State Senator Kurt Schaefer (R-19) wants to be Missouri’s next Attorney General. He wants it a lot since he announced his plans to run in 2016 over a year ago. Consequently he’s been very busy  getting his name out before the public. But not just any public. His constituency of choice seems to be the reddest dregs of this increasingly red state. It’s  hard to think of just about any rightwing bandwagon he hasn’t tried to ride since declaring his candidacy, no matter how rickety:

Tax Cuts for Rich Folks: Evidence suggests that Schaefer supports the Kansas tax “experiment” and would be willing to beggar Missouri’s middle and working class in order to give big tax cuts to rich folks and their businesses. When state GOPers recently fêted Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Schaefer, who is currently the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, opined that the governor had “some really compelling numbers.” This is in spite of what Politico has dubbed the “Brownback effect,” observing that “Republicans once idolized Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as a tax cutting superstar – now he’s a lesson in what not to do.” Evidently Schaeffer didn’t get the message. Or else he actually takes seriously dishonest statistics of the sort that billionaire Rex Sinquefield published in Forbes Magazine in order to make the Kansas experiment look like it is succeeding, or at least not as disastrous as it is proving to be.

Social Spending Cuts: Schaeffer, like so many GOPers before him, seems to think it’s okay to fund tax cuts – favored by rich political donors like Rex Sinquefield – by cutting the ground out from under those who lack the wherewithal and the influence to fund his climb to the top of the Missouri political heap. He’s proposed cutting $130 million from the already meager amount allocated by the House to social services, health and mental health services. He says that the agencies are wasteful and that cuts are necessary to slow their growth.

It is true that Missouri’s social services are currently not functioning too well. Ill-considered cuts and the resulting “reforms” over the past few years have taken a steep toll, a situation that many take as evidence that they need more rather than less money. According to figures supplied by state budget officials, Schaefer’s claims of waste perhaps reflect his ideological biases rather than a close analysis of the real-life situation. As for out-of-control growth? Wouldn’t you expect that as Missouri continues its GOP-led transformation into a poverty stricken backwater, one might expect demand for services to increase – a demand, that folks like Schaefer are determined not to meet.

Guns “R”Us: Schaefer was one of the motivating forces behind Missouri’s Amendment 5, a constitutional amendment voted in by the gun-mad hordes who dominate mid-term elections in Missouri. This amendment, under the rubric of an “inalienable” right to own guns, was so badly written that it has made it impossible to bar convicted felons from gun ownership. As the St Louis Post-Dispatch described it, Schaefer’s decision “to start acting like a pandering fool” has had a scary, but entirely predictable – and predicted – result:

… .In a state in which there are more gun deaths than traffic deaths, in which toddlers are grabbing mommy and daddy’s guns and firing away, in which cities are being told by a Legislature there is nothing they can do about gun violence, now convicted felons can own guns and there is nothing the police can do about it.

Again, let me reiterate. This guy’s a lawyer – and he even wants to be the state’s main lawyer. If his legal acumen was insufficient to locate the problems in what was essentially his baby, a lot of other folks pointed them out before it was too late to fix them. Now Schaefer’s twisting and turning, trying to find a way to prove that “Amendment 5 doesn’t mean what it says.” Sadly, the courts don’t agree.

So stop and think. Either Schaefer is, as the Post-Dispatch implies, a spineless panderer, or he’s out-and-out stupid. He’s either taken in by or cynically peddling obviously failing, ideologically driven voodoo economic theories, GOP welfare queen vilification, and the Guns equal God ideology of hardcore gun crazies. Either way what rational, unbiased person could trust him to act in the best interests of the people of Missouri – either in the State Senate where he now works his backwards magic, or as Attorney General? Is the distinction even meaningful? If the sum of a politician’s major legislative efforts are stupid and harmful then it’s doesn’t make much difference if the motivation is incompetence or venality. For all practical purposes that individual is a fool.

Greg Sargent writes today:

The Republican strategy on sequestration has been clear for months now: sequestration is terrific because spending cuts are good…and every specific program cut by sequestration is a terrible injustice that Barack Obama should have avoided.

Many of Missouri’s Republican political contingent, folks like new-minted Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), who were adamantly unwilling to entertain meaningful compromise when the sequester was still a gleam in the Tea Party’s eye, and who strutted around demanding spending cuts and no, never, under any circumstances, new revenue, are, now that they’ve got their cuts, trying to confuse the issue by talking about “Obama’s sequester.”  GOPers are also jumping on specific unpopular and damaging cuts – first they wept about curtailing White House tours and now they’re rending their hair about the furlough of large numbers of air traffic controllers. They want us to believe that they they’re blameless and if the Obama administration only cared enough or were smart enough they’d cut something else instead. But guess what? President Obama is powerless to pick and choose what to cut:

What is happening now is what the law requires, nothing less and nothing more. The president has no choice but to follow it.

Here’s what the laws and the technical analyses say. According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 897 non-defense “budget accounts” — and the thousands of “programs, payments and activities” within them — shall be cut by the “same percentage.”

That hasn’t stopped our GOP pols from pretending that it was or is all avoidable. Ann Wagner, for instance, wants us to know that she “offered solutions to replace his [i.e. Obama’s] sequester with responsible cuts and reforms” – which, Wagner being such a reasonable member of the extreme right wing, otherwise known as the GOP, were surely ignored out of pure willfulness, don’t you think?

Another Missouri GOPer, Senator Roy Blunt, has been far cagier. He wants President Obama to really own these Republican spending cuts because, once they go into effect, nobody but nobody is going to like them:

Last week, Blunt introduced the “Essential Services Act of 2013,” which would protect American jobs and public safety by ensuring “essential” federal employees like air traffic controllers continue to provide vital services. The bill, which Senate Democrats blocked as an amendment to the continuing resolution (CR) last month, would give the Obama Administration the flexibility it claims it does not have to apply the same standards used during occurrences of inclement weather or other government shutdowns to the sequestration cuts to each agency.

This effort by Blunt and Wagner to trick us into thinking that that if it weren’t for President Obama and his  Democratic minions we could have our budget cake and eat just as well as we always have is just downright silly. As Sargent notes:

… It may be true that no one specifically wants to shut down air traffic control, or the FBI, or food inspections, or the military … but once you start really looking at that list, what you find is that the level of cuts involved mean that something that “nobody” wants to cut will in fact have to be cut.

The truth is that sequestration cuts – which are significant enough already – already represent significantly lower levels of cutting spending than what House Republicans wanted. Some Tea Partiers in the House voted against them because they were not severe enough. And don’t forget: the budgets that Republicans have been voting for, year after year, promise to entirely wipe out non-defense discretionary spending over the long term. All of it.

Now, it’s true that if you ask Republicans whether they support this cut or that cut, at least the ones that affect their supporters, they’ll claim that, no, they only want to do away with waste, fraud, abuse, and foreign aid. But that’s not what their budgets say. It’s not what their rhetoric says, either.

I believe that almost every one of our Missouri GOP House members voted for that GOP budget that would, as Sargent correctly notes, “wipe out non-defense discretionary spending over the long term. All of it.” I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing them squawk now that the chickens they enabled are on their way to Missouri. Is it too much to ask these charlatans to stand up and take responsibility for what they’ve done – not to mention what they’re still trying to do?