All posts tagged "missouri"

These Republicans just told on themselves with a familiar Washington magic trick

There is a familiar Washington magic trick, and Missouri’s U.S. senators perform it with unusual confidence: Spend years denouncing the bipartisan cult of stupid wars, then salute smartly when your own president lights the fuse.

Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt have both marketed themselves as realists, skeptics of permanent intervention and the old foreign-policy catechism. Hawley said in 2019 that the point of American foreign policy is “not to remake the world,” and in 2023 said flatly that “regime change didn’t work.” Schmitt built a parallel brand in softer packaging, attacking the “failed Washington way” on foreign policy, repeatedly calling Donald Trump the “peace president” and insisting he did not want “a forever war in the Middle East.”

And then came Iran, the moment when rhetoric had to cash out and both men opposed the effort to reassert congressional authority over war powers.

Hawley — who had earlier said it would be “a whole different matter” for the United States to affirmatively strike Iran and that he would be “real concerned” by that prospect — found a way to make his peace with it once it was Trump making the call. He defended Trump’s actions as lawful so long as no ground troops were involved.

Schmitt, who had spent months selling Trump’s foreign policy in the language of restraint, landed in the same place. Suddenly the old concerns about executive overreach, strategic drift and another Middle East trap looked less like convictions than talking points with expiration dates.

That is the tell. Politicians change their minds all the time. Hawley and Schmitt change in one direction only: toward Trump.

Hawley ran the same play on Medicaid cuts, warning they would hurt Missouri’s rural hospitals and the people who depend on them. The warning was real enough. Then came the vote, and there he was, backing the bill anyway. Later he moved to soften or undo parts of what he had just supported, which is another neat bit of Washington stagecraft: denounce the harm, help cause the harm, then reappear as the man racing in with a bucket of water.

Schmitt’s contradictions are less theatrical than Hawley’s, but no less revealing. Last year he demanded the Epstein files be released — “Hell yeah. Open it up. Release the Epstein files” — then grew markedly more careful once Trump was back in office, saying only that he was “curious” and would support releasing whatever “credible information” might be there.

A self-proclaimed free speech warrior as Missouri’s attorney general, he seemed perfectly comfortable last year when government pressure bore down on late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel after a joke about the late conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk.

That is the through line with Hawley and Schmitt: every principle has an escape hatch. They are against regime change until their president bombs Iran. Against Medicaid cuts until leadership needs the vote. Against censorship until they do not like what is being said.

What Hawley and Schmitt understand, maybe better than most, is that modern political branding rewards the appearance of rebellion almost as much as rebellion itself.

You do not have to resist the machinery. You only have to speak as if you might. You can sneer at the old consensus, campaign against the old order, strike the pose of the insurgent — and then, when the moment comes, vote like a company man.

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.

A tragic cop killing revealed something especially chilling about this MAGA mover

Josh Hawley had me going.

When I first saw his tweet last Wednesday after two sheriff’s deputies were murdered near Springfield, Missouri, I thought we were in for another attack on the horrors of the political Left. Here’s what Hawley said:

“Two heroic deputies in my home state of Missouri were senselessly murdered by a thug with a long history of violence toward law enforcement. We need accountability for these soft-on-crime policies destroying our communities.”

Then, a few questions popped to mind.

What soft-on-crime policies?
Whose policies?
And who’s getting held accountable by whom?

In case you haven’t been following Missouri politics, it’s quite the red, pro-MAGA state. Christian County, where this tragedy occurred, voted 76 percent in 2024 for Donald Trump. Hawley had a stint in 2017-18 as the state’s drive-by attorney general as he climbed the political ladder to his current seat in the U.S. Senate.

That begs the question of who owns the soft-on-crime policies alleged, without provocation, by Hawley.

On Friday, the shattered community of Christian County paid a richly deserved tribute to fallen heroes, Gabriel Ramirez and Michael Hislope, who were murdered protecting the people there. Both were murdered by Richard Dean Bird, a decades-long criminal who was killed in a standoff with law enforcement.

You won’t be hearing much about Bird, which is fine: He doesn’t deserve the attention. But if he hadn’t fit the most common profile of murderers in the U.S. — white, poor, male — you better believe that Hawley and others of his ilk would have made him a household name by now.

