All posts tagged "missouri"

This GOP plot may hand Dems a massive red state win

In American politics, we’re familiar with gerrymandering — when a political party redraws district lines to gain an electoral advantage.

But what happens when that plan backfires and accidentally benefits the opposing party instead? Enter what politicos call the “dummymander.”

Republicans in several states, including Missouri, followed President Donald Trump’s orders to redraw congressional maps to protect the GOP’s House majority. To do it, they carved up blue seats and dispersed those Democratic voters into deep red districts, making many hue more towards pink.

Earlier this month, Democrats scored massive wins across the country — seen by many as a rebuke of the president and the prelude to a blue wave in next year’s midterms. Could that wave be large enough to turn carefully constructed GOP maps into a dummymander?

Republicans worried about that very scenario in Missouri two years ago, when state senators rejected a map that would have given the GOP seven of the state’s eight congressional seats. They feared a 7-1 map could swing to a 5-3 map if political winds shifted.

Those concerns were set aside in September when the legislature redrew the map to break up the Kansas City-based 5th District represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.

So does this make Missouri a prime candidate for a dummymander?

Probably not.

The key difference between 2022, when the 7-1 map was deemed too risky, and 2025, when it was approved, is the retirement of Republican U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer. His rural St. Elizabeth home made it difficult to keep him in his district while maintaining a GOP advantage everywhere else.

Luetkemeyer’s replacement, Bob Onder, lives in the St. Louis suburbs, making a gerrymander easier.

Under the new lines, the previously Democratic 5th District would have voted for Trump by 18 points last year, said Erin Covey of Cook Political Report, a national nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes election trends. And Trump would have won the new 4th District — which now includes more Democratic voters from Kansas City — by 21 points.

Even the 2nd District, long targeted by Democrats, became redder under the new map. Covey said the new 2nd District would have voted for Trump by 11 points, compared to eight points before.

She notes that the last time the U.S. saw a blue wave — in 2018 — the reddest seat Democrats flipped was in a New York district Trump won by 15 points.

Now, all this could ultimately be moot. A referendum campaign is raising millions to put the new map on the 2026 ballot, which could freeze the current districts in place until an up-or-down statewide vote.

But if the new map stands, Missouri Democrats shouldn’t be so discouraged that they don’t recruit and run strong candidates, said Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which also provides nonpartisan political analysis at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“If the wave comes,” Kondik said, “you want as many surfboards in the water as possible.”

Look no further than Tennessee, where Democrats are contesting a special election for a U.S. House seat Trump carried by 22 points. Despite the district’s deep red tilt, Democrats are making a play, hoping an anti-Trump electorate is ready to rebuke the party in power.

As both parties brace for the chaos of 2026, one thing’s clear: in the game of gerrymandering, the only certainty is that the lines will always keep shifting.

Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020.

As Nazi sympathizer roils GOP, one MAGA senator's silence grows more telling by the day

For several weeks now, the American right has been embroiled in a bitter internal fight about Nazis and antisemitism.

Specifically, the fight has centered on a Nazi sympathizer who keeps finding his way into the orbit of influential conservatives: Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes, a far-right activist and Holocaust denier, has summed up his political worldview as “hating women, being racist, being antisemitic.” He once proclaimed that Jews “are responsible for every war in the world. It’s not even debatable at this point.”

Yet that repugnant belief system hasn’t blocked his access to a who’s who of the conservative movement — including Donald Trump, who dined with Fuentes and fellow anti-semite Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

More recently, Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show for a two-hour softball interview that featured a call for a “pro-white” movement to oppose the “organized Jewry” Fuentes believes is undermining American cohesion. Carlson’s interview elevated Fuentes’ profile, giving his extremist views an audience far beyond his usual following.

The interview also roiled the American right, setting off an ugly debate about who should be allowed inside the tent of the conservative movement. Among those warning against the mainstreaming of Fuentes was Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

“Listen, this is America. He can have whatever views he wants,” Hawley told Jewish Insider.

“But the question for us as conservatives is: Are those views going to define who we are? And I think we need to say, ‘No, they’re not. No. Just no, no, no.’”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went even further, saying: “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”

The public condemnation of Fuentes and his beliefs from Hawley and other high-profile Republicans stands in stark contrast to Missouri’s other U.S. senator, Eric Schmitt.

Schmitt has yet to make any public comments about Fuentes, and his office did not respond to requests for comment.

There’s certainly no obligation for elected officials to speak out on every controversy, but Schmitt’s silence in particular is raising eyebrows.

First, he has never hesitated to attack antisemitism when it emanates from the left. Why the sudden reticence when it comes from the right?

Second, Schmitt is only a few weeks removed from a speech at the National Conservatism Conference where he argued the United States is not a nation built on ideas but on the legacy of “settlers and their descendants.”

Critics heard echoes in Schmitt’s speech of the old “blood and soil” nationalism that underpinned European fascist movements.

And third, over the summer Schmitt hired a staffer who was fired from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for circulating a video featuring Nazi imagery. That same staffer previously praised Fuentes’ influence on young men, though he later apologized.

Silence doesn’t equal agreement, and Schmitt’s defenders might argue he shouldn’t dignify Fuentes with attention. Why give an extremist more oxygen?

