Missouri has among the most underperforming public school systems in America, a genuine health care access crisis in its rural areas, transportation infrastructure that is consistently ranked among the nation’s worst, and one of the country’s highest firearms death rates.
So naturally, some of the sober public servants who represent Missourians in the General Assembly are lining up legislation for the coming session to further loosen gun laws, harass transgender residents, post the Ten Commandments in public schools and offer bounties for turning in undocumented immigrants.
Pre-filed bills for the 2025 legislative session that begins Jan. 8 in Jefferson City contain the usual culture-war catnip that has clogged the General Assembly’s agenda in recent years from its Republican supermajority. Some lowlights are worth reviewing, if only to remind the state’s residents of just how dysfunctional Missouri’s political representation has become.
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The First Amendment is unambiguous about keeping governmental institutions out of the religion business. But Constitution, schmonstitution, says state Rep. Hardy Billington, R-Poplar Bluff. He has filed legislation (HB34) to require schools to post the Ten Commandments “in each building and classroom” of every public school in the state.
It specifies that school districts can use public money to purchase the displays — meaning students’ families that practice any non-Judeo-Christian religion, or no religion at all, would be forced to help pay for this proselytizing through their taxes.
The bill addresses the considerable problem of which of the multiple versions of the Commandments to use by specifying the exact wording of the required displays within the legislation. So not only would the bill force the display in every Missouri classroom of a specific religious doctrine, but it would have to be Rep. Billington’s preferred interpretation of that doctrine. How politically pious.
In the coming session, as usual, the Legislature’s gun brigade is trying to further loosen Missouri gun laws that have already become among the loosest in the nation over the past two decades. That’s the same period during which the state has seen its annual firearms death rate (as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) rise from average to among the nation’s highest. Go figure.
Probably the most tone-deaf of the latest crop of gun-coddling bills is HB548, which would lift Missouri’s current ban on “firearm suppressors,” more commonly known as silencers.
Rep.-elect Mike Costlow, R-Dardenne Prairie, filed the bill Dec. 13 — four days after an assailant used a silencer-muffled handgun to assassinate an insurance-industry CEO in a crowded area of Manhattan and was able to bicycle away without most people in the vicinity having heard anything. Which is the whole point of silencers.
Costlow acknowledged to the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson last week: “I can understand why optics would say it’s bad timing.” You think?
The national GOP’s obsession with undocumented immigration isn’t a logical front-burner issue for a smallish Midwestern state like Missouri. But Republican politicians here have been working to get a piece of the issue anyway, by sending state resources to the southern border and other pandering stunts.
In that vein comes SB72 from Sen-elect David Gregory, a St. Louis County Republican. His bill seeks to let regular citizens become immigration bounty hunters. It would offer $1,000 to citizens who turn in undocumented immigrants to the state highway patrol.
“We need all hands on deck to ensure we catch illegal immigrants BEFORE they commit violent crimes,” Gregory wrote on social media — thus promoting the familiar xenophobic lie that undocumented migrants are more crime-prone than native-born Americans. (Statistically, the opposite is true.) Critics say the measure would also incentivize harassment and, potentially, violence against illegal and legal immigrants alike.
And no Missouri General Assembly session today would be complete without bills attacking the miniscule but easily demagogued transgender population. Among prefiled bills are multiple measures like HB157, to restrict transgender residents to their birth-certificate gender on state-issued identification cards — even for adults who have undergone transgender surgery. As with all transgender issues, this is a tiny sliver of the population that somehow merits an outsized amount of attention from today’s GOP.
Missouri has many serious problems. Not remotely among them are transgender driver’s licenses, immigration crime waves, overly restricted firearms or the lack of biblical pronouncements on public school walls. Here’s hoping the putative grownups who still putatively control Missouri’s General Assembly will summarily dispense with this and other legislative nonsense in the coming session and actually focus on the peoples’ business.
