Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is campaigning to retain his current office next year — but is he the slightest bit interested in actually doing the job? There’s scant evidence of it.
Instead of enforcing state law and representing Missourians’ interests in court, the state’s chief legal official has been using his office to try to prevent the public from being allowed to vote on abortion rights and gun safety, to interfere in the medical decisions of transgender citizens and to sue the Biden administration over its relationship with social-media companies.
Does everyone feel safer now?
Meanwhile, Bailey has been contracting private law firms to handle state legal work that is important but apparently not high-profile enough to merit attention from him and the state-paid lawyers he directs. As for Missouri’s Sunshine Law, the state open-records statute that Bailey’s office is supposed to enforce, new reporting indicates his own office may not even be adhering to it.
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The state constitution tasks Bailey’s office with representing most state agencies in court and other legal duties. The post is elected, but Bailey was appointed to it by Gov. Mike Parson in January to fill the vacancy left when former Attorney General Eric Schmitt departed for Washington, D.C. Bailey will seek election to the office for a full four-year term next year.
He has clearly learned well from his predecessors how to spin his tax-funded litigation powers into catnip for the Republican base.
Schmitt used the power of the office to sue dozens of school districts for following mainstream medical advice regarding pandemic masking policies. His predecessor, Josh Hawley, sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act, which would have threatened the medical coverage of as many as two million Missourians. For showily endangering the health of their own constituents, both were rewarded with U.S. Senate seats.
Nine months into the job, Bailey is well on his way to outpacing them both in terms of politicizing his official powers beyond all recognition.
Earlier this year Bailey created an emergency rule to effectively ban transgender hormone therapy for adults, withdrawing it only after even his fellow Republicans deemed it too extreme.
He was instrumental in the statutory ban on adolescent transgender care that went into effect Monday — an achievement that medical experts warn could lead to increased teen suicides, but which Bailey is bragging about in his campaign fundraising appeals (and in the Post-Dispatch opinion section on Friday).
To stall a pending abortion-rights referendum effort, Bailey used (and, a court would ultimately rule, misused) his office to press the surreal claim that it would cost Missouri billions of dollars in lost tax revenue from unborn future Missourians.
He’s currently making a similarly bogus claim to try to stall a t, insisting that fewer guns on the streets will cost Missouri hundreds of millions of dollars in “increased crime costs.†Never mind that virtually all reliable data shows this less guns/more crime argument to be the polar opposite of true.
Part of Bailey’s job is to represent the state in court when convicted felons appeal their convictions. It’s a job that generally means trying to defend the conviction and keep the felon locked up. Yet the normally tough-on-crime Bailey in June asked a state appeals court to throw out the manslaughter conviction of a white Kansas City detective who shot and killed a Black man in his own driveway.
Former ºüÀêÊÓƵ Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner was rightly excoriated for siding with criminals over the law; Bailey himself did much of the excoriating. We’ll leave it to the readers to ponder why this situation is different.
So, while Bailey has been promoting all kinds of performative politics that arguably are outside his official duties, who has been doing his official duties? To some extent, it’s been private attorneys hired on contract — which the taxpayers have to pay for in addition to the salaries of Bailey and his on-staff attorneys.
Some of that outside hiring is to defend the state in court against a lawsuit filed by purveyors of shady unlicensed gaming machines, who are suing to get state law enforcement to leave them alone.
Bailey appears happy to oblige. He has said that enforcing the state’s gaming laws should fall on local prosecutors, not him. He hasn’t been clear on why private attorneys had to be brought in to defend the lawsuit instead of his own office — but in dropping out of the case in April, his office referenced conflict of interest. That appears to be about the more than $25,000 in political donations Bailey has accepted from sources tied to the unlicensed gaming machines.
Of course, there would no longer be a conflict of interest if Bailey were to just give the campaign money back. Then his office could handle the litigation and the taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for private legal fees.
But the other side of that argument is … well, we mentioned that Bailey is running for election, right? That’s expensive, taxpayers. (Don’t worry, we’re sure he’s appreciative.)
Bailey’s official duties also include ensuring that state agencies — including the attorney general’s office itself — are adhering to Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which mandates that most government information is openly available to the public. But as the recently reported, this important issue has apparently been put to the bottom of the stack as Bailey focuses on anything that can get him a headline.
The news site reports that Bailey’s office has only now completed processing requests for public records submitted in 2021. Some of those requests are complex — fine — but some are simple. Yet Bailey’s office has decided to process continuing requests in chronological order, instead of breaking out the simple ones for immediate approval.
For example, the news site has asked Bailey’s office for three days’ worth of his official calendar for the week before last. This is indisputably a public record, of the kind generally turned over in days, and an easily fulfilled request. But because of the backlog, Bailey’s office has told the news site it will have to wait awhile to get that clearly public record ... until late March of next year.
If the Missouri Independent doesn’t want to wait that long, we can tell them right now what is on the attorney general’s agenda for those days, and for every day: He is busy using his tax-funded office to promote culture-war piffle while denying Missourians the nuts-and-bolts legal service they’re paying for. He shouldn’t be rewarded for it in next year’s elections.