That might be a persuasive if Schmitt had not already brushed shoulders with the ideological world Fuentes inhabits. Once those lines blur, clarity becomes a duty, not an option. Avoiding the issue allows extremists to imagine their views are tolerated within mainstream conservatism.

When the loudest message a leader sends is silence, it can be heard as permission.

Or maybe it’s just cowardice.

Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020. The Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

MAGA senator’s rampages go far beyond mere defensiveness

Let’s talk about what happens when Josh Hawley gets angry.

Missouri’s senior U.S. senator doesn’t take criticism lightly — whether from the press, his colleagues or anyone he perceives as an enemy. His approach? If you get hit, hit back harder.

It’s not just a defense mechanism. It’s a political strategy. All criticism draws a counterattack, and the conflict itself becomes the story.

Case in point: A few weeks ago, Hawley blasted Ameren Missouri over utility shut-offs and rate hikes, blaming the surge in electricity use from new data centers for “sucking up the electricity off the grid, taking it away from hard-working Missourians.”

That didn’t land well with Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin, a fellow Republican. In a letter to Hawley’s office, she called his claims “misleading” and warned his rhetoric could “unnecessarily alarm the very people we both serve.”

Instead of a debate on energy policy, Hawley mocked O’Laughlin on social media as a mere “state politician” doing the bidding of her campaign donors.

It’s a familiar pattern that repeats throughout Hawley’s career with almost mathematical precision.

Shortly after Hawley was sworn in as Missouri attorney general in 2017, consultants from his political campaign began working out of his official office, directing government staff and using private email accounts to dodge Missouri’s open-records laws.

When the arrangement was revealed in the run-up to Hawley’s 2018 Senate election, he attacked the media, called the story “absurdly false,” and painted himself in the campaign’s homestretch as the victim of left-wing attacks.

It wasn’t until four years into his first Senate term that a judge eventually determined Hawley’s attorney general’s office had, in fact, “knowingly and purposefully” violated open records laws to protect his campaign from public scrutiny, ordering the state to pay $240,000 in legal fees. A state audit also concluded Hawley may have misused state resources to boost his Senate campaign.

In 2020, the Kansas City Star reported Hawley was registered to vote at his sister’s home in Ozark. At the time, the Hawleys only owned property in the D.C. suburbs, though they were building a house in Missouri.

Facing questions about his ties to Missouri, Hawley called the Star a “dumping ground for Democrat BS” while his allies dug up the reporter’s years-old stories from college to suggest he was biased.

Republican U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner questioned the cost of expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — a bill Hawley championed to aid St. Louis-area residents harmed by Cold War nuclear testing. Hawley called Wagner’s comments “shameful” and said she was turning her back on her constituents.

Hawley labeled conservative columnist George Will an out-of-touch elitist (“Dont’ you have a country club to go to?”) over a critical newspaper column and demanded Wal-Mart “apologize for using slave labor” over a critical social media post.

In today’s political marketplace, anger is currency. Outrage drives clicks, donations and loyalty.

Hawley thrives in that arena, turning every criticism into proof of persecution that mobilizes his political base and feeds the image he hopes to convey of a warrior fighting the political establishment.

But to Hawley’s detractors, it’s all theater, his outrage little more than a tactic used to distract from tough questions and avoid accountability.

The recent flare-up with O’Laughlin has cooled, but not because of reconciliation. When asked recently by a reporter from Nexstar if he’d reached out to her, Hawley replied simply: “No, I don’t know her.”

For Hawley, the fight isn’t a byproduct of politics — it is politics.

Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020. Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

These Jan 6 lawyers should not be allowed near a courtroom — never mind a school district

Here’s a lesson for the public schools to teach parents: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers at the Thomas More Society.”

You may have heard that Kirkwood School District, in Missouri, was recently threatened with a lawsuit over a three-minute LGBTQ+ History Month video shown to middle schoolers last month. Some parents complained.

The Chicago-based Thomas More Society swooped in with an eight-page demand letter threatening years of federal litigation and “substantial attorney fees” unless Kirkwood caved to their demands — all in the name of “protecting” the school district’s children from exposure to non-heterosexual subject matter.

This uncivil society has fancied itself for two decades as a guardian of morality. Not merely to advance homophobia, but to defund public libraries, shutter abortion clinics and otherwise seek to redefine America in the most unChristian manner imaginable.

But it was the group’s spectacularly failed attempt to overthrow American democracy as leading election deniers that best defines its notion of right and wrong. And that best illustrates the threat it poses to the rest of us.

Kids need to be protected from adults like this.

In 2020, the Thomas More Society created something called the Amistad Project — after updating its bylaws to include “election integrity” as part of its mission statement.

It launched lawsuits in multiple key swing states Donald Trump lost — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona — all of which were dismissed or tossed out after courts found serious procedural or constitutional flaws.

In December 2020, it sued in federal court seeking to block Congress from counting electoral votes on Jan. 6. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg rejected the motion, writing that the suit “rests on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution. It would be risible were its target not so grave.”

Risible is judge-speak for “Stupid on stilts.”

The Amistad Project was run at the time by Phill Kline, a former Kansas state attorney general whose resume included having had his law license suspended in 2013 for what the Kansas Supreme Court termed “clear and convincing evidence” that Kline committed 11 separate ethics violations.

