Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey may have a bad track record in court, but he’s winning anyway. This is especially true of his crusade to make the workforce and higher education less diverse.

He’s had success using losing lawsuits, investigations that do nothing but burn Missouri taxpayer dollars and threatening letters that misstate the law.

On the day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled traditional affirmative action programs in higher education unconstitutional, Bailey sent threatening letters to Missouri universities and municipalities in which he overstated what the ruling did and implied that all efforts at fostering diversity and inclusion in Missouri must be halted.

In April, Bailey excoriated the Business Roundtable for having “racist DEI initiatives.” He wrote he would fight “woke political trends and blatant racial discrimination.” In an impressive act of government “jawboning” that Bailey has claimed to oppose in other contexts, he threatened that such policies “risk exposing your organizations to substantial liability.”

Bailey is suing IBM, alleging the company did too much to recruit non-white and female hires.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (the “DEI” much maligned by the far-right) help companies hire and retain qualified people who they wouldn’t easily find through traditional white male networks. Many studies and companies have explained that diversity is good for profits and innovation, and that you don’t get a diverse workforce without making an effort to recruit one.

Bailey’s court filings come shockingly close to outright stating his contrary premise: women and non-white people are inherently inferior so any increase in their representation is bad.

IBM argued that Bailey hasn’t pleaded that any Missouri employee or job applicant was discriminated against. Indeed, this looks like Bailey preening for the national anti-diversity warriors rather than addressing a Missouri problem.

Though you wouldn’t know it from listening to Bailey, diversity is still a permissible goal under Supreme Court precedent. And it is typical for companies to reward executives for advancing corporate goals.

But the IBM lawsuit looks like another one where Bailey could win with a loser of a case. IBM has long been known for being a model for inclusive policies and a great place to work. IBM’s diversity council began in the ‘90s. It has touted hiring a disabled employee in 1914. But this year it ended most of its diversity efforts. We’ll see whether IBM continues to fight back against Bailey.

Whatever happens, say goodbye to IBM and similarly situated companies employing more people here. Bailey has made it clear that employers should expect legal harassment for exercising their rights to association and free speech in Missouri.

Bailey has also sued Starbucks. His brief argues that the Starbucks workforce has become “more female and less white” — and that this is unacceptable.

Starbucks appears to be defending the values that the company professes. The company is also likely aware that if it were to abandon its reasonable efforts to have a workforce more representative of its customer base, it could lead to a boycott and a massive stock hit like Target experienced.

Shareholders have realized that reversing inclusive policies is bad for business. Shareholders voted down anti-diversity proposals overwhelmingly this proxy season.

The market has spoken. So Bailey’s latest ploy is to punish free speech in the market.

Bailey filed lawsuits against two firms that give shareholders advice on how to vote. He claims that they have engaged in “deceptive practices” by recommending inclusive policies. This is one of his many attempts to weaponize the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, which was meant to protect Missourians from actual fraud.

But frivolous lawsuits against out-of-state corporations are not the only way to light taxpayer dollars on fire.

Bailey can burn up twice the Missouri tax dollars by having Missouri wage legal warfare against itself. See for example, Bailey’s investigation of the Hazelwood School District over an off-campus fight between students of different races, the three year lawsuit against the Springfield School District over demands to search thousands of documents for a list of possibly DEI-related terms that the District estimated would cost $170,000, or his new investigation of the City of Columbia over whether it might be trying to advance diversity and equity.

How does a successful, powerful white man come to have such resentment towards women and people of color for the modest gains we have made that he treats it as Missouri’s biggest problem? How does someone once known as a “reasonable and smart attorney” become a “warrior in the culture wars”? What could compel him to regularly use dehumanizing language about diversity proponents who merely want more people to have opportunities?

Did he get radicalized online? Bailey has filed a surprising number of lawsuits based on tweeted statements or videos.

His IBM lawsuit cites a video circulated online. He sued Media Matters in response to an Elon Musk tweet (that lawsuit was thrown out as I predicted, but Media Matters had to cut staff due to the costs of Bailey and Musk lawsuits, so that’s another extra-legal win for Bailey). Bailey sued Planned Parenthood over a Project Veritas video, without bothering to get the unedited tape.

