them — which has depressed union membership and wages around the country. Earlier this year, they persuaded the Supreme Court to void all such security agreements in public sector unions. Workers in the private sector, however, are still free to pursue them in states without right to work laws.

In February 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens — who later resigned amid an unrelated sexual assault and blackmail scandal — signed the right to work bill in Missouri.In response, outraged union workers got a referendum on the ballot to overturn it, with AFL-CIO mobilizing steelworkers and construction workers to go door to door to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures.

Republicans were desperate to win this vote, even going so far as to pass a law moving the referendum from the November ballot to the August primary in the hope lower turnout would kill the measure. But in the end, it wasn't even close. Voters rejected right to work 67.5 to 37.5.

In Missouri, workers stood up and said no to the erosion of their right to organize. And the business interests pushing to undermine unions have been put on notice.

ecowatch 5/18 missouri law that soy not meat

http://www.alternet.org/parents-treated-criminals

In researching an upcoming article I’m writing about the St. Louis school system, and the district’s ongoing funding crisis, I came across an astonishing example of who wins and who loses in current approaches to government budget balancing.

As a local St. Louis reporter tells it, during a public meeting about a proposed new $130 million 34-story apartment building in the city, alderman Joe Roddy used a slideshow to make a case for why the city should give the developers 15 years of reduced property taxes, a $10 million subsidy, in exchange for some additional retail space and 305 high-end, luxury apartments downtown.

In a slide show titled “How the City Makes & Spends Money,” Roddy, a Democrat mind you, laid out a hierarchy of those who “make money” for the city at the top and those who cause the city to “spend money” at the bottom.

At the top of his slide were businesses. In the middle were residents with no children and retirees. And at the very bottom – in the tier of city dwellers who place the biggest financial burden on government – were “criminals and residents with children in public school.”

When told that some might take offense at equating families with children needing free public schools to criminals, Roddy countered that the project would “target tenants who are young professionals without children. Attracting that demographic to the city is crucial, he says, and after the tax abatement ends, the revenue windfall for the city will be significant.”

By the way, St. Louis has a history of extending tax abatements for developers to longer terms.

Winners and Losers

The thrust of Roddy’s remarks is well understood by all – in a budget environment of forced scarcity, there are increasingly strong demarcations between winners and losers, and parents who plan on sending children to free public schools are increasingly losers.

To be fair to Roddy, a great deal of St. Louis’s financial constraints, particularly in relation to the city’s ability to cover the cost of education, is the fault of the state of Missouri.

A 2015 accounting of state school funding found Missouri is “underfunding its K-12 schools by $656 million statewide, nearly 20 percent below the required level.” The budget situation for families with children has not improved a lot since then, with this year’s installment cutting spending on school buses, higher education, and social services.

Missouri is one of 27 states that spends less on education than it did in 2008.

The severity of Missouri’s budget austerity seems specifically targeted at districts like St. Louis that happen to be stuck with lots of low-income families with children (Where would they fall in Roddy’s hierarchy?).

A 2016 study conducted by NPR found that St. Louis schools on average spend considerably less per student compared to the highest spending districts in the St. Louis area.

Another more recent analysis by EdBuild finds St. Louis schools have a cost adjusted revenue per student that is nine percent below Missouri’s average. The district gets only 35 percent of its revenue from the state even though the district is challenged to educate a student population in which 68 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measurement of poverty.

Pay to Play, and LearnThe trend of financial inequity for St. Louis schools is worsening, according to Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker, who finds that the district, since 1995, is increasingly at a funding disadvantage compared to the rest of the state.

It’s not hard to see how this is going to play out for parents.

To pay for the costs of crime, under-funded local governments are “increasing fines and fees associated with the criminal justice system,” according to a report by NPR in 2014.

One community where court fines and fees “skyrocketed” to levels that made them a major revenue generator for local government is next door to St. Louis – Ferguson, Missouri, where, you recall, 18 year-old Michel Brown was gunned down by local police nearly three years ago.

As it is for the accused in the criminal justice system, parents in local schools are having to bear more of the burden of education costs.

According to an annual report, known as the Backpack Index, that calculates the average cost of school supplies and school fees, parents will have to pick up more of the tab if they want their children to participate fully in school.

The annual cost to parents is significant at a time when the majority of school children come from households in poverty: $662 for elementary school children, $1,001 for middle school children, and $1,489 for high school students.

A detail highlighted by NBC’s report on the Backpack Index notes that the biggest spike in direct costs to parents comes from fees charged for activities like school fieldtrips, art and music programs, and athletics. These fees far exceed costs for items like backpacks, pens, and graphing calculators.

Families with children in elementary schools can expect over $30 on average in school fees. For children in middle school, the average cost of fees climbs to $195 for athletics $75 for field trips, and $42 for other school fees. In high school, the fees spike much higher to $375 for athletic (often called “pay to play fees”), $285 for musical instrumentals, $80 to participate in band, and $60 in other school fees.