Can you imagine, in this environment, had Richard Dean Bird been an undocumented immigrant? Or worse yet, from Somalia or Latin America?

Instead, the main interest in Bird is why he was released from custody just the week before he killed two cops, on $50,000 bond after having been arrested on charges of second-degree burglary, unlawful possession of a firearm, and stealing. This is a man who had a miles-long rap sheet of convictions dating back to 2003 and had served seven years in Kansas state prison for battery against a law enforcement officer and fleeing police after firing a rifle at a deputy in 2014 in the Johnson County suburb of Kansas City.

Bird was granted bond by Judge Eric Chavez, a Republican who was elected to the Stone County bench in 2022. From all appearances, Chavez is a veteran of the local legal community who was likely following the bond laws as shaped by statutes passed by the Republican-led General Assembly and interpreted by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019.

Chavez hasn’t been excoriated personally as “soft on crime” by Hawley or other Republicans. Nor should he be. But what do you suppose the story would have been if Chavez were a Democrat?

In that event, Hawley would have made certain that liberal Democrats owned the deputies’ deaths. And he would have laid the bond rules that allowed for Bird’s release at their doorsteps as well.

Inconveniently, those revised bond procedures were a matter of interest in the period Hawley was attorney general. Months after he left office, the state Supreme Court finalized Rule 33.01, which established release conditions that apparently made the granting of bond to Bird legally defensible.

That’s above my pay grade, but this isn’t: If those rules are now “soft,” Hawley had the loudest law-enforcement microphone in the state while they were being considered. Good luck finding a record of any tough-on-crime position he staked out at the time.

(Then again, Hawley apparently doesn’t have the sharpest recollection of Missouri these days. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Fox Digital reported that Hawley described Christian County as “my home county” in a statement. Christian County is a three-hour drive to Lafayette County, where Hawley grew up in Lexington.)

The murders of Ramirez and Hislope should bridge any partisan divide as a tragedy that turns all stomachs. But Hawley chose the moment to make a cheap political point with his irrational “soft on crime” reference.

It’s of no solace that, in so doing, Hawley executed a remarkable self-own by calling out “policies” from his own watch — and administered by his own political party.

If Hawley wants accountability, he should start with a mirror.

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This unscrupulous Trumper's involvement in the Georgia elections raid should worry us all

When the FBI carried out its controversial raid last month at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, it was already guaranteed to inflame partisan tensions.

What made the episode more striking was the presence of Andrew Bailey.

The former Missouri attorney general is now co-deputy director of the FBI. He traveled to Georgia to oversee an operation tied to claims about the 2020 election that have been repeatedly debunked and exhaustively litigated.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He lost Georgia. The state conducted three statewide counts, including a hand recount, and still certified Joe Biden’s victory. Some Trump allies who made sweeping fraud claims about Georgia have since recanted, often under oath or under legal pressure. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani lost a defamation lawsuit for spreading those false claims.

For Missourians, Bailey’s involvement in Georgia is its own warning sign.

His political rise hasn’t been built on careful management or restrained lawyering. It has been driven by media visibility, aggressive rhetoric and a willingness to validate Trump’s preferred narrative — regardless of the record.

During his short tenure as Missouri attorney general, Bailey made election denial rhetoric a central feature of his political identity. After winning a full term in 2024, he hoped his loyalty would land him a new job in Washington as FBI director or U.S. attorney general.

According to multiple media reports, Trump was not impressed. Bailey did not receive either post.

He ultimately left Missouri last year after being tapped as co-deputy director of the FBI, a role that has historically been held by one person and involves managing the bureau’s day-to-day operations.

His fellow co-deputy director, Dan Bongino, later stepped down to return to podcasting. Instead of elevating Bailey into the traditional singular role, the Trump administration hired the former head of the FBI’s New York Field Office to replace Bongino.

Those who watched Bailey run the attorney general’s office weren’t surprised by the decision not to elevate him.

Bailey’s tenure in Missouri drew criticism over missed deadlines, bungled appeals and settlements that reflected disorganization rather than strategy. Under his watch, Missouri paid out record-breaking sums in settlements and judgments, including one settlement that committed taxpayers to annual payments stretching into the year 2098.

He also narrowly avoided being questioned under oath over an alleged ethics breach in his own lawsuit against Jackson County. A judge ordered his deposition, but Bailey moved to dismiss the lawsuit before it could take place. One of his deputies lost his law license in the ordeal.