The Court’s findings included that he misled a grand jury, provided false testimony, and illegally obtained confidential medical records during his investigations of abortion providers. The Court cited his “dishonest and selfish motives” and noted his “inability or refusal to acknowledge” his misconduct. He would ultimately lose his appeals at the U.S. Supreme Court, at a reported cost of $600,000 to Kansas taxpayers.

Great guy. I have no idea what he’s doing now. But during the scandalous post-2020 election effort to thwart democracy, he personified the Thomas More Society’s idea of an upstanding and morally impeccable attorney.

There are quite a few other examples of attorneys who have been associated with the society and whose service — like Kline — speaks volumes as to the group’s high standards of virtue.

There was Jenna Ellis, whose meteoric rise from a traffic-law attorney in Colorado to the height of Trump World culminated in a criminal guilty plea for aiding Trump’s fake‑elector scheme and a public censure for repeatedly misrepresenting the 2020 election. (To be fair, Ellis deserves our compassion as a survivor of close exposure to Rudy Guiliani’s flatulence and runaway hair dye.)

There were lesser known stalwarts like Erick G. Kaardal — identified as “Special Counsel” for the Amistad Project in the December 2020 election‐lawsuit filings. A federal judge referred him for possible disciplinary action after describing his complaint as “a sweeping Complaint filled with baseless fraud allegations and tenuous legal claims.”

The list goes on. But you don’t need deep research to understand the grotesque nature of the Thomas More Society. The demand letter it sent to the Kirkwood School District on behalf of a handful of aggrieved parents speaks for itself:

“Based on our track record of First Amendment victories and fee recoveries across the country, those amounts are likely to be substantial.”

Nice school district you have here. It would be a shame if something bad happened to it.

At this point, it’s fair to wonder what sort of moral outrage might be so heinous as to offend the sensibilities of the openly heinous themselves? Must be pretty gruesome, right?

Fortunately, there’s no need to speculate. The demand letter specifies some of the atrocities perpetrated at Kirkwood. Here it is (but I must warn you these bulleted items might not be appropriate for children to see):

“Years ago” being “openly LGBTQ+ was difficult and dangerous” and “everything changed” for the good during the “Stonewall Uprising,” thanks in part to “brave activists like Marsha P. Johnson [a self-identified ‘drag queen’] and Sylvia Rivera [a self-identified ‘transvestite’],” which led to “speak[ing] up” for “LGBTQ+ rights” across the world.
The “Christopher Street liberation day march” was the first “Pride parade” that served as a way for self-identified LGBTQ+ individuals to “step out of the shadows” and “show the world who they were,” because “being yourself is something to celebrate, not hide.”
“Pride” is about “being proud of your identity.”
“Pride month” is “celebrated” with “parades, festivals, and flags full of bright colors.” The rainbow flag was created as a “symbol of love, acceptance, diversity, and hope.”
Newer versions of the “Pride flag” include the “progress pride flag” adding “black and brown to highlight the inclusion of people of color,” along with “pink, blue, and white to include the ‘trans’ community.’ This evolution shows that the movement is growing and working hard to include everyone.”
“The Pride community today is a huge and amazing group”; “it’s a supportive family.”
“Pride reminds us to[:] Be proud of who you are[,] Stand up for fairness and equality[,] Support Others” [as also displayed in illustrated text on the video], “no matter who they love or how they identify.”
“It started as a protest, and today it’s also a celebration of courage, history, and community.” “Supporting ‘Pride’ means supporting equality, kindness, and the right to be yourself.”
“HAPPY LGBTQ+ HISTORY MONTH” [shouted by student-narrators in unison, and as further displayed in illustration on video].

Dear reader, I apologize if it has offended your sensibilities to see — in raw and uncensored form — the subversiveness that was inflicted upon innocent children in Kirkwood. Certainly, it’s understandable that it might offend your religious beliefs.

Especially if you’re possessed by whatever demons haunt the nice people at the Thomas More Society.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.

This Republican heartland hypocrite can't hide behind his copy of the New York Times

If you didn’t know better, you might believe Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) was ushering in a new era of bipartisan compassion with his op-ed this week in the New York Times.

Headlined “No American Should Go to Bed Hungry,” Hawley’s piece struck all the right notes about why the nation must act immediately to preserve SNAP food assistance for 42 million people — now endangered by the government shutdown.

Trouble is, that’s if you didn’t know better.

And the public record knows better.

Less than four months ago, on July 1, Hawley voted to slash SNAP by at least $120 billion over the next decade — the Congressional Budget Office had it at $187 billion. And he can’t even claim party loyalty as a defense: Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Rand Paul all voted no.

But the SNAP cuts were just the appetizer. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” —Trump’s sweeping budget package that passed 51-50 with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie — was a banquet of cruelty. Every Democrat voted no. Hawley voted yes.

The bill included:

More than $1 trillion cut from Medicaid — the largest rollback in U.S. history.
Work requirements that mostly punish people already working.
Removal of coverage for lawfully present immigrants.
Restrictions on provider taxes that help keep rural hospitals alive.