Also in high school, the fees extend to academic courses including participating in Advanced Placement classes, which more schools emphasize students participate in. The average fee for testing related to these courses is $92 and the costs of materials to prepare for these tests, as well as SAT tests, tops $52.

Charging Parents

In 2011, I spotlighted the practice of charging parents direct fees for school programs in five states – Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania – and connected the rationale for the fees to austerity budgets.

I noted that schools have an obligation to work with all of the varying interests and abilities of students by offering sports, clubs, after-school activities, service learning, and other programs. But states that continually under-fund education pressure schools to shift the burden of these programs from a shared cost of the community onto only those families who need the services.

The problem is getting worse.

In North Carolina, the recently passed state budget again leaves schools woefully short of what they need, and now state administrators are scrambling to pass down the millions in education cuts.

“On the chopping block,” reports left-leaning watchdog NC Policy Watch, “include offices that provide services and support for local school districts, including intervention efforts in low-performing regions.”

In what appears to be an effort to twist the knife deeper, “the state budget also bars school board members from making up the lost cash with transfers from various GOP-backed education initiatives, including the controversial Innovation School District—which provides for charter takeovers of low-performing schools—and other programs such as Teach for America, Read to Achieve, and positions in the superintendent’s office.”

In the meantime, NC’s budget has winners too, as all budget documents do: “Lawmakers continued to set aside millions for a massive expansion of a private school voucher program. The state is expected to spend $45 million on the program this year, with the plan to expand the annual allocation to $145 million in the next decade.”

Now you tell me, who is the criminal here?

Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America's Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

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While journalists and political junkies are focused on the latest implosion of the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicaid, conservatives in several states have been working to decrease the minimum wage that businesses can pay to their workers.

In Missouri, Republicans just passed a law overturning a local measure passed by the city of St. Louis that had raised the minimum wage to $10 per hour.

The new law will prohibit counties and cities within Missouri from creating their own minimum wage laws. It will also roll back the St. Louis minimum hourly wage to the statewide floor of $7.70.

Notably, Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, refused to sign the law, even though he spoke out in favor of it. Under the Missouri constitution, bills passed by both houses of the state assembly automatically become law.

In a news conference June 30, Greitens focused on procedural objections to the bill. He faulted the Republican-controlled Senate for utilizing a procedural loophole to block a Democratic filibuster of the measure, which had prevented it from being voted on until the final day of the chamber’s legislative session.

“I disapprove of the way politicians handled this,” Greitens said, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “That’s why I won’t be signing my name to their bill.”

The governor’s refusal to sign the law was interpreted as an at of cowardice by some Democrats.

“Signing it would have shown the fact that he is heartless and that he really doesn’t care about the working poor,” state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed told the Post-Dispatch. “So what he didn’t want to do is sign a bill to take money out of the pockets of those who already have an increase, but still do so.”

During the Senate delay, the city ordinance went into effect on May 5. It is unclear how many local businesses will reduce their employees’ wages to $7.70 after paying the higher $10 rate.

Missouri is not the only state where Republican elected officials have successfully targeted minimum wage laws. Until recently, such an action seemed like a conservative pipe dream. Thanks to a years-long hollowing out of the Democratic Party in rural and exurban areas, however, right-wing politicians have become able to pursue policies that were once impossible.

The GOP effort in Missouri came on the heels of an earlier success in March, when Iowa Republicans managed to roll back mandatory pay increases passed by local jurisdictions. It was the first time such a law had ever been passed, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal nonprofit group that supports higher minimum wage laws.

Terry Branstad, Iowa’s Republican governor, was decidedly more gung-ho in his response to the idea. He held a formal signing ceremony for the bill and spoke on its behalf, citing his desire for a single wage across the state.

“I think that uniformity is critically important, especially when you have communities that are in more than one county,” Branstad said as he signed the new law.

In February, Branstad said he did favor “a modest increase” in wages, however.

Advocates of lowering the minimum wage have also had success using lawsuits. In October, Kentucky’s Supreme Court overturned a 2014 Louisville ordinance that would have raised the city’s minimum wage to $9 an hour. In a 6-1 ruling, the court ruled that the local law violated the state constitution.

Republicans in Maine have also been successful at changing local minimum wage laws. While GOP efforts in other states have been opposed by low-wage workers, in the Pine Tree State, bartenders and restaurant employees appear to have assisted them and a number of Democrats joined in.

The unusual coalition behind decreasing wages in Maine highlights one of the emerging controversies in the debate over the minimum wage: whether employees who receive tips should be paid the same minimum wage as those who do not.

Under federal law, employers are required to supplement payments to workers who do not earn enough tips to reach the minimum wage threshold. The federal minimum wage for non-tipped employees is $7.25 per hour. Congress has not passed an increase since 2007.

Free-market advocates and restaurant industry representatives argue that adding tips onto a full minimum wage will cripple many food establishments by forcing them to raise prices or reduce staffing levels.

James Dill, a Democratic state senator in Maine, had resisted that position but changed his mind after he received hundreds of of emails and phone calls from waiters and bartenders asking him to support lowering the amount that tipped workers must be paid.