Controversies accumulated. Bailey’s office missed an appeal deadline in a high-profile COVID mask mandate case. He falsely blamed a school district’s DEI program for an off-campus assault. He recused himself from a gambling lawsuit after political committees tied to gambling lobbyists donated to a PAC supporting his campaign. He accepted $50,000 from a company accused of poisoning a Peruvian town and later asked a court to move the case out of Missouri.

Which brings us back to Georgia.

Bailey’s presence at the Fulton County raid was not just a management detail. It was a signal about the kind of leadership now shaping the FBI and about how quickly the bureau’s credibility can be subordinated to political priorities.

Missouri has already seen what Bailey does when he’s in charge. The FBI is now taking its turn.

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 red state Republicans just stabbed their voters in the back

On Wednesday night, the U.S. House delivered a stinging, bipartisan rebuke to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda, voting 219-211 to rescind the “fentanyl emergency” tariffs on Canadian imports.

Six Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Don Bacon (R-NE), Kevin Kiley (R-CA), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and Jeff Hurd (R-CO) — joined every Democrat but one to pass the resolution. It was a historic moment: the first time Trump’s own House has formally voted to terminate a national emergency used to justify tariffs.

Missouri Republicans decided keeping the president happy is their top priority. Politically, that’s easily rationalized. This was a symbolic vote unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, and it’s never getting signed by Trump.

Reps. Ann Wagner, Jason Smith, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, and Sam Graves all voted to maintain the 35 percent duties — despite a wall of evidence that these tariffs are bleeding their own constituents. Under a normal president, even one of their own party, these Republicans would have instinctively thrown down for the interests of their voters.

But we don’t have a normal president. It’s a solid indication of how partisanship literally trumps pocketbooks in congressional districts where incumbents feel safe.

The economic reality was laid bare just hours before Wednesday's vote. The Tax Foundation confirmed that Trump’s tariffs represent the largest U.S. tax increase as a percent of GDP since 1993.

For the average American household, this hidden tax cost $1,000 in 2025 and is projected to climb to $1,500 in 2026. The same analysis found the tariffs will offset most of the economic gains from Trump’s own tax cuts.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, in its flagship outlook released on Thursday morning, revised inflation projections higher for the next three years, citing direct upward pressure from these duties.

This isn’t an abstract dispute. Canada is Missouri’s largest trading partner, its auto and aerospace supply chains running directly through the northern border.

By voting to uphold these levies, the Missouri GOP bucked the very business groups they once regarded as sacrosanct — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Soybean Association — all of which have publicly opposed these tariffs.

For Wagner, the choice was binary: stand with the president, or side with the West County exporters, homebuilders, and manufacturers she claims to represent. She chose the president.

A majority of Americans oppose the tariffs. A January New York Times/Siena poll found 54 percent of voters want them gone. A Marist survey released last week put the number at 56 percent.

When Americans are told that Canadian tariffs could raise gas prices 30 to 70 cents per gallon, half of Trump’s own supporters flip to opposition.

Minutes before the vote closed, Trump posted on Truth Social:

Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!

Six Republicans heard that threat and voted their conscience anyway.

Missouri’s delegation heard it and fell in line.

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Red state AG's sociopathic nonsense is a threat to us all

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has filed a lawsuit seeking to require the Census Bureau to “redo” the $14 billion 2020 Census to exclude the persons she doesn’t consider persons. The U.S. Constitution requires that every 10 years “the whole number of persons in each state” be counted for the purpose of apportioning representatives.

Hanaway’s press release brags that her “first-in-the-nation suit” is “the most significant election lawsuit in a generation.” Indeed, her attempt to dilute the voting power of those in states with large minority populations (which tend to be blue, but also include Texas and Florida) is groundbreaking in its disregard of constitutional text and history. Since the first census in 1790, we have always counted non-citizens.

At both the founding of the nation and the adoption of the 14th Amendment, women like myself and Hanaway did not enjoy the rights of citizenship. But we were counted in the census anyway.

To this day, we do not let children vote, but we still count them. Because children are part of the population. The point of the census is to count the population.

Neither authorized nor unauthorized migrants can vote, but we need to know how many of them live here so we can allocate representation and resources.