On that last point, Hawley warned colleagues about devastating rural hospitals. He negotiated a $25 billion band-aid spread over five years — then voted to gut the programs anyway. The senator always manages to rationalize his hypocrisy by introducing fig leaf bills he knows are going nowhere.

The bill’s SNAP provisions imposed crushing work requirements and bureaucratic hurdles designed to kick people off the rolls. It penalized states with high “error rates,” meaning Missouri — at 10.2 percent— would lose 25 percent more in funding, despite already struggling to administer the program.

The same bill eliminated Affordable Care Act subsidies for 22 million Americans. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10 million will lose coverage overall — a devastating blow to working families, low-income seniors and lawfully present immigrants who’ve paid into Medicare for years.

The timeline doesn’t quite line up with Hawley’s soaring rhetoric today.

In May 2025 —just two months before the vote — Hawley wrote another Times op-ed titled “Don’t Cut Medicaid.” In it, he warned that slashing health insurance for working people would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”

He even asked: Would Republicans be “a majority party of working people, or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?”

Then in July, he voted for the C-suite.

Now, in October, as his party’s shutdown threatens the food security of 42 million Americans, he’s back with another heartfelt op-ed and a narrow bill to preserve only SNAP. The rest of the government — furloughed workers, shuttered services, disrupted lives — can wait. They’re not in this week’s parable.

You wouldn’t know any of this from today’s Times essay. In it, Hawley casts himself as a cross between FDR and the Apostle Paul.

“Love of neighbor is part of who we are,” he writes. “The Scripture’s injunction to ‘remember the poor’ is a principle Americans have lived by.”

Now, I don’t claim to be a Christian. But from what I understand about the words of Jesus, I’m not aware of any indifference to the poor — or even equivocation — that would inspire slashing SNAP payments or blowing up health-care coverage.

For that matter — and again, I’m no expert — is there language in the New Testament telling us to welcome strangers as long as their immigration papers are in order?

Jesus just fed the hungry and reached out to everyone. There wasn’t any ambiguity involved. And definitely not a residency requirement.

As my readers know, I don’t buy the un-American notion that ours is a Christian nation. It is definitively not — and it belongs to all of us of different faiths, or no faith, as much as it does to Hawley and others who worship as he does.

But even on his best behavior, Hawley today offered Christian benevolence with an asterisk. He warned of “fraud” and “illegal aliens” abusing SNAP, as if that were a national crisis. It’s not. Unauthorized immigrants are mostly ineligible, and fraud rates remain minimal.

But this is more about optics than facts. Hawley portrays the worthy poor as native-born and properly documented — not strangers at the gate.

Hawley does stand out from fellow Republicans who dare not go off script about the poor for fear of crossing Donald Trump and his MAGA minions. The text of his op-ed was just splendid.

But talk is cheap. And it’s heinously cheapened when you just voted against your own piety.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.

How Trump's racism-fueled revenge tour came for workers in St. Louis

Donald Trump’s revenge tour has come to St. Louis.

But this time, it’s not about prosecutors or political enemies. It’s about dismantling civil rights programs — and it’s personal.

Nearly 2,000 minority and women-owned businesses at Lambert International Airport just learned they must prove they were discriminated against — with evidence locked in their competitors’ files — or lose their ability to bid on federal contracts.

Under new Trump administration guidelines issued last week, contractors must submit “personal narratives” detailing specific economic harm compared to “non-disadvantaged” businesses. They must prove, with a “preponderance of evidence,” that they were denied financing on terms their white competitors received.

How are they supposed to find the evidence? Bank loan terms are confidential. Competitors’ financing deals are private. The contractors are being asked to document discrimination they cannot possibly access.

They can’t. And that’s precisely the point.

The targets of Trump’s dismantling campaign? Civil rights programs created to remedy the exact kind of discrimination he was accused of — and denied — more than a half-century ago.

In 1973, the Nixon administration’s Department of Justice sued Donald Trump and his father for refusing to rent apartments to Black families across 39 buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The government charged that Trump Management refused to rent to people “because of race and color,” required different rental terms based on race, and misrepresented to Black families that apartments weren’t available.

Trump’s response to the federal civil rights lawsuit?

“They are absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated, and we never would.”

He settled without admitting wrongdoing, paid no fine, and faced no requirement to prove his innocence. The discrimination lawsuit — backed by DOJ lawyers, civil rights investigators, and documented evidence — simply went away.

Fifty-two years later, President Trump demands that minority contractors prove they’ve been discriminated against, using evidence they cannot access, or lose their ability to compete for federal contracts.

The double standard is the point: Discrimination you can deny, even with the Justice Department’s lawyers and evidence arrayed against you. Oppression you must document in triplicate, with impossible proof, or lose everything.

The timing couldn’t be worse for St. Louis. Lambert is planning a $2.8 billion terminal renovation — the largest construction project in the region in decades. From 2015 to 2019, the airport reported 28. percent participation by disadvantaged businesses under the old program. Those billions in contracts represented real wealth-building in communities systematically excluded from economic opportunity.

Now the rules change just as the money arrives. Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis City NAACP, had this to say to the Post-Dispatch:

“By shifting the burden of proof onto minority and disadvantaged business owners with these deeply subjective requirements, the federal government risks reviving old discriminatory barriers under the guise of ‘neutrality.’”