“I believe in a higher minimum wage,” he told the Washington Post. “But the people who this was impacting didn’t want it.”

The measure passed Maine’s House of Representatives 100 to 37 and cleared its Senate 23 to 12. Once it goes into effect in January, the minimum wage for tipped workers will return to the previous state minimum of $3.75 per hour.

During his 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump appeared to support raising the minimum wage requirement to $10 an hour. Since he assumed office, however, Trump has made no movement toward promoting the idea.

According to a poll released in June by the University of Maryland, 74 percent of respondents favored increasing the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour. Even 58 percent of self-identified Republicans supported the higher wage.

see show me TT

koster no 3rd term AG runs for gov 2016 (roades hit am rising?)

public integrity AZ AG

2016 missouri ag schaeffer hawley

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/politics/elections/ad-campaign-targets-schaefer-as-battle-over-hawley-leave-issue/

The Beacon and the Investigative News Network have analyzed data from the Missouri Ethics Commission, followthemoney.org and OpenSecrets.org to determine the biggest donors from 2008 and 2013. We intend to continue adding data to this project for the foreseeable future.

1 Rex Sinquefield, Westphalia, MO Retired financier 576 donations: 180 to candidates and 396 to committees

$28,083,480

2 David Humphreys, Joplin, MO President and CEO of TAMKO Building Products, Inc 159 donations: 111 to candidates and 48 to committees

$5,225,425

3 Stanley Herzog, St. Joseph, MO Herzog Companies Inc. 83 donations: 68 to candidates and 15 to committees

$2,091,975

4 Sam Fox, Clayton, MO Harbour Group, former ambassador to Belgium 139 donations: 94 to candidates and 45 to committees

$1,751,147

5 William Danforth, St. Louis, MO Chancellor emeritus, Washington University 160 donations: 135 to candidates and 25 to committees

$1,422,116

6 James & Virginia Stowers, Founder of American Century Investments, MO Founder of American Century Investments 17 donations: 6 to candidates and 11 to committees

$1,326,398

7 Ethelmae Humphreys, Joplin, MO TAMKO's Chairman of the Board 91 donations: 73 to candidates and 18 to committees

$1,081,175

8 Jack Taylor, St. Louis, MO Retired Founder of Enterprise Rent-a-Car 115 donations: 83 to candidates and 32 to committees

$983,135

9 Roy Pfautch, St. Louis, MO International Public Affairs Consultant 142 donations: 115 to candidates and 27 to committees

$929,050

10 August Busch III, St. Charles, MO Former President of Anheuser-Busch109 donations: 74 to candidates and 35 to committees

$887,040

11 James Nutter, Kansas City, MO James B. Nutter & Company 226 donations: 141 to candidates and 85 to committees

$851,360

12 John McDonnell, St. Louis, MO Former Chairman and CEO of McDonnell Douglas 35 donations: 24 to candidates and 11 to committees

$745,733

13 Kenneth McClain, Independence, MO Attorney at Humphrey, Farrington & McClain, P.C. 99 donations: 65 to candidates and 34 to committees

$718,685

14 David Steward, Town and Country, MO Chairman and Founder of World Wide Technology 165 donations: 119 to candidates and 46 to committees

$696,422

15 James McDonnell III, St. Louis, MO Son of James S. McDonnell, founder McDonnell-Douglas 119 donations: 85 to candidates and 34 to committees

$684,600

16 Marilyn Fox, Clayton, MO Philanthropist 78 donations: 56 to candidates and 22 to committees

$664,925

17 Jerry Hall, Monett, MO Executive Vice President of Jack Henry and Associates 42 donations: 27 to candidates and 15 to committees

$633,450

Get data for your state

Donor API

Source: Contribution data from the Missouri Ethics Commission, followthemoney.org and OpenSecrets.org. If you see a duplicated donation or know of a donation we've missed, e-mail Jason Rosenbaum at jrosenbaum@stlbeacon.org.

AG Koster says Missouri will join lawsuit challenging the EPA’s new carbon-emission regulations

Oct 9, 2015, 09:37 AM

- Koster argues that EPA has exceeded its authority in setting new standards and that the cost of compliance puts Missouri’s economic strength at risk -

Jefferson City, Mo. –Attorney General Chris Koster today said Missouri will join more than 20 other states in suing the EPA for exceeding its authority in issuing new regulations, collectively known as the “Clean Power Plan,” that set strict limits on carbon emissions for each state.

In a speech at the Missouri Electric Coop’s annual meeting in Branson this morning, Koster explained that he supports Missouri’s ongoing efforts to produce energy more cleanly and efficiently, but that EPA’s plan sets a compliance schedule that is economically risky and robs Missouri of its competitive advantage in low consumer and industrial electrical rates.

“Cleaner energy production is an important goal,” Koster said, “and one Missouri’s energy producers are already working toward.” Koster observed that over the past decade Missouri utilities have added more than 2,200 megawatts of generating capacity from wind power and other renewable resources.

