In the leadup to Missouri’s August primary, Republican candidates for state office have frequently taken shots at the state’s largest cities.
“There's a reason that the same access to firearms in suburban areas and rural areas doesn't see the same kind of result of violent crime,” state senator and gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel said in a July televised debate. “We have leaders in St. Louis city, in Kansas City, that don't want to put bad guys in jail.”
This kind of rhetoric has become standard Republican fare in Missouri, as office-seekers paint the state’s cities as hotbeds for crime and lawlessness and tout their law and order policies as the only way to prevent violent crime from spreading. It’s no coincidence that Republicans feel compelled to take shots at cities that are more progressive and diverse than the rest of the state.
It’s a tactic also common in national politics. Former President Donald Trump and his Republican challengers frequently attacked Chicago and other major cities as crime-ridden places where violence proliferates. Fearmongering about crime in more diverse, more liberal urban areas have become a talking point for the GOP despite national data showing violent crime is down.
St. Louis, Kansas City and other cities are easy political scapegoats for Missouri candidates like Eigel in large part because they are reliably Democratic enclaves in an otherwise deeply red state. Republicans running for a statewide position know they can win without city voters.
Once in office, Republicans codify their distaste for cities into law by restricting what cities can and cannot do. They’ve largely succeeded at this by passing laws that block the very cities they call lawless from enacting the policies to address problems.
City lawmakers can’t raise the minimum wage. They can’t require people to pass a background check before buying a firearm. They can’t pass a moratorium on evictions. Kansas City can’t control its own police department, or how much the city will fund it.
“When I am at mayor's conferences, mayors from huge cities, small towns, from Republican-leaning states, Democratic-leaning states, all of them are saying, ‘We want to be able to do better to address issues in our community, and we don't have the opportunity to do so,’” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. “It ties our hands tremendously.”
Entrenched Republican power
Lawmakers in deeply Republican states like Missouri use those state-level restrictions as a playbook and a punitive tool to block progressive policies and impose their right-wing political agenda on liberal cities.
Republicans have controlled the Senate and the House since 2003. The party then extended its power in 2017 when Eric Greitens became governor, establishing a Republican trifecta that has not budged since.
Christopher Koliba, a professor in public administration, policy and governance at the University of Kansas, says power is already tipped toward states, but preemption has picked up in Republican states since 2013.
“This middle of the last decade was really a time where the conservative movement organized itself and began to look at preemption as this way to get conservative policies passed in a more prolific way, and a pretty effective one as well,” Koliba said.
Before representing Kansas City in Congress, Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II served as a Kansas City councilmember from 1979 to 1991 and then mayor from 1991 to 1999, when he says city-restrictive state policies were rare.
“I cannot think of a single piece of legislation or a single issue where we were preempted,” Rep. Cleaver said.
Blocking local governments
In the paper, “Preemption of City Authority in America,” Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault writes that “new preemption” substitutes preferences of the state for the views of local voters.
These preemptive measures, Briffault writes, are deregulatory and punitive. Preemption doesn’t establish a state standard for cities to follow, but blocks local government action and punishes municipalities if they don’t fall in line.
“I think it's making impotent local elected officials,” Rep. Cleaver said. “If it continues to grow, I think there will be absolutely no need to even have city councils and mayors and county legislatures, because everything will come from the state government.”
‘Fear of the city’
When Republicans criticize Missouri cities, they often do it using coded racist language to paint a negative picture of the Black residents who live there. Following the shooting at the end of the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory parade killed one and injured at least 24 people, Gov. Mike Parson blamed it on “thugs.”
“Just a bunch of criminals, thugs out there, just killing people at an incident like that and attempting to kill all those people and created such chaos that people got hurt, being trampled,” Parson said.
When Mayor Lucas said immigrants are welcome in Kansas City in April, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey threatened legal action and falsely claimed that Lucas was offering “an open invitation to illegal immigrants.” Republican lawmakers then proposed taking state funds away from any city that becomes a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, though Missouri law already prohibited municipalities from enacting any sanctuary policies.
“If you're trying to make sure that you can run up conservative scores in exurbs — like Belton, or Raymore, or in St. Charles County, Missouri — what you want to create is fear of the city,” Lucas said.
Calls to pass local gun control measures grew louder following the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs victory rally at Union Station that killed beloved radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan and injured at least 24 others.
But Missouri law prevents any county, city or municipality from passing legislation regulating the sale, purchase, transfer, ownership, use, possession, transportation, licensing, permit and registration of firearms.
At a recent Jackson County legislature meeting, legislator Jalen Anderson criticized that policy.
“These preemption laws were put in place to make sure that our lives are made to be political, that our safety is political, that they have something to run on every two years,” Anderson told a room full of gun safety advocates and young people who testified about the importance of gun control.
Paying for the mistakes of its cities
Republicans’ rhetoric capitalizes on real frustrations some Missourians have with the cost of cities’ missteps.
In 1985, a federal judge ordered Kansas City to fix its deeply segregated school system by creating a plan to build one of the best school districts in the nation, in the hope of luring back the white families who fled to the suburbs as the Great Migration brought more Black families to the metro.
The plan included 15 palatial new buildings and remodels to 54 old ones, giving the district an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, a robotics lab, a film studio and other state-of-the-art amenities. Higher property taxes within the district covered some of the cost, but the state — and, by extension, all of its taxpayers — funded the rest, to the tune of $200 million.
At one point, just 9% of the state’s students — in St. Louis and Kansas City — commanded 44% of the state education budget. That was more than the state spent on highway patrol, prisons, courts and the state fire marshal combined.
Now, Missouri voters across the state get to dictate part of Kansas City’s budget, and may get to do the same in St. Louis if Republicans have their way in the future.
In August, they’ll decide again if Kansas City should increase its minimum funding allocation to its police department. An identical bill in 2022, overturned by the state supreme court because of misleading language around its costs, passed with 63%, though Kansas City residents voted heavily against it.
Kansas City has not had local control of its police department since the 1930s, a governance structure not seen in any other major U.S. city.
The department is overseen by a Board of Police Commissioners, all of whom are appointed by the Missouri governor except for the Kansas City mayor. The amount of money that flows to the KCPD is set by Missouri lawmakers, though funding comes from Kansas City.
St. Louis regained control of its own police department through a statewide vote in 2012, after decades under state control. Despite the city putting up its lowest crime numbers in a decade last year, Missouri lawmakers introduced a bill during the legislative session to again take control of the city’s police, as it has in Kansas City.
‘I want to punish Columbia. I want to punish St. Louis. I want to punish Kansas City.’
In a paper written earlier this year for the University of Chicago Law Review, Lucas warned of the state’s shift toward using preemption laws to cancel out policies cities and other municipalities have already passed.
“It is reactionary, it is usually aggressively negative towards people that we are trying to help, and it is something that, frankly, never has the benefit of actually a good legislative process,” Lucas said. “It's, instead, ‘I want to punish Columbia. I want to punish St. Louis. I want to punish Kansas City.’ That has nothing to do with, ‘I want to build a better Missouri.’”
Those policies are on the rise as cities handle more consequential issues like homelessness, public safety, the protection of LGBTQ youth, health care access and affordable housing.
“It's largely state capitals in Jefferson City and Topeka, trying to say, ‘Get out of that,’” Lucas said. “What happens if we're out of it? It means there are no rights for renters. It means there is no health care opportunity, particularly for LGBTQ youth in our community. It means that we are not safer. ”
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