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The Nation Learned What Missouri Has Known for Years about Eric Schmitt
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If Eric Schmitt is “all hat and no cattle,” this is what the hat looks like
This has not been a good month for Missouri Attorneys General.
First it was the current AG, Catherine Hanaway, and the fight over the gerrymandered map created by the GOP members of the Missouri Legislature. She got a conservative Missouri Supreme Court to systematically and quite thoroughly dismantle her arguments in a unanimous opinion, and then in three separate petitions to the US Supreme Court, had them repeat the beatdown three times with all the understated legal brutality you can pack into a brief per curiam opinion.
Then it was time for the AG that Hanaway was appointed to replace, Andrew Bailey. Bailey left the Missouri AG position to take on the co-deputy directorship of the FBI when it became obvious that the then-current deputy was incapable and rather uninterested in doing that job. Part of the enticement was that Kash Patel was on thin ice, and having Bailey in place would make it easy to elevate him to the top job when Trump tired of the problems created by Patel, which were piling up on DOJ head, Pam Bondi. Sadly for Bailey, while Bondi got the boot, Patel managed to weather the storm and hold his job, and Todd Blanche was elevated to take Bondi’s job. Yesterday, Bailey called it quits on his waiting game, and announced he was leaving the FBI and DC to (checks notes) spend more time with his family back in Missouri.
And today was Eric Schmitt’s turn.
Plenty of others have taken apart what happened in the Senate Judiciary committee in his confrontation with Jack Smith, so go read them for the accounts of that idiocy. Lots of folks expressed surprise at the mess, including Lawrence O’Donnell who put a lot of the fault on Schmitt’s senate staffers. You know who wasn’t surprised at this? Missourians. I’m sorry, Lawrence, but you can’t blame this on poor staff work or lazy staff work. This is who Eric Schmitt is, and has been for quite a while.
He wasn’t always like this. As Jason Hancock wrote in the Missouri Independent,
Schmitt won a seat in the state legislature in 2008 with 55% of the vote in the middle-class suburbs along Interstate 44. Over eight years, he built a conservative record that regularly involved working with Democrats.
He stood with Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon to push insurance coverage for autism treatment. He helped legalize CBD oil for people with intractable epilepsy, drawing on his son Stephen’s experience. After Ferguson, he championed legislation limiting municipalities’ reliance on traffic fines and court fees.
The AFL-CIO endorsed him in 2012.
In a 2014 video tour of the Missouri Senate chamber in Jefferson City, Schmitt said lawmakers’ different backgrounds and opinions made respect important, and that the room reminded him of the need for “a more civil tone in politics, now more than ever.”
Schmitt said he had been inspired by Jack Kemp to “take that conservative message outside of the Republican echo chamber.”
The goal wasn’t merely to beat people who disagreed with you. It was to persuade them.
Schmitt was term-limited out of the state senate in 2016, and was named Missouri’s AG by then-Governor Mike Parsons, to replace the former AG, Josh Hawley, who left for the US Senate after only two years as MO AG.
But a funny thing happened, when Schmitt moved to the AG office. He, like Hawley before him, began looking ahead at the upcoming Senate contest, and decided to seek to become the one to replace retiring GOP Senator Roy Blunt. That’s not the funny part – that’s bog-standard political ladder climbing. What was funny is that the pressures of the GOP primary began to change his approach to politics.
As one of his former conservative GOP colleagues in the MIssouri Senate described in an off-the-record conversation with a Jefferson City acquaintance, Schmitt discovered that whenever he announced an indictment against Democrats or liberals over things like mask requirements or discrimination against white people, his campaign began seeing a nice little bump in his campaign contributions. Then, he realized that if he announced that he would be seeking an indictment, the money would flow in. Then he discovered that if he simply announced he was opening an investigation, the money came in.
And one by one, his GOP primary opponents fell in the polls as Schmitt rose.
Gone was any effort to follow Kemp’s path to go “outside the Republican echo chamber.” Schmitt put himself in the center of the echo chamber, enthusiastically and with his eyes wide open, and started shouting.
