ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
May 17, 2024
By The Editorial Board
During his short tenure as Missouri’s top legal official, Attorney General Andrew Bailey has consistently used (and abused) his office to promote an extremist right-wing partisan agenda with a brazenness unheard of even in Missouri politics.
Bailey, appointed to the office to fill a vacancy in January 2023, is seeking the Republican nomination in August to run for a full elected term in November.
In the interest of keeping the public informed about this uniquely problematic public official, the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board has launched this standing summary of Bailey’s more outrageous ideological stunts and abrogations of duty. We have dubbed it The Bailey Tally. It will be updated as needed.
Latest addition: Punting on Christian boarding school abuse
Activists have implored Bailey to use the prominence of his office to highlight alleged physical and sexual abuse of kids at Christian boarding schools — a historic problem in Missouri’s under-regulated private school system and one that critics say is still happening under the radar.
Bailey’s office responded with a generic public statement saying his office doesn’t have jurisdiction to unilaterally investigate “sexual abuse and human trafficking.”
As we noted in a May 17 editorial, Bailey’s entire 16-month tenure to that point had been spent largely in launching and promoting unilateral investigations and lawsuits regarding culture-war issues — including, specifically, a “trafficking” suit against Planned Parenthood based on a fictional girl concocted by a right-wing sting operation.
In fact, even as his office punted on the boarding-school issue, Bailey took to (where else?) Fox News that week to tout his crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants, saying he will “fill the vacuum created by the federal government’s ineptitude” on immigration.
Bailey’s reluctance to get involved in the boarding school debate comes on the heels of attempts by right-wing members of the Legislature in the last session to loosen the already-inadequate state oversight of those Christian facilities to prevent child abuse.
Defending slander on the taxpayers’ dime
In early May, Bailey announced his office would provide the legal defense (on the taxpayers’ dime) for hard-right Missouri state Sens. Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Nick Schroer, who were being sued for defamation by Denton Loudermill.
The senators shared and commented upon social media posts falsely implicating the Kansas man as being involved in the Feb. 14 mass shooting during the Kansas City Chief’s Super Bowl celebration.
The senators’ reposts of the false allegation included the (also false) claim that Loudermill was an illegal immigrant, and they used it to slam the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Bailey’s justification in court documents for demanding “absolute legislative immunity” for the trio was that state legislators “should not be inhibited by judicial interference or distorted by the fear of personal liability when they publicly speak on issues of national importance” — an obvious nod to the GOP’s current obsession with politicizing the immigration debate.
Among those who recognized how improper it is to use public resources like that was Gov. Mike Parson, a fellow Republican who appointed Bailey as attorney general last year.
“This gentleman (Loudermill) did nothing wrong whatsoever other than he went to a parade, and he drank beer and he was Hispanic,” said Parson. (Loudermill is actually Black.) “We’re just not going to attack citizens, in Missouri or anywhere else, just because we think we have the power to do such.”
Threatening a mayor over legal immigration
In mid-April, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas publicly invited legal migrants, with legal work permits, to come to work in his city, which was experiencing a building boom and labor shortage. Bailey, in a made-for-Fox News stunt, responded with a threatening letter to Lucas laced with dubious legal reasoning, partisan disinformation and a whiff of xenophobia.
Bailey’s letter (which the attorney general promptly, dutifully shared with Fox News) threatened unspecified “legal action” over Lucas’ comments. It quotes from statutes that make it illegal to transport undocumented migrants into Missouri or to employ them.
The letter acknowledges Lucas’ specification that he was talking about migrants who are “lawfully present, with lawful work permits.” But Bailey then dismisses that element as irrelevant because the federal government’s “open border programs are themselves illegal.”
In calling for the hiring of migrants with federally approved work permits, Bailey alleges, “you are actively encouraging Missouri businesses to become entangled in a fundamentally unlawful program.”
“Fundamentally unlawful” as decreed not by Congress or the courts, mind you, by one unelected official in one Midwestern state.
The race-baiting politicization of a tragic student fight
In late March, Bailey inserted his office into a tragic incident in which 16-year-old Kaylee Gain was critically injured by another girl in a horrific after-school fight near Hazelwood East High School that was captured on video.
Though Kaylee is white and her attacker as seen on the video is Black, it’s not at all clear that race was a factor. The bystander video shows it was part of a broader melee in which multiple students were fighting with one another.
Yet Bailey announced an “investigation” into the school’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for students of all races. It shamelessly politicized the girl’s life-threatening injuries in service to the political right’s obsession with stamping out DEI policies.