Despite this progress, Koster noted that Missouri’s energy producers estimate that complying with EPA’s deadlines would cost the state more than $ 6 billion. He argued that Missouri is better off maintaining the competitive advantage it enjoys through low-energy costs while continuing to develop low- and zero-emission sources of energy on a more reasonable timeline. “Renewable energy is a vital piece of our state’s energy portfolio,” Koster said. “It is essential, however, that we achieve this goal in an economically responsible way that makes sense for Missouri.”

Koster also emphasized that Missouri’s recent history with EPA justifies skepticism when EPA creates sweeping regulatory schemes imposing new obligations on Missouri residents and businesses. During Koster’s tenure as Attorney General, Missouri successfully challenged new EPA regulations regarding mercury emissions and water rules, arguing in each case that EPA unlawfully encroached on Missouri’s sovereign authority to regulate its air and water.

“I will continue to fight against federal overreach and to keep Missouri strong,” Koster concluded.

Koster said that he intends to join with other states in challenging the new regulations when they are formally published. EPA has not publicly announced a firm publication date.

The full text of Koster’s speech is available here.

===

Yesterday, Spence Jackson, a spokesman for Missouri state auditor Tom Schweich—who committed suicide last month—was found dead [3] of “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

The deaths of Jackson and Schweich have sparked outrage in Missouri. In the final days of his life, Schweich was subject to both an overt and covert campaign attacking him personally, including rumors that he was Jewish (he did have Jewish lineage on his grandfather's side but was a practicing Episcopalian).

In his eulogy for Schweich, former Missouri Senator John Danforth issued a strong rebuke [4] of the campaigns waged against the former state auditor, saying, “Words do hurt. Words can kill. That has been proven right here in our home state.”

In the days leading up to Schweich's suicide, he alleged that the state's GOP chairman, John Hancock, was telling people he was Jewish.

“Until recently, I mistakenly believed that Tom Schweich was Jewish, but it was simply a part of what I believed to be his biography,” Hancock reportedly emailed [5] to his party's central committee (he did not attend Schweich's funeral). Hancock did not explain why Schweich's faith was relevant.

It wasn't an explanation that Danforth bought. “Someone said this was no different than saying a person is Presbyterian. Here's how to test the credibility of that remark: When was the last time anyone sidled up to you and whispered into your ear that such and such a person is a Presbyterian?”

In addition to a whisper campaign against Schweich's faith, his intended campaign for governor of Missouri made him the target of political rivals who already began hitting him with paid advertisements. In one radio ad, composed by Ted Cruz adviser Jeff Roe's Axiom Strategies [6], he was called a “little bug” and compared to the television character Barney Fife due to his physical build.

AlterNet called Axiom Strategies and requested Roe's comment about both suicides. We were told that Roe has not answered any media requests on this topic. As of this writing, the Cruz campaign has not gotten back to us with a comment.

In an interview with CNN yesterday, Cruz said he was “not going to engage in the personal mudslinging, in the negative attacks on people's character.” If that were true, why would he hire someone who played a role in such a brutal smear campaign?

disenfranchise

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/:{2015:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/03/16/oregon_automatic_dmv_voter_registration_passes.html

PEABODY MISSOURI

yikes, CU meets local ordinances:

Early in April, coal industry executive Shaun McCutcheon won big when the Supreme Court swept away limits on how much money wealthy donors can contribute to federal political campaigns. But in St. Louis, Mo., coal interests are trying to prevent people from even voting.

This story began when ordinary citizens joined together and took a stand against both climate change and their city’s destructive practice of granting enormous tax breaks to big business while cutting funding for public services. They talked to thousands of residents who were upset that St. Louis keeps giving away tens of millions of dollars of badly needed public money to Peabody Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company) and the lobbyists, banks, and law firms that enable it. And after hearing over and over again that “there oughta be a law” against corporate welfare for polluters, they did what we learned in civics class: they wrote a law that would ban public financial incentives to unsustainable energy producers and their major business partners.

They didn’t just write the law: Under the banner of Take Back St. Louis, they walked door-to-door, talking to friends, neighbors, and strangers about their idea. They collected over 22,000 signatures — more than 10 percent of all the voters in St. Louis — on a petition for a ballot initiative. The city’s elections board verified the signatures, and began preparing to print ballots.

This is where you might expect to hear about a vigorous election campaign, with arguments from both sides put to the voters, a spirited debate about the future of St. Louis and our planet, and finally, the voters making their choice at the ballot box. You might even expect to hear about the coal company spending millions of dollars to fight the initiative in the days before the vote.

But you’d be wrong: There was no vote. Instead, the coal company’s lawyers rushed to court and asked a judge to block the election on the grounds that the law would unfairly discriminate against the coal company and its business partners, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. The judge agreed, and cited the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision for the theory that business entities “are entitled to constitutional protection as citizens.” He issued a preliminary injunction blocking the vote, and scheduled a trial for March 31.

At the trial, Take Back St. Louis provided evidence about the environmental damage caused by burning coal, and the damage to the fabric of St. Louis caused by the city’s penchant for giving away public dollars to big business. The other side didn’t put any witnesses on the stand. The judge may make his final decision any day now.