Another possibility is that this is how Republicans feel they need to make a name and impress Trump and MAGA. Still, I just can’t muster the cynicism to make it make sense.

Sometimes I wonder what Bailey’s mom thinks.

I learned that Dr. Jessica Bailey was the first female dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s School of Health Related Professions and a revered and beloved leader there — and a champion of diversity efforts.

A 2022 article about her retirement describes Dr. Bailey’s mentorship and recruitment of the school’s then chief diversity and inclusion officer. In an earlier article, Dr. Bailey extolls that colleague for being “committed to providing opportunities for students who might otherwise not imagine themselves in a health care profession,” and having “the vision to recognize opportunities to make our health care work force be more representative of our Mississippi population.”

These are goals that her son claims are unconstitutional and racist.

During Dr. Bailey’s tenure as dean, she oversaw the development of a Diversity and Inclusion Champion Professional Development and Certificate Program. She supervised PhD theses concerning the need to diversify the health work force and bone marrow donors. She was lauded for her personal involvement in a program that recruited young Black men into medical professions.

I asked Bailey’s office whether the attorney general thinks his mother was engaged in illegal “woke political trends and blatant racial discrimination” in general, or specifically with the mentorship program for Black men.

His office responded:

“Attorney General Bailey has no knowledge of these programs administered in another state, years ago, when he was not in office. What he does know is this: DEI programs that condition opportunity on skin color violate the Missouri Constitution and the foundational American promise of equality under the law. Whether it’s in corporate boardrooms, public universities, or government contracting, he will continue to fight race-based discrimination in any form. He has led on this issue since taking office.”

That’s a clearer “yes, my mother did illegal, racist things” than I was expecting.

Bailey is not just disavowing the work of his highly accomplished mother, who has referenced the barriers she overcame as a woman in a male dominated field and who worked to help others up the ladder. He is twisting the law to claim all such efforts are illegal.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is presenting himself as the rare Republican willing to fight for low-income Americans who will lose their health care or food assistance if his party makes massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. He has been rewarded with much credulous reporting suggesting he is sincere about that.

But as Missouri’s senior U.S. senator and former attorney general, it’s fair to expect Hawley to know what is happening on the ground here: an abject failure to administer federal benefits in compliance with current law.

There is absolutely no possibility that Missouri can handle additional red tape like the “work requirements” in both the House and Senate versions of Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” yet Hawley has endorsed them.

Missouri just isn’t capable of enhanced eligibility requirements. A lawsuit brought by disabled Missourians who were denied SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, proves this.

One plaintiff with cancer and COPD, lacking internet access, transportation — and, let’s not forget, food — used her prepaid cell phone minutes sitting on hold for days trying to get an application. When she gave up and paid for a ride to a benefits office, she got an application but couldn’t complete the required interview due to lack of staff. So she spent more days on hold before having her application denied for failure to complete the interview that she couldn’t get.

That lawsuit was filed when Hawley’s fellow senator from Missouri, Eric Schmitt, was our attorney general. Instead of fixing the problem, the state has defended the lawsuit for three years.

When the court found that Missouri was not complying with the law, current Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed a non-appealable order that merely requires monthly progress reports on call wait times. In January of this year, the lowest daily average call wait time was 58 minutes and the highest average was 2 hours. The maximum wait time was 5 hours, roughly 21,000 calls were dropped and 14,134 callers gave up (or ran out of cell phone minutes, or had to pick up their kids, or had to go to work, etc).

On the Medicaid front, Missouri was investigated and offered support by the Biden Administration to deal with our worst in the nation, legally non-compliant wait times for enrollment.

Individuals submitting their renewal information — online, in person, by fax, or even certified mail — regularly lose their coverage automatically because the state fails to process their documents in time.

A woman who already had coverage through MO HealthNet, Missouri’s Medicaid program, went months without prenatal care because she was unable to reach anyone to tell them she was pregnant.

When the pandemic freeze on Medicaid disenrollments expired, Missouri made a mess of the eligibility review process so families learned at the pediatrician’s office that their children had lost their health insurance despite still being eligible. Children who went without medications for manageable conditions like asthma ended up at emergency rooms.

