This editorial page has spent much time and space alerting Missourians about their attorney general’s unprecedented abuse of his office for political ends. Andrew Bailey’s ideologically driven lawsuits, his official harassment of educators, medical professionals and others and his made-for-Fox News grandstanding on the taxpayers’ dime has indeed required a lot of ink and bandwidth to fully document.
But the flip side of Bailey’s mendacious misuse of the state’s top legal office is the appalling extent to which he fails to fulfill the responsibilities that he’s actually supposed to carry out.
That includes responding to requests for information under Missouri’s Sunshine Law. As the Missouri Independent reports, Bailey’s office is still more than half a year behind in processing such requests. The situation creates an unacceptable lack of transparency for an office that wields massive power.
People are also reading…
Bailey’s office says the problem is staffing; they just don’t have enough lawyers to process all the Sunshine requests in a more timely manner. Of course they don’t — they’re too busy with ideological stunts like suing the state of New York for its criminal conviction of former President Donald Trump.
Bailey, appointed as attorney general last year to fill a vacancy, is running for a full term this year. As we have cataloged in our on-going “Bailey Tally“ of his worst offenses, his campaign strategy has been primarily to use his powers as the state’s top lawyer to go after the Biden administration, trans-care medical professionals, school districts and anyone else deemed a culture-war enemy by the far right.
Even as he takes Missouri into legal battles it has no business fighting, this putative public servant has refused to engage in issues that are clearly his responsibility. He won’t confront illegal gaming moguls who contribute to his election campaign, has declined to investigate sex-abuse allegations against Christian schools supported by his base voters and has generally shrugged off routine duties of his office that don’t grab showy headlines.
Among Bailey’s clearest duties, like those of all state officials, is to provide information about his office and its operations to those who file Sunshine Law requests for records. Given the legal power that office has, such transparency is especially crucial.
Yet, as the Independent reports, the office is only now completing the last of the Sunshine requests filed in 2023.
The backlog is in large part because of an insistence on making even the most minor, easily fulfilled requests wait in line behind more complicated ones. The result has been ludicrous scenarios such as a 10-month wait for the Independent for access to three days’ worth of Bailey’s official calendar, a clearly public and easily provided piece of information.
A Bailey spokesperson told the news site that a spike in Sunshine requests coupled with staff turnover is why it’s taken longer than anticipated to work through the backlog, which in part Bailey inherited.
They don’t have enough staff doing it, in other words.
Here, let us make some suggestions that could help:
First, Bailey could drop his insane litigation against New York. He announced last month that he would sue that distant state “for their direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump.”
Obviously, Missouri’s official lawyer has zero legal standing in such a suit. We don’t know offhand how many staff Bailey has put on this tax-funded campaign commercial, but every one of them should be taken off it and assigned to address Sunshine requests.
There are numerous other frivolous, ideologically driven or just plain silly lawsuits or investigations that could be similarly dropped and those staffs set to the legitimate work of providing the public transparency Bailey is legally required to provide.
His legal defense for three conservative state senators being sued for slandering a private citizen by wrongly alleging online that he was the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl party shooter? Let them hire their own lawyers, and put those state lawyers to work spreading Sunshine.
His official probes into online criticism against billionaire Elon Musk and Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker, two right-wing heroes? They don’t need Bailey’s staff; Missourians seeking open records do.
His ongoing investigation of transgender medical care, which has turned into a harassment campaign against caregivers and therapists? How about leaving the issue to families and medical professionals — and pry into public records instead of private ones?
There’s lots more. Even a cursory look at all the ways Bailey is wasting the taxpayers’ money and human resources shows he could throw a small army of lawyers and others at that backlog of Sunshine Law requests and whittle it down in no time.
But then, who would sue the state of New York over a criminal prosecution that has nothing to do with Missouri? That’s what constitutes a priority in Andrew Bailey’s worldview. It’s a worldview that doesn’t belong in Missouri government.