There is one group of people who were not always counted as whole persons for purposes of apportioning representation. Hanaway’s attempt to evade that history is chilling. Her lawsuit correctly notes that the 14th Amendment states: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

Then her filing goes on to assert: “this same rule — expressed with materially identical text — also governed when the Constitution was first ratified.”

“Materially identical” leaves me at a loss for printable words.

When the Constitution was ratified, the text laid out that enslaved persons would only count as three fifths of a person for apportionment purposes. The 14th Amendment invalidated that horrifically racist provision. It got rid of the rule that only free persons and indentured servants be fully counted. This is the opposite of “identical.” But Hanaway and five other lawyers signed their names to this sociopathically revisionist nonsense.

Hanaway, presumably not wanting to beat up on the founders or the framers of the 14th Amendment, tries to re-write history to say we only started counting non-citizens in the census during the Carter administration.

Her claims are also incompatible with the constitution’s text. There is a word the framers used instead of “person” when they intended to limit something to citizens. That word is “citizen.” Courts have long recognized that the word “person,” for example as used in the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process, grants rights to undocumented persons.

It’s good for the census to get a full count of who lives in the country, even if they are visa holders or undocumented. I also think it’s good to apportion representation and federal funding accordingly. You can disagree with me on this as a policy matter. But if you do, your beef is with the framers, so your only remedy is to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Constitutional text and history doesn’t get more explicit than this.

The requirements of the constitution aside, counting everyone in the census is also the right thing to do for moral and contractual reasons. Immigrants are persons who live in our states. Even those without legal status came at our invitation.

This country wanted undocumented workers’ low-paid labor. We gave them tax-ID numbers so they could pay taxes. We encouraged them to build lives and families here for decades. We built industries and got all our food on their backs. But we gave them no path to citizenship.

Hanaway filed her lawsuit at a moment when people are being grabbed off the street in Minnesota and across the country by masked ICE agents who have been detaining anybody who looks non-white. Hanaway’s suit was filed after multiple people trying to document or stop this have been shot by ICE agents, two of them fatally.

Hanaway’s lawsuit is ugly and unfounded. Even in these dark times for the rule of law and basic human decency, this gambit should fail and she should be judged for the attempt.

Bridgette Dunlap is a lawyer and writer living in St. Louis County. She has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, ReWire, Ms. and Slate. Bridgette wants Missouri to be a great place for her kids, and all kids, to grow up.

Head, meet desk: how one Republican posted GOP red-scare idiocy for everyone to see

When Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) found out that radical communists from California were trying to meddle with the critical gerrymandering efforts of Missouri Republicans, she sprang into action.

Wagner took to X — platform formerly known as Twitter — to let it be known that she wasn’t about to stand for any of that. Here’s what she posted:

Now, that’s the kind of bold response we need more of in the country, by God. The last thing Missouri should stand for is to allow California puppets of George Soros to be pushing us around.

There was one small problem, however, with Wagner’s righteous indignation.

Just a detail.

It turns out that she had her Californians a little mixed up.

You see, the offensive post from the California Democrat was referencing a gathering of concerned citizens at the California City Hall Railroad Park right down there on 500 Oak Street in the fine little town of California, Missouri.

Population 4,458, nestled in beautiful Moniteau County, 24 miles west of Jefferson City.

As the great Gilda Radner’s legendary Saturday Night Live character Emily Litella would have said: “Never mind.”

In Wagner’s defense, both the state of California and the town of California, MO are indeed located to our west. The little town is about 140 miles from St. Louis County, conveniently on the way toward the West Coast.

And it turns out that California Democrat is the name of the hometown newspaper, not a political organization in Gavin Newsom’s west coast den of inequity.

That’s easily confused, isn’t it?

And who can blame Wagner for her outrage anyway? If I might really add fuel to the fire, it turns out that the Missouri citizens who gathered at the town railroad park were organized, at least in part, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Now, if I didn’t happen to be a past president of the ACLU chapter, let me tell you, I’d really go off on the danger posed by this sort of thing.

But Mr. Soros won’t permit me to do that.

In any event, kudos to HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery, who grabbed a screenshot of Wagner’s tweet.

For some reason, Wagner has since deleted it.

I don’t know why Wagner would memory-hole the thing.

California needs to butt out of our elections. Right, Emily?

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Red state GOP goes scorched earth in effort to silence voters

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.

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.

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.