When Schmitt headed to take his seat in the US Senate, he left behind him various ongoing legal cases, one of which I’ve discussed here at Emptywheel before:
In late 2021, Schmitt made a big deal about twisting a case in St. Louis county involving the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services into a precedent giving him the power to prohibit schools from enforcing any mask mandates. He sent cease and desist letters to school districts with such mandates, threatening a lawsuit if they did not rescind their policies. Some did just that, but others did not, including the Lee’s Summit Reorganized District #7 in the KC suburbs. Instead, the lawyer for the LSR7 district responded to Schmitt’s letter with one of his own, announcing their intention to file a countersuit, filing a huge shot across Schmitt’s bow.
The letter is a real gem, gutting Schmitt’s claims on numerous grounds. Most damning, from my point of view, was this from the end:
We don’t need to rely on just these general statutes to demonstrate the Attorney General’s lack of authority in this matter. Consider what the Legislature has authorized school districts to do in the face of a pandemic. Under RSMo. § 167.191:
It is unlawful for any child to attend any of the public schools of this state while afflicted with any contagious or infectious disease, or while liable to transmit such disease after having been exposed to it. For the purpose of determining the diseased condition, or the liability of transmitting the disease, the teacher or board of directors may require any child to be examined by a physician, and exclude the child from school so long as there is any liability of such disease being transmitted by the pupil.
This law speaks for itself. Not only may a school district exclude from school a child who has COVID; it may exclude from school a child who has been exposed to COVID and who is liable to transmit it pending a medical test or examination to confirm that the child is not afflicted with the disease.
In short, the duly elected Lee’s Summit R-7 Board of Education will not abandon its statutory duty to govern the operations of the school district. If you follow through on your threat to sue the District, we will defend that suit vigorously, and pursue all remedies available to the District resulting from any suit that violates Missouri Supreme Court Rule 55.03, which requires among other things that any claim “is not presented or maintained for any improper purpose” and that the claim “is warranted by existing law.”
Schmitt was a dummy, and filed the suit anyway, despite the letter from the school district’s attorney. After he won election to the US Senate, the case landed in Andrew Bailey’s lap. Bailey immediately realized exactly what a turd of a case he had on his hands, so he did the right thing. He dropped his suit and asked the school district to do the same with their countersuit. They refused. Instead, they took their Bailey and the state to trial, and when the judge ruled, it was as to affirm the schools all the way down the line. As the KC Star said at the time (paywalled, sorry):
Judge Marco Roldan, in his 18-page ruling, found that Schmitt, a Republican who was elected to the U.S. Senate last year after four years as state attorney general, did not follow Missouri law when he ordered the Lee’s Summit School District to stop enforcing its COVID-19 mitigation efforts in 2021.
“There exists no Missouri law allowing the Attorney General to involve himself in a School District’s efforts to manage COVID-19 or other disease within its schools,” Roldan wrote in his ruling. The ruling offers a scathing rebuke of Schmitt, who had sued Lee’s Summit and dozens of other school districts at the height of the pandemic.
Schmitt regularly touted the suits on social media and used them to elevate himself in his Senate campaign.
“Parents and students followed the Attorney General’s lead, leading to even greater confusion than the pandemic had already caused,” Roldan wrote.
So what happened in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting with Schmitt getting his butt handed to him by Jack Smith is *exactly* what those of us in Missouri expect of Schmitt, because we’ve seen this guy operating like this for years. He took Trump’s approach on the “perfect phone call” and used it as a guide for his approach to his work as Missouri AG, and has continued to do this in the US Senate. He, like Trump, has embraced the Three Great Premises of Idiot America.
1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true is someone says it loudly enough.
3. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.From Hanaway to Bailey to Schmitt, it hasn’t been a good month for current and former Republican Attorneys General of Missouri. There’s one more former Republican AG from Missouri that hasn’t spectacularly faceplanted yet this month – Josh Hawley. But the month isn’t over yet.
Wait – did you hear that? Did I just hear Hawley say “hold my beer” or was that simply my imagination?
*sigh*
Thanks to Jack Smith, the rest of you have learned what we in Missouri have known for years. Schmitt is a publicity-loving hack, who believes his own press releases, who believes truth is what anyone who shouts loudly enough says it is. That wonderful image out of Texas and the old West fits Schmitt to a T: he’s all hat and no cattle. For that matter, I’m not convinced he’s even got hat. Unless, that is, it’s a ten gallon hat made out of tinfoil.
(apologies/thanks to Dr. Keys for the image)
The post The Nation Learned What Missouri Has Known for Years about Eric Schmitt appeared first on emptywheel.