That word — neutrality — is a lie. In an unequal system built on centuries of exclusion, “neutrality” isn’t neutral. It freezes existing disparities in place. It has nothing to do with merit; it’s about returning to the days when white, male contractors got pretty much all the business.

The Lambert changes are part of a coordinated national assault on diversity programs. On his first day in office, Trump displayed his contempt for the civil rights movement of the 1960s by revoking the 1965 executive order requiring federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans.

In May, the DoJ moved to dismantle the entire $37 billion Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program serving 49,000 contractors nationwide. All federal DEI staff have been placed on leave for eventual termination.

It cannot be overstated that the DBE program itself was created in 1983 during the Reagan administration. Republicans who go along with Trump’s treachery might want to keep Reagan’s name out of their mouths.

Reagan did, after all, sign off on a bipartisan acknowledgment that discrimination in contracting was real and required remedy. Federal officials estimate the new rules will cause a 10 percent nationwide drop in certified firms and cost $92 million to implement. But those numbers vastly understate the impact.

This follows the blueprint laid out in Project 2025, which explicitly called for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” with DEI programs.

As John Bowman, president of NAACP St. Louis County and an airport commissioner, aptly told the Post-Dispatch, the “political scapegoating … will have a devastating impact on minority and women-owned businesses.” Which, of course, was Project 2025’s dream outcome.

The contractors at Lambert aren’t asking for handouts. They’re asking for what the DBE program was designed to provide: a fair shot at competing for publicly funded work after decades of documented exclusion. Now they’re being told to prove they deserved that shot all along—to produce evidence of their own oppression as a prerequisite for economic participation.

This answers a fundamental question about who gets to build America’s infrastructure — and who gets built out of the American dream entirely. The man who said “we never have discriminated, and we never would” — while the Justice Department documented otherwise — now demands minority contractors prove their discrimination with evidence he never had to produce.

Say this much for Donald Trump. When it comes to settling old grievances about getting busted for racism, he has a fine memory.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.

This GOP gov's National Guard ploy is an absolute scam — but ICE horrors are all too real

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe made headlines this week by “activating” the National Guard to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The detail buried in most stories: He deployed just 15 people.

If the news landed in your inboxes, you might have been drawn in like this:

“Missouri Gov. Kehoe activates National Guard to assist ICE agents”

Or this:

“Missouri ‘authorizes’ National Guard to assist ICE’s deportations statewide”

Or this:

“Gov. Kehoe authorizes Missouri National Guard to assist in ICE enforcement.”

Bet you didn’t know from those headlines that this bold initiative involved 15 men and women in a state of 6.24 million people. Bet also you didn’t know that these poor folks will be assisting ICE’s creepy crackdown from the comfort of desks at undisclosed locations.

Far be it from me to minimize the potential impact of such an operation. I mean, dispatching 0.00024 percent of our population to work desk jobs is not nothing in the fight against crime.

At that rate, St. Louis County would qualify for two people. The city of St. Louis might proportionately receive three‑fifths of a person, in keeping with the prevailing thought patterns of many of our state legislators.

But let’s not diminish this bold commitment on the part of our governor. It was such a profound announcement that the media was captivated to the point of forgetting to ask some basic questions — or at least forgot to report the answers in all the excitement.

Such as these:

What exactly will these 15 guardsmen be doing? Are they answering phones? Filing documents? Processing detainee records? Is this top‑secret law‑enforcement support, or an upgrade to the ICE employee lunchroom?
Do they have security clearance to access ICE systems? These are federal databases containing immigration records, legal casework and sensitive personal information. If no clearance is needed, why not?
What training — if any — did these guardsmen receive to do ICE work? Clerical support in a federal law‑enforcement agency isn’t just about typing fast. It involves complex processes, legal standards and chain‑of‑custody rules.
How does pushing paper actually “free up” ICE field agents? In almost all law‑enforcement agencies, a clear distinction exists between personnel behind desks and those risking their lives in the field. Are we to believe that the guys wearing masks, kicking down doors and hauling off suspects also change printer cartridges in their spare time?
Where, exactly, are these guardsmen being stationed? Which ICE offices? For how long? Who’s supervising them? Who requested them? And who benefits from their presence?

These questions answer themselves. The security clearances alone take months. Desk work doesn’t free up field agents. But here’s what does work for scoring cheap political points: a press release. And nothing more.

From the standpoint of millions of immigrants — legal or otherwise — the United States is functioning as a dictatorship. Racial and ethnic profiling of citizens and non‑citizens alike (many of the latter being here legally) has been sanctioned by the Supreme Court.

Most of us don’t experience that terror personally. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerously un-American.

Donald Trump and soulless minions like Deputy Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller gleefully terrorize America’s immigrant community by the hour. Like Kehoe’s frivolous announcement, this filthy enterprise rages on a foundation of lies.

According to recent data, about 65 percent of people booked into ICE detention have no criminal convictions whatsoever. More than 93 percent have no violent convictions. The agents supposedly “freed up” by these 15 guardsmen in Missouri are being dispatched to raid workplaces and homes to arrest individuals whose only violation is a civil immigration matter.