Not everyone will agree that this ballot initiative is the best policy, and that’s fine. The Take Back St. Louis folks think they can convince a majority of St. Louis voters, and they’re willing to take on the coal interests in a contest for votes. But first, the court has to get out of the way. Now that the judge has the evidence, he has a chance to get this right, lift his injunction, and let the vote proceed.

Whether or not you think that giving tax breaks to coal companies and their business partners is a good idea, we should all agree that this is a question for voters, not judges. Because it was bad enough when coal companies could simply open their checkbooks to flood elections with unlimited spending; now they won’t even let people vote.

Ron Fein is the Legal Director for Free Speech For People, an organization dedicated to challenging the misuse of corporate power and restoring republican democracy to the people.

http://grist.org/business-technology/do-coal-companies-have-more-rights-than-voters/

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http://www.takebackstlouis.com/the_initiative

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may 30

On Tuesday, a St. Louis judge threw out a ballot initiative that would amend the city charter to prohibit tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and their major business partners. Before residents even had a chance to vote.

The story began when citizens took a stand against both climate change and St. Louis’ destructive practice of granting tax breaks to big business while cutting funding for public services. They wrote a law and collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot for a public vote.

But nobody can vote.

Coal allies, fearful that the initiative would pass, pursued a two-pronged strategy to prevent it from ever reaching the ballot. And the success (so far) of that strategy shows why the democratic system is rigged in favor of big corporations and special interests.

First, the court challenge. This week, the judge issued a final order preventing St. Louis residents from voting on the initiative. The judge theorized that state law doesn’t allow cities to make rules about who gets tax breaks, and that the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause prevents voters from saying that they don’t want to give tax breaks to coal companies and their business partners. On the latter point, the judge opined that, under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, “business organizations are ‘persons’ entitled to equal protection as well as other constitutional rights.”

Second, the legislative challenge. While the case was pending, the mayor’s office pushed a curious amendment to an obscure state bill. In the middle of a bill about county prosecutors and sewer districts, you’ll find a provision that specifically prohibits the city of St. Louis from passing, by ballot measure, any restrictions on tax breaks for coal mining companies. There’s only one coal mining company in St. Louis known to receive city tax breaks: Peabody Energy.

So in court, the claim is that coal companies’ constitutional rights are violated by a citizen initiative to stem the flow of special tax breaks. And in the Legislature — where Peabody donors spent almost half a million dollars in the last two elections — the legislators slip in a special provision preventing St. Louis voters from taking a vote on whether to give tax breaks to Peabody.

Is democracy in St. Louis only for those who can pay? The office of the mayor — whom Peabody funds — has helped to both challenge the initiative in court and lobby the Legislature to prevent St. Louisans from voting on city policy.

We’re at a turning point. The Supreme Court keeps striking down common-sense rules to limit the influence of wealthy donors and corporate interests in our political system. Next week, the U.S. Senate is holding a hearing on a constitutional amendment to restore our ability to limit the influence of money in politics, and the full Senate will vote on it this year.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about tax breaks for one coal company in one city. It’s about our democracy, and why we must fight to reclaim it.

Ron Fein is the legal director of Free Speech For People, and co-counsel to the Take Back St. Louis campaign, along with a Missouri-based legal team. Stuart Keating is a St. Louis attorney with a practice specializing in environmental and corporate law, and is co-counsel to the Take Back St. Louis campaign.

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links http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/judge-keeps-take-back-st-louis-initiative-off-ballot/article_2a1a22aa-21d8-5577-890a-a9401aae3c16.html

may 27/14

Opponents of the “Take Back St. Louis” initiative succeeded Tuesday in their effort to block the measure from going before voters in the city.

St. Louis Circuit Judge Robert Dierker issued an order prohibiting the city’s Election Board from putting the measure on a ballot.

Dierker’s ruling is a defeat for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, or MORE, which led a petition effort to block tax incentives for any company that engages in “unsustainable” energy production — or does $1 million a year in business with such an entity.

Opponents filed suit Jan. 31 to keep the initiative off the April 8 ballot. The suit described the proposed city charter amendment as “intentionally arbitrary and vague” and “disastrous public policy.” It said many businesses could be blocked from receiving city services, perhaps unknowingly because of vague definitions in the measure.

In his 24-page ruling, Dierker said the proposal would “exclude a variety of enterprises from qualifying for benefits under the statutory regime of economic incentives or, (in MORE’s) parlance, corporate welfare.”

MORE’s main target is Peabody Energy, which received tax breaks from the city when it expanded its headquarters in 2011. The group has said tax breaks would be better directed to help small businesses and revitalize poor parts of St. Louis.

Backers of the initiative said that, although they were disappointed by Dierker’s decision, the setback would be temporary. Supporters said in a statement that they were confident an appellate court would put the measure before voters in August or November.

The Take Back St. Louis initiative was begun to correct what the statement said were Mayor Francis Slay’s “failings in gouging the St. Louis public schools and other public programs in order to subsidize corporations.”

