The Biden administration sued Missouri in federal court in Kansas City on Wednesday over the state’s bonkers attempt to nullify enforcement of federal gun laws here. The plainly unconstitutional state statute has already had the predictable result of hampering crime-fighting efforts. Yet state Attorney General Eric Schmitt is, in his typically grandstanding way, vowing to defend the statute, declaring: “The law is on our side.”
Perhaps Schmitt has lost his copy of the Constitution. Article 4, Section 2 plainly dictates that when federal and state law are in conflict, federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” The passage contains no asterisks allowing ideological extremists in a state to blithely declare some federal laws unenforceable because that’s what their base wants to hear.
Yet that’s what Missouri’s ruling Republicans did last year with passage of the so-called Second Amendment Preservation Act. The act says that any federal gun law that doesn’t have a corresponding law in Missouri statutes cannot be enforced within the state, with the threat of expensive judgments against any police agencies that do.
The bill’s culture-warrior authors no doubt thought this would look good on a bumper sticker. But in the real world, it has caused police to pull out of joint crime-fighting operations with the federal government, for fear of violating the law. “The Missouri law has had a harmful impact on public safety efforts within the state …,” the federal lawsuit claims. “Critical information that state and local offices previously shared with federal law enforcement officers to facilitate public safety and law enforcement is now frequently unavailable to federal law enforcement agencies in the same manner.”
Because of the Missouri act, the Justice Department has also pulled out of participation in Missouri’s “Safer Streets Initiative.” That was the successful state-federal joint crime-fighting effort that Schmitt established back when he was still doing his duty as attorney general, rather than using the powers of his office to pander to the hard right in service to his U.S. Senate bid.
In a statement, Schmitt accused the Biden administration of putting “partisan politics ahead of public safety.” That’s rich, from an attorney general who has abused his authority to intimidate school districts over masking policies, and now is defending a clearly illegal statute that is making it more difficult for police to fight crime.
The Missouri law, which is also being challenged by St. Louis and other plaintiffs in the state Supreme Court, doesn’t stand a chance of survival in the court system. Schmitt knows this as well as any other lawyer does. But as always these days, he is driven entirely by how many tough-talking headlines he can tout to the right-wing voters he hopes to win over in the Senate primary. Missouri’s potential crime victims, like its potential coronavirus victims, stand to pay a high price for Schmitt’s ambition.
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