But the evidence shows this campaign isn’t just cruel — it’s catastrophically counterproductive. The Peterson Institute for International Economics projects that if 8.3 million undocumented immigrants are deported, GDP will fall 7.4 percent by 2028. When 500,000 undocumented workers were deported through the Secure Communities program, the result wasn’t more jobs for Americans — it was 44,000 fewer jobs held by U.S.-born workers.

Back in Missouri, 15 guardsmen will shuffle papers they’re not trained to process, potentially accessing systems they’re not cleared for, supposedly freeing field agents who do entirely different work.

None of this matters to Kehoe. The fraud isn’t a bug — it’s the feature. He’s not protecting Missourians’ safety. He’s protecting his own political standing, giving his base red meat while economists warn this policy will devastate the economy and cost American workers their jobs.

Fifteen Guardsmen. That’s what protecting politicians looks like.

Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.

This Republican may blow up her life's work — just to please Trump

As many of you know, I ran last year for Congress against Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), and lost. I have no plans to run again.

As regular readers know, I’ve hardly mentioned her since starting this Soapbox almost four months ago. She’s largely irrelevant.

But the upcoming bombshell decision facing the U.S. House of Representatives about whether to release the Jeffrey Epstein files is a test of Wagner’s fundamental integrity unlike any other she has faced in her years in Congress. And it is upon us.

Wagner has had one signature issue in her career — standing up, she claims, for the plight of women who are victims of sex trafficking. When I say it’s her one signature issue, let me add: whatever comes in second place isn’t even close.

The issue didn’t come up when I ran against her, because there was nothing to argue about. For years, she has spoken loudly and repeatedly and elegantly on behalf of the need to have better protection for sex-abuse victims, and particularly for those who have been trafficked.

Good for her. I never questioned her righteousness nor her sincerity on this point and there were plenty of other issues for me to campaign on, none of which needs to be rehashed here.

But the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is the definitive sex-trafficking story of our time, and maybe of all time. What this pervert did, who he did it with, how, when and why — and the ongoing coverup of his trail of evidence by Donald Trump — is about as major as news stories get.

As best as I can tell, Wagner, the self-proclaimed champion of trafficked women, has never once spoken Epstein’s name publicly — despite the fact that he used his power and privilege to traffic and abuse hundreds, if not thousands, of young girls.

Wagner faces a vote that is tough for her fellow Republicans — but should be a slam-dunk for her — which is whether to require the Justice Department “to release all the files related to Epstein’s case, including information related to his clients and close circle,” as reported today at The Hill.

The Trump White House, dropping any pretense of true innocence, has gone full-authoritarian with its own Republican Party on this one.

“A White House official commented on the discharge petition Tuesday night, saying that supporting it would be viewed as ‘a hostile act,’” NBC News reported.

Really? Releasing all the Epstein files — in accordance with Trump’s repeated pledges on the campaign trail to do just that — is now a hostile act. Those are pretty strong words.

Wagner’s vote, whenever it happens, will present a rare binary choice. So would her refusal to follow the leads of fellow Republican Reps. Thomas Massie (the disclosure bill’s co-sponsor), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert in the event Trump’s lapdog House Speaker Mike Johnson manages to kill it.

Here’s the choice:

Wagner votes “yes” for full disclosure of the Epstein files, proving she is a woman of integrity and cares about sex-trafficking victims, as she has claimed for at least a decade

Wagner votes “no” or even fails to vote “yes” as a participant in Trump’s coverup, in which “integrity” and “Ann Wagner” should never be mentioned in the same sentence again.

You didn’t hear me talk like that during the campaign, because nothing had occurred in her record for me to question her personal character. This would be it.

If Wagner fails to stand with Epstein’s sex-trafficking victims — and with the basic principle of accountability for sex traffickers — then she at least should do the world a favor and renounce the following that she either sponsored or cosponsored:

FOSTA – Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act
Bill: H.R. 1865 (115th Congress)
Role: Primary sponsor (authored)
Summary: Amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove immunity protections for websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking, enabling civil and criminal liability. Passed the House 388–25 (Feb 2018), Senate 97–2 (Mar 2018), and signed into law April 11, 2018 as part of the broader FOSTA‑SESTA package.

SAVE Act – Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation Act
Bill: H.R. 4225 (113th Congress, 2014) & H.R. 285 (114th Congress, 2015)
Role: Primary sponsor
Summary: Made it a federal crime to knowingly advertise commercial sex acts involving trafficking victims, particularly minors or coerced adults. Passed the House 392–19; ultimately incorporated into the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA) of 2015.
Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA)
Bill: S. 178 (114th Congress, 2015)
Role: Key House co-sponsor and advocate; included Wagner’s SAVE Act provisions
Summary: A wide-ranging bipartisan anti-trafficking law that enhanced law enforcement tools, increased restitution, funded services for survivors, and strengthened training across federal agencies. Incorporates multiple bills, including the SAVE Act, and was signed into law on May 29, 2015.
Trafficking Survivors Relief Act
Bills: Multiple versions — H.R. 6292 (114th), H.R. 459 (115th), H.R. 3627 (116th), H.R. 8672 (117th), H.R. 7137 (118th Congress, 2024), and reintroduced in H.R. 1379 (119th Congress, 2025)
Role: Original sponsor or cosponsor in multiple sessions
Summary: Provides post-conviction relief—such as vacating convictions, expunging arrests, sentencing mitigation, and affirmative defenses—for survivors of human trafficking who committed non-violent crimes as a direct result of their victimization. Versions reported in the House and supported across party lines.

