Our lawmakers are back in Jefferson City to help decide what kind of a country we will have, and what kind of country we will be. That’s a pretty strong observation. But if we are honest, it is also pretty strongly true.
Governor Kehoe has called them back because President Trump worries he won’t have continued absolute power for the last half of his term unless legislatures in various states take unprecedented action to change congressional district lines to eliminate Democrats.
Forget what the voters decided in the 2024 Congressional elections. Make sure some of them can’t have the representative they elected because a President who brags about his popularity is worried that, in truth, he is so unpopular in poll after poll that Americans might vote in 2026 to impede his seizure of absolute power.
The Missouri legislature wants to take Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s elected job away from him by splitting his district so about half of his biggest supporters can’t vote for him in 2026.
It is interesting that Republicans, who have so many chest-thumping evangelical Christians supporting them, want to eliminate a member of Congress who is a Christian minister. Perhaps Emanuel Cleaver isn’t Christian enough. Perhaps they think he is spiritually lost or spiritually bankrupt because he’s a Methodist, a mainline Christian group that has split in a dispute about whether God creates gays.
Wouldn’t you think that a president who peddles Bibles, poses holding a Bible in front of a D. C. church, and says in commercials that he has several Bibles and it’s his favorite book would want someone like Congressman Cleaver in Washington as a moral force?
That’s Trump’s problem. He is not a moral force himself. In fact, there are plenty who wonder if he has any morals at all.
Donald Trump, who is so scared of losing power that he will disrupt the entire system of picking a representative government, wants the legislature to just turn over the keys to the democratic process in Missouri to him.
He talks about American exceptionalism but cares not for the government system that gives us that distinction and he will do anything to make sure his power goes unchecked for as long as he and his political offspring can keep it.
Have the people of Missouri asked for this change in who represents them?
No. There has been no public outcry that our congressional delegation has betrayed the people who elected it. But those we have chosen to represent us at the state level are facing a demand that the legislature go against its own public’s wishes so Missouri can help keep a man in power who day after day advances policies that are antithetical to a heritage that millions have lived and died to defend and to perfect.
Now we have the spectacle of our chosen state representatives and our chosen state senators meeting to undermine our representatives in the national government that we voted to support less than one year ago, and in the process throw out a Black Methodist minister who has served our state with great honor and decency in Washington since January 3, 2005, a man dedicated to public service in the pulpit as well as in the places of power—a dozen years on the city council in our largest city, eight years as its mayor, and more than two decades representing Christian values and his district’s needs.
He rightfully threatens to fight this ill-conceived realignment in court: “It will render people in Kansas City essentially silent and powerless,” Cleaver said. “The reason I’m saying this is Kansas City is roughly 70-something percent Democratic. If you tear Kansas City apart — put one portion of the Kansas City area in one district, the other in another — the chances are they have no representation.”
He is correct although today’s majority party does not seem to care.
What hammer does Donald Trump hold over our lawmakers that makes them so craven in doing his bidding? It’s a big one. It’s the power to withhold or even take back the billions of dollars in federal funding that underwrite about half of the state budget.
It is awfully hard to look down the barrel of that gun and not wilt. Trump wants no defiance from Missouri and from other Republican states. He and those who are pulling his strings daily prove they care not one whit for most of us but expects our voices in government at state and federal levels to say only two words: “Yes, sir.”
Some key questions emerge: Is there time to make all of this happen? Can opponents drag out the special session before the bill passes and the court battles begin and how long will that process take before it clears state courts and goes through the federal court system, which will take even more time?
When will filing for these offices begin if this issue is tied up in courts? Candidates cannot file in districts that will not legally exist until the courts rule which map will be THE map. When will primary elections be held, ditto? When will lawsuits challenging the results begin and be processed? Will the court fights be done before time for a November election?
This is going to be a long and ugly process that will do nothing to improves public confidence in Missouri’s, and the nation’s, government.
One man wants to take away one of our members of Congress with a new map THAT IS UNLIKELY TO BE PUT OUT FOR VOTER APROVAL before an election is held specifically to oust a congressman who has been elected eleven times by people in a district that Trump wants the Missouri legislature to destroy.
Here is the final question:
How much does the Missouri General Assembly want to disgrace itself for a man who has been considered by almost 150 of the nation’s most distinguished historians one of the worst presidents in history—-eve before he started swinging a sledgehammer in his second term.
Despite the words of a long-ago popular song, Freedom IS a word for everything to lose.
Our legislators will tell us at the end of this special session if they think it is, as the song also says, “just another word.”