Now imagine everyone has to navigate a dysfunctional system every six months to keep their health insurance as both versions of the bill would require. Or even once a month – as the bills would allow.

You have to take time off work to prove you are working. Or you have to use up time and cell phone minutes to try to prove you can’t work and qualify for an exemption. In a system as broken as Missouri’s, many people can’t jump through those hoops even when they treat it like a full time job.

If Missouri can’t or won’t run it’s SNAP program properly under current law – where the federal government pays all of the benefits and 50% of the cost of administering those food aid dollars that go straight into our local economies – there is no way food insecurity here won’t get significantly worse and our economy won’t take a serious hit with Republicans’ planned cuts.

Those proposed cuts include states losing at least 5% and up to 25% of their SNAP dollars depending on their “error rate” of under and over payments to households with SNAP. Missouri’s most recent error rate is 10.2%, which means we would lose 25% of our funding for being over 10%, like the majority of states. And the bill would also cut funding for administrative costs which will inevitably make our error rate worse. SNAP is an optional program, and I wouldn’t put it past our legislature to end it all together and let people starve.

As to Medicaid, instead of allocating the funding needed to run MO HealthNet properly, our legislators blame leadership issues or technology problems. Our legislature has done nothing to prepare for what the proposed Trump cuts would do to us, nor what the DOGE impoundments are already doing. They just keep passing tax cut after tax cut.

Given we are not currently capable of running our Medicaid or SNAP programs, there is no possibility that we can manage added expensive red tape.

But that’s the goal. Republicans know, because it has been widely documented, that work requirements don’t work even in more functional states. They don’t increase employment because people with Medicaid who can work are already working.

(I am setting aside the larger undiscussed issue of why working full time in the U.S. is not enough to afford health care, unlike in peer nations.)

The idea that there is $880 billion, or even a fraction of that, in “fraud, waste, and abuse,” in Medicaid is ridiculous. The savings Republicans are counting on would come from deliberately making it too burdensome for the struggling people these programs were intended to help to continue using them.

Look at Arkansas. The state implemented a work requirement and 18,000 people lost their insurance in the few months before a court determined the requirement had been illegally implemented.

Georgia enacted a program in lieu of Medicaid expansion that requires monthly eligibility paperwork. It has enrolled only 3% of Georgians with qualifying incomes, and the money spent on verifying eligibility has dwarfed that spent on providing actual medical care.

Republicans are counting on this happening on a much larger scale to offset their tax cuts. It’s an incredibly wasteful and dangerous strategy.

We burn money on processes to root out non-existent “fraud.” Then, when the people least equipped to navigate those processes can’t do so, they will lose their preventative health care and end up sicker and resorting to more expensive care at hospitals that are required by law to treat them regardless of ability to pay. Then all our premiums go up.

In Missouri, cuts will exacerbate our existing shortage of healthcare providers as more rural hospitals shutter due to lack of funds.

Hawley acknowledged that Missouri’s rural hospitals are in trouble when he opposed a different provision inthe House bill, which would curtail a Republican-created and very popular state tax used to get federal Medicaid dollars to hospitals. (He has since caved on the House’s curtailment, and now only opposes the Senate’s significantly more drastic one.)

Rural Missourians will have particular difficulty navigating the work requirement due to lacking internet access, transportation, and job opportunities. And you know what makes it harder to keep a job? Losing your health insurance so you can’t manage your health conditions.

Despite there being no universe in which Missouri becomes capable of administering additional eligibility requirements anytime soon, Hawley doesn’t even object to Republicans moving the implementation deadline up from 2029 to next year. This is not a serious proposal for a functioning eligibility process. It’s a plan to take insurance from eligible people on purpose.

When Hawley was asked last week about people “inadvertently losing coverage,” he said: “We can sort that out.” How? If it’s so easy to sort, why didn’t Hawley or Schmitt sort it out when they were state officials or since?

Hawley is portraying himself as an advocate for the people by using the Trumpian tactic of telling us that up is down and a cut is not a cut. Presuming Hawley knows anything about the reality in Missouri, he knows better.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.