For cynics who might think Wagner believes Trump is entitled to some special exemption on the subject of sexual exploitation of women, I would direct them to her public comments on October 9, 2016 — in the wake of the release of the infamous Access Hollywood Tapes — in which she most clearly stated he was not. In fact, she felt so passionately about sexual exploitation of women, that she made this public statement:

"I have committed my short time in Congress to fighting for the most vulnerable in our society. As a strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault, I must be true to those survivors and myself and condemn the predatory and reprehensible comments of Donald Trump. I withdraw my endorsement and call for Governor [Mike] Pence to take the lead so we can defeat Hillary Clinton."

It took Wagner less than three weeks in 2016 to decide that Trump wasn’t such a bad predator, after all. Or maybe that she didn’t need to be that true to victims of sex trafficking and assault.

Today, the “strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault” has another opportunity to show that she means what she has been saying all these years.

What’s it going to be, Ann Wagner, when it comes to your chance to stand up and make a politically difficult statement on behalf of those victims? Even at the risk of seeming “very hostile” to Trump?

It is her moment of truth.

This rare Republican can't avoid being crushed — by her own party

They partied like it was 1999 in Gov. Mike Kehoe’s office this week.

Kehoe unveiled Catherine Hanaway as Missouri’s new attorney general at a news conference Tuesday in his office. Hanaway represents a major upgrade over Andrew Bailey — who was called by Donald Trump to bring his thuggery to the FBI.

Being better than Bailey is lower than any limbo bar in the world. Hanaway is a normal person with the intellect, character and résumé for the AG job. Bailey is the polar opposite in all four respects.

Hanaway is what’s known as a “normal Republican.” She also is a hard-right social conservative — especially on women’s reproductive freedom — to a degree that almost guarantees she won’t be loved in her new job by anyone to the left of Attila the Hun.

Bailey, on the other hand, is a MAGA Republican to his venomous core. And herein lies the real uncertainty about Hanaway’s path ahead.

Catherine Hanaway is most definitely a RINO in the minds of Trump’s MAGA base. That’s not my definition; it’s theirs. The point’s not even debatable.

Watching the video of Hanaway’s introductory press conference, one could easily imagine Republicans were back in 1999 or thereabouts, when Hanaway was a freshman Republican state legislator. Kehoe was in Jefferson City as well at that time, as the owner of a prominent car dealership.

Everything said Tuesday was just normal GOP fare from the previous century. Hanaway would lead with her proven toughness on crime, she’d be pro-life, she’d advance “conservative values,” she’d draw upon her proud rural roots, and she’d protect individual rights.

But the event was far more notable for what wasn’t said. That would be anything that might soothe the psycho psyches of deep red MAGA world.

There was not a single reference to the scourge of the illegal-immigrant invasion, nor sanctuary cities, nor the need for the state to cooperate with ICE. There wasn’t a single reference to supposed genital mutilation of kids, for which Bailey slandered Washington University while Hanaway sat on its Board of Trustees.

There was no talk about the need to end habeas corpus or to increase the use of National Guardsmen and even federal troops to fight crime in Missouri. Hanaway even referenced St. Louis positively without the obligatory “Democrat-run” MAGA qualification.

Asked if Trump had been consulted or otherwise had input into Hanaway’s selection, Kehoe answered with a most abrupt — and I’d say telling — firm “no.” These folks better hope video of this doesn’t get shown on the walls of Stephen Miller’s vampire cave.

Here’s the problem for Hanaway and Kehoe: MAGA didn’t die this week. And it’s not going away anytime soon in the state of Missouri.

Left to her own devices, Hanaway might perform as a solid prosecutor like she did in St. Louis as U.S. Attorney, but with deference to the political winds that blow harder through her office in Jefferson City. She’d focus on the job, with the aforementioned right-leaning politics.

But Hanaway’s not going to be left to her own devices. Not as long as Trump is president.

Trump’s ceaseless and sustained assault on democratic institutions offends the instinctive sensibilities of real Republicans almost as much as it does those on the Democratic side. Real Republicans pride themselves as the party of states’ rights and less government and more privacy — and while they haven’t lived up to that much — it’s quite another thing for RINOs to embrace full authoritarian control.

On the other hand, we’ve seen what’s happened with Hanaway’s good friend, Rep. Ann Wagner, who quite literally sold her political soul — who cares about the Epstein files and all this talk about sex trafficking stuff? — in full subservience to the rule of Trump.

It’s not a question of whether Hanaway will be called upon to sacrifice her core beliefs — just as Kehoe is preparing to do now on Trump’s gerrymandering demands — it’s a question of when.

Whether that manifests itself in endless, feed-the-base frivolous partisan lawsuits at taxpayer expense like Bailey did — or whether it might involve something more deadly and serious — a MAGA reckoning will be coming for Hanaway.