Organizations active in the Take Back St. Louis effort will continue to support those who organize against “unsustainable energy producers” such as Peabody and hold the St. Louis Development Corp. accountable for creating living-wage jobs, initiative backers said.

Dierker’s ruling is in a suit filed by Jane Dueker, a lawyer and former Peabody lobbyist.

He ruled that the “manifest purpose” of MORE’s effort “is not so much to advance the use of approved fuels, as to punish enterprises which deal in the disfavored fuels and to punish the enterprises which deal with the disfavored energy producers for their presumed role in furthering the business of the disfavored producers.”

Tim Bryant covers commercial real estate, development and other business stories for the Post-Dispatch. He blogs at Building Blocks, the Post-Dispatch development blog.

6 may mayor/state block: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/slay-s-office-turns-to-legislature-to-block-local-ballot/article_ec94707c-78ad-5edc-8895-fc1f8e7b2164.html

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has vetoed a bill that included a drafting error copied-and-pasted from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation, and criticized ALEC members for having "simply parroted ... the ALEC model act without alteration."

"While some may believe that such an error is 'close enough' for a model act, it cannot be allowed to become the law of this State," Nixon, a Democrat, wrote in his veto message. "Particularly in an area of the law that is the subject of ongoing litigation, a glaring defect such as this cannot be ignored."

Missouri Senate Bill 508, sponsored by ALEC member Sen. Mike Parsons, was modeled after the ALEC Navigator Background Check Act, and aimed to create new hurdles for health care “navigators” who enroll Missourians in healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act. The bill was voted on by ALEC's corporate and politician members at ALEC's December 2013 meeting, and became official ALEC policy in January 2014.

The original ALEC model legislation would have required a navigator to submit fingerprints to the state highway patrol for a background check, and referenced the federal Public Law 92-554 -- but the correct reference is to Public Law 92-544, which deals with federal criminal records. The error in the ALEC model bill was copied-and-pasted verbatim into the Missouri legislation.

"Some state legislatures that have considered similar navigator-related legislation derived from ALEC model legislation have taken the opportunity to fix the incorrect reference from the ALEC model before enacting it," such as Arizona, Nixon wrote in his veto message. "However, like the Missouri General Assembly, other state legislatures considering such legislation have simply parroted the incorrect reference from the ALEC model act without alteration," noting that politicians in neighboring Kansas made the same mistake.

This isn’t the first time that ALEC politicians have pushed ALEC legislation without paying much attention. Two years ago in Florida, Florida state Rep. Rachel Burgin (R) forgot to removeALEC’s mission statement from a bill she introduced.

The Navigator Background Check Act was one of several ALEC model bills introduced in the Missouri legislature in 2014, according to a list compiled by Progress Missouri. Between 47 and 57 Missouri politicians are ALEC members, according to a report from Progress Missouri, Center for Media and Democracy, Common Cause, and Missouri Jobs with Justice Voter Action.

ALEC held its most recent meetingin Kansas City, Missouri in May.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/12526

1. Missouri Legalizes Shooting People for Being in Your Section

Feeling the Castle Doctrine defined “castle” too narrowly, Missouri State Representative Joe Don McGaugh proposed a bill allowing any citizen to use deadly force to protect against unlawful entry of private property. “This is a common sense extension of the law that would empower a nanny or babysitter, or anyone with the owner’s permission to occupy a property, to defend himself or herself against an intruder,” he said.

Unfortunately, McGaugh didn’t write his bill very carefully, and the Missouri House ended up passing a law that endorses use of deadly force by anyone pretty much anywhere. The bill allows for force by “occupants” of “private property"— conditions written so loosely that occupants could refer to a diner or a baseball game attendee or someone watching a movie, while invasion could mean anybody they feel intruding on whatever property they happen to be on.

As Think Progress explained [3], the bill is basically Stand Your Ground, except it replaces the threat of immediate physical harm with the feeling of invasion. Feel threatened in a business by someone you don’t think belongs there? Take out your gun and start shooting. Or, to quote Charles Pierce [4], “If you're at a Royals game, don't even think about moving down to the really good seats unless you feel lucky, punk.”

===

Missouri May Be Next State to Ban Tesla Motors

Cliff Weathers / AlterNet

===

The Sierra Club has joined with Organizing For Action, an Obama-allied nonprofit group, to organize constituents of Rep. Ann Wagner to protest on Wednesday afternoon outside the congresswoman's Ballwin, Mo., office in an effort to get her to acknowledge the reality of manmade climate change.

The protestors claim the Missouri Republican has ducked questions on climate change science, and point to her participation in Americans For Prosperity's "No Climate Tax Pledge," which opposes any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.

"She's got her head in the sand," Michael Berg, an organizer for the Missouri chapter of Sierra Club, told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday. "She clearly does not admit that this is a problem and will not do anything to confront it."

Environmentalists were particularly troubled by an email Wagner sent to a constituent regarding her position on climate change, which was later reprinted in full on a little-known blog.