A real lawsuit over an imaginary girl
In February, Bailey filed a remarkable suit against Planned Parenthood alleging human trafficking. It’s based on a staged, heavily edited hidden-video sting in which the widely discredited right-wing activist group Project Veritas appears to get a Planned Parenthood employee to tell a man where he can take a pregnant girl out of state to get an abortion without parental permission.
The girl referenced in the video doesn’t actually exist. And the only alleged help from the Planned Parenthood employee is to provide information about abortion services, which the Missouri Supreme Court has long ruled is protected by the First Amendment.
In a social-media post announcing the suit, Bailey made clear the point, calling it “the culmination of a multi-year campaign to drive Planned Parenthood from the State of Missouri.”
Some creative math to undermine voters’ rights
In a brazen attempt to stall efforts to put an abortion rights referendum on the statewide ballot, Bailey last year refused to sign off on the state auditor’s modest official cost estimate of the measure, claiming instead it would cost the state billions of dollars in lost tax revenue from unborn Missourians.
The state Supreme Court unanimously threw out the case in a scathing finding that Bailey never had legal authority to even weigh on the question.
Bailey’s bizarre up-is-down argument on gun safety
Bailey last year filed suit attempting to derail a gun-safety referendum effort by claiming fewer guns on the streets would cost Missouri hundreds of millions of dollars in “increased crime costs.”
There is no reliable data backing that argument — though states with loose gun laws like Missouri’s generally do have significantly higher gun death rates than states like Illinois, that have stronger gun laws.
Siding with a convicted cop against a dead Black victim
In June 2023, Bailey’s office filed a highly unusual motion attempting to overturn the conviction of a white Kansas City police officer who’d been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a Black man in his own driveway. The motion cited no new evidence, but essentially just second-guessed the prosecution’s case.
The motion — from an attorney general’s office that normally is tasked with supporting criminal prosecutions on appeal — has been described as unprecedented, and infuriated local prosecutors who handled the case.
On orders from Elon Musk, Bailey goes after a media watchdog
In November, Bailey vowed to insert his office into a spat between Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and the liberal national media watchdog group Media Matters that exposed how the platform sometimes placed ads from major companies next to antisemitic tweets.
When Musk and others suggested, bizarrely, that the expose’ constituted criminal fraud, Bailey tweeted (even more bizarrely): “My team is looking into this matter.”
Bailey followed through in late March with a lawsuit against Media Matters for its commentary. The suit declares (without an ounce of irony or apparent self-awareness) that Twitter is “one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in America.”
Making life harder for trans Missourians is always good politics
Last year, Bailey created an emergency rule to effectively ban transgender hormone therapy not just for kids but also for adults. He withdrew it only after even his fellow Republicans deemed it too extreme.
Continuing his seeming obsession with making life harder for trans people, Bailey last year joined 18 other Republican attorneys general to challenge a proposed federal rule that would require states to ensure that foster parents who want to take in kids with sexual identity issues agree to relevant training and to respect the child’s preferred pronouns.
The challenge argued that would constitute infringement on foster families’ freedom of religion and speech — effectively seeking to turn abused kids into ideological fodder for the culture wars.
Public enemy No. 1: Underpaid teachers trying to do their jobs
In the first two months of 2024, Bailey twice made legal threats against the Webster Groves school district over separate issues that are of questionable importance — but likely to appeal to right-wing culture warriors.
In late January, he sent a cease-and-desist letter to district alleging it was teaching sex-education curriculum without providing the required opt-out opportunity for parents.
In February, he sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Webster Groves school district alleging that its general goal of hiring a more racially diverse teaching staff to reflect the diversity of its students is “discriminating on the basis of race in direct violation of both state and federal law.”
Gamblers, polluters, pot growers and other generous supporters
• As Missouri debates how to confront an unlicensed video gambling industry so brazen that it sued to prevent the Missouri Highway Patrol from seizing the illegal machines, Bailey has refused to take any action at all.
In fact, he wouldn’t even use his own office to defend the lawsuit — the very definition of his official duty — instead contracting it out to a private firm at the taxpayers’ expense. Bailey’s campaign has accepted more than $25,000 in donations from that unregulated industry or its lobbyists.
• A PAC supporting Bailey accepted a $50,000 campaign contribution from a New York-based LLC in September 2023. Just two months earlier, Bailey had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the LLC’s Missouri-based subsidiary in an environmental lawsuit stemming from the lead poisoning of children in Peru.
• Late last year, the co-owner of a marijuana company that was in the midst of a legal battle with state regulators — with Bailey’s office representing the state in that legal fight — hosted a political fundraiser in his Ladue home in support of Bailey.