As a citizen and as someone whose early career was privileged to feature working for the wonderful Kit Bond — mine when he was governor, hers as a young Senate aide — I truly wish Hanaway well. For all our sakes.

But I wouldn’t bet against the power of Trump and MAGA in Missouri. Horrific times lie ahead.

These aren’t the good old days

New Trump henchman's disastrous record would make a North Korean general blush

Andrew Bailey, Missouri hardly knew ye.

But what we saw of ye was plenty more than enough.

One of the most nakedly partisan attorneys general in Missouri history, Bailey has been tapped by President Donald Trump to become his quasi–number two man at the FBI. Bailey snagged his career vault solely by politicizing the power of his state law-enforcement office in Trump’s name.

Meanwhile, Governor Mike Kehoe announced today that former GOP House Speaker Catherine Hanaway — the only woman to hold that post — is his choice to replace Bailey as attorney general. That’s unlikely to sit well with many in MAGA world, a subject for later in this space.

For now, as I documented here, Bailey served a constituency of one and it paid off handsomely — one adoring, taxpayer-funded Trump press release at a time. Bailey didn’t limit himself to following the MAGA playbook like others at his craft; his degree of obsequiousness to Trump was enough to make a North Korean general blush.

Bailey’s rise is a cautionary tale. He succeeded not only because he advanced Trump’s agenda, but because of how he went about the task.

His was not a triumph of right-wing ideology. It was of style points, groveling, ruthless ambition, and a willingness to get down and dirty.

Bailey took a back seat to no one as a toady for Trump during the 2024 election campaign. That meant paying homage in a big way to the Big Lie that Trump was somehow robbed in 2020.

“The left stole that election by changing the rules of the game at the 11th hour. They’re going to try to steal this one by silencing our voices on big tech social media platforms, by stifling us in the mainstream media and by packing the polling places with criminal illegal aliens that shouldn’t be here in the first place.” — Bailey, May 14, 2024 debate in Springfield, MO

Most Republicans survived by nodding their heads at the falsehood needed to soothe Trump’s mental trauma over losing to President Joe Biden in 2020. Not Bailey. He went all in on the lie — and I suppose garnered some style points with that whole “packing the polling places with criminal aliens” sequel, which you didn’t hear every day.

Holding fast to the Big Lie wasn’t unusual. Doubling down with zeal four years later was quite another thing.

But Bailey goes big, just the way Trump likes it. When he attacked trans people as attorney general, he didn’t just check off a box — he went all in with the declaration that virtually all trans care was “an unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful practice” for “any person or health organization” to perpetrate.

Bailey didn’t even limit that dripping bigotry to kids. He tried to include adults as well — not for any decent reason, but to get himself lambasted by the nationally respected Human Rights Campaign. Think Trump doesn’t go for that sort of thing?

It’s the pattern that Bailey followed throughout his tenure in office. He wasn’t satisfied to use the power of his office to attack DEI wherever he could detect it as some horrible virus.

Instead, Bailey would do things like falsely blame the Hazelwood School District’s DEI program for the off-campus assault of a student. When proven wrong, Bailey must have been smiling broadly to become the focus of a formal complaint about the behavior of his office.

He recused himself from a gambling lawsuit filed against the Missouri State Highway Patrol after PACs connected to the lobbyist of the companies suing the state wrote thousands in checks to the committee supporting his campaign, the Missouri Independent reported. Trump likes that sort of thing.

It was not his only brush with campaign violations. And Bailey was blasted by Clay County Judge Karen Krauser, who ordered Bailey to sit for a deposition after it was discovered he and a deputy met with a member of the Jackson County Legislature without the knowledge of the county’s attorneys. The county was a defendant.

Do you think Trump minds that he crossed the line with a judge?

Bailey has resisted releasing individuals whose convictions were overturned, even when new evidence supported their innocence. In the case of Sandra Hemme, a judge threatened to hold Bailey in contempt for instructing prison officials not to release a woman whose conviction had been overturned after she served 43 years.

If there’s any mitigating circumstance to Bailey’s tenure as attorney general, it’s that he’s not a good lawyer. In one of his first and most important cases, Bailey attempted to thwart the will of the people to keep off the ballot the 2024 constitutional amendment that eventually reinstated women’s right to an abortion.

That wasn’t remarkable. Bailey was expected by Republicans to fight the measure. They might not have expected his 6-0 thrashing before a moderately conservative Missouri Supreme Court.

Legal observers point to the astonishing number of losses he’s piled up. From mask mandates to social media censorship to his toxic emergency order declaring gender-affirming care as “experimental,” the list goes on.

But the point for Bailey was never about winning cases. It was about winning attention from the MAGA base and, above all else, Trump himself.

Just because a guy isn’t good at trying cases doesn’t mean he can’t be good at that.

Besides, Bailey is off to a new job as one of the very top officials of the FBI, the most important law-enforcement agency in the world. There, he won’t need to worry about trying cases — or losing them.

In fact, how he did in his previous work won’t matter at all. Although he had a fine career in military service, Bailey comes to the FBI with zero experience at the FBI or any police agency like it.

Zero. Unlike all the 38,000 men and women who serve today at the FBI. What could go wrong with any of that?

Nothing, apparently, if Andrew Bailey does what he does best.

Which is to keep Donald Trump happy.