"The field of climate science is in its relative infancy and it appears that some within the public policy world have made dubious assessments of scientific information in order to further their own political agenda," Wagner wrote in the letter. "Our policy response to this dilemma should not be based on inconsistent and unsound science or driven by the fear of a supposed catastrophe."

Wagner spokesman Patrick Howell confirmed that the letter was written by Wagner and signaled she is open to meeting with activists to discuss their concerns, though he declined to elaborate on her opinions about climate change. "The congresswoman is always willing to meet with these groups," he told HuffPost.

The protest comes as OFA is laying the groundwork for legislative action on climate change, the first step of which involves targeting so-called climate deniers in Congress. Last month the group emailed its reported 20 million subscribers a "greatest hits" video compilation of congressmen whom it's identified as climate deniers. That video targeted Republican Sens. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), as well as House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and others.

This week OFA held 50 events around the country that run the gamut of praising members of Congress for their work to combat global warming, to taking on climate deniers.

"The big success is that people were organizing very locally, figuring out what was important in their congressional disctrict and running their own plan based on that," said Ivan Frishberg, the organization's climate change campaign manager. "For a lot of these places, it was just a first step. This was the first action, and then we'll be building for future actions over the course of the summer and the rest of the year."

===

Missouri: http://www.alternet.org/print/food/look-out-corporations-promote-right-farm**

Progressive Populist [1] / By Margot Ford McMillen [2]

Look Out: Corporations Promote ‘Right to Farm’

May 9, 2013 |

Every year for the last six or eight, family farmers and small-town residents in Missouri have had to fight off legislations designed to take away our local control and put all the lawmaking privileges in the hands of state lawmakers. Taken to the extreme, this would mean that county, city and township ordinances and laws would be void. No more city zoning, no health ordinances guaranteeing special treatment such as special regulations against noise, air pollution, water pollution and so forth, for county residents that demanded it.

The beneficiaries of these laws would be corporate do-badders who want to export costs like cleanups or health care for employees. Without regulations, they could get taxpayers to pay for pollution and social justice atrocities. It would be business as usual for them, only better!

This year, we have been dealing with bills introduced simultaneously in the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate to ensure “modern farming practices” forever. The resolutions on the House side said, “No state law shall be enacted which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology and modern livestock production and ranching practices, unless enacted by the General Assembly.”

Never mind that “agricultural technology,” “modern livestock production,” “ranching practices” are not defined. And never mind that they would seem to suggest methods of production like Confined Animal Feeding Operations and genetically altered crops. If these resolutions passed, citizens would be asked to vote this dangerous language into our state constitution. Where it would reside forever.

As I write this, just a few days after tax day, it looks like we’ve beaten back this particular monster. It is possible, of course, that all we’ve done is cut off one head to reveal two or three more, but the citizens have been calling lawmakers, pointing out the errors of the bills, and gaining support as the session moves forward.

But here’s the larger question: Where the heck did this idea of changing the constitution come from? We know who it benefits — the industrial agriculture system — and we know who it hurts — ordinary citizens. But who wrote this bill, now called “right to farm,” and who financed the possibility that it would get traction?

Thanks to the magic of Google, I quickly found three states with efforts for constitutional amendments similar to Missouri’s proposals. Another few keystrokes and I found the source of the language. It came from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. And on the ALEC website, a few more clicks took me to the list of legislative members from Missouri.

In November 2012, North Dakota, a state besieged with fracking (and, yes, ALEC has policies and sample legislation favoring that subject also) passed a “right to farm” amendment into the constitution. Its language is eerily like the proposal in Missouri: The right of farmers and ranchers to engage in modern farming and ranching practices shall be forever guaranteed in this state. No law shall be enacted which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology, modern livestock production and ranching practices.

While you might think this guarantees farmers against the frackers, please note the seriously vague and troubling words “modern,” “technology,” and the confusing phrase “no law shall be enacted …” So, in North Dakota, no county, township, parish, city or any governmental body will be able to pass a law or ordinance to protect themselves from chemicals, GMOs, CAFOs or any other kind of industrial farming scheme.

Not only will farmers be affected. This amendment can have serious repercussions for consumers: North Dakota, one of our chief wheat-raising states, will not be able to refuse to plant untested (and untrusted) GMO wheat under this Constitutional clause.

The same sort of language is being considered in Montana, another primary wheat-raising state, and in Indiana, one of the buckles on the corn belt. The Hoosier experience, summed up by Indiana’s TribStar.com, sounds just like Missouri. They say:

“House Joint Resolution 5 and Senate Joint Resolution 27, identical pieces of legislation making their way through the two chambers, seek to amend the Indiana Constitution to prevent any legislative body from adopting any rules regulating farming ...

“The amendment, apparently, would prevent any rules regulating large industrial agricultural businesses such as confined animal feeding operations. It would also prevent any laws that protect public health and private property rights for Hoosiers who are not farmers. Even zoning laws could be challenged.”

These dangerous laws could spell the end of rural life and the endorsement of fields farmed with robot tractors, sprayed by drones carrying Agent Orange and growing untested GMO crops with serious health consequences.

State by state, beginning in Indiana this fall, voters will confront this amendment and industry will spend the big bucks to get it passed. Find out if it’s active in your state, and who supports it.

Then call your friends and neighbors and work to defeat it.

See more stories tagged with:

Right to farm [3],

Missouri House of Representatives [4],

confined animal feeding operations [5],

constitution [6],

deregulation [7],

alec [8],

american legislative exchange council [9],

gmo [10],

cafo [11],

north dakota [12],

house joint resolution 5 [13],

senate joint resolution 27 [14],

modern farming practices [15]

===

JEFFERSON CITY • The Missouri Legislature has approved a bill that seeks to block the implementation of Agenda 21, a non-binding United Nations action plan that promotes sustainable development.

The anti-Agenda 21 bill now goes to Gov. Jay Nixon, following the House’s final approval of the bill Wednesday night.

“This is truly a bill that’s going to help protect Missourians and their private property rights,” said state Rep. Lyle Rowland, R-Cedarcreek.

The U.N. adopted the voluntary action agenda in 1992. It was meant to address issues of poverty, management of natural resources, and other goals The United Nations initiative does not hold the force of law in the United States, but it has drawn recent attention from some conservatives who have pushed similar bans in other states.

The far-right John Birch Society, one of the leading anti-Agenda 21 advocacy groups, claims on its website that the plan will "curtail your freedom to travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas and raise a family.”

“Furthermore, it would eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain,” it claims.

Rowland, during a debate on the legislation last month, said the bill is about protecting property rights.

“Just because Agenda 21 hasn’t been approved by the federal government – there’s a lot of things that we get hit with that there hasn’t been any legislation passed on,” he said, suggesting that initiatives could come through the executive branch.

House Minority Leader Jake Hummel, D-St. Louis, compared the bill to legislation that would regulate “space aliens.”

Other Democrats questioned why the Legislature was spending time on that legislation and not other bills they deemed more pressing.

But many other Republicans have bristled at suggestions that the legislation is silly or unnecessary.

“This isn’t a far-fetched idea or issue,” Rep. Diane Franklin, R-Camdenton, said during the recent debate. “We have to protect private property rights.”

Rep. Jeff Grisamore, R-Lee’s Summit, said he believes there are ties between Agenda 21 to the Occupy movement and anti-Walmart sentiment.

“This piece of legislation is a very legitimate concern,” he said.

The passage of the anti-Agenda 21 legislation is among several bills the GOP-controlled Legislature has tackled this year that observers have sought to mock because of their right-wing ties.

The House passed a bill, which has not been approved in the Senate, that would ban the use of surveillance drones. Proponents say the bill will ensure privacy rights and have implied that it’s needed to keep the federal government from spying on Missouri residents.

Following the Agenda 21 vote Wednesday, the House gave final approval to legislation that targets the use of Sharia and other foreign laws in the United States, which Democrats also questioned.

“We’re talking about the boogey man in Sharia land,” said Rep. Mike Colona, D-St. Louis. “It’s a waste of time. There is no boogeyman out there.”

It's unclear whether Nixon, a Democrat, will sign the bills, quietly let them pass or try to block the bills from becoming law by veto. Both were approved with slight veto-proof margins.

(The anti-Agenda 21 legislation is SB265 and the foreign law bill is SB267)

Elizabeth Crisp covers Missouri politics and state government for the Post-Dispatch. Follow her on Twitter at @elizabethcrisp.

===

The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don't hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.

In February, CMD reported on state resolutions calling for the approval of the KXL pipeline project in Mississippi, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri. The language in three of these resolutions closely matched a "backgrounder" from TransCanada. The forth resolution, introduced in Missouri, mirrored a resolution from the American Legislative Exchange Council.

In the last few months, Ohio, Kansas, and Indiana have introduced very similar resolutions, which also feature paragraphs from TransCanada’s own materials. Although these resolutions are non-binding, they will be showcased by industry lobbyists as evidence about how state legislators (and by extension the public) feel about the pipeline project in an attempt to influence the pending State Department decision on KXL. While opponents of KXL have been active on many fronts, their absence from state legislatures nationwide has been notable.

Industry Turns Out in Force, But Face Little Opposition

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koch funded voter dis

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main officials ALEC gov etc

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/16/liberal-group-identifies-30-alec-model-bills-in-missouri/

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Which is why some news out of Missouri on Tuesday was particularly stomach-churning: Just hours before Giffords made her way into the nation's Capitol, an unknown provocateur was stalking the halls of the Missouri Capitol, tagging the doors of lawmakers—most of them Democratic women—with images of rifle crosshairs. From the Columbia Daily Tribune:

Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said. The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate—Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said. One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington.

...

It's an apt moment to recall that Giffords once criticized Sarah Palin for using a map that literally put political enemies in the crosshairs. "We need to realize that the rhetoric…for example, we're on Sarah Palin's 'targeted' list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC in spring 2010. "When people do that, they've gotta realize that there are consequences to that action."

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/gabby-giffords-missouri-cross-hair-stickers-democrats

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