My favorite part of Eric Schmitt’s latest attack on schoolchildren and taxpayers is that it highlights one of his fundamental failures as Missouri’s attorney general.
Last week, Schmitt, apparently under the assumption that lawyers get a volume discount, sued the Missouri School Boards’ Association, accusing the nonprofit of violating the state’s Sunshine Law. The lawsuit follows dozens upon dozens that Schmitt has filed against school boards across the state, some of them alleging Sunshine Law violations; others alleging the imposition of illegal mask mandates.
Every time Schmitt files one of these lawsuits, he runs to Twitter and Fox News to proclaim that he’s a “fighter” — his favorite poll-tested word — but the reality is, he’s more like a punch-drunk, washed up boxer trotted out to give other fighters an easy win.
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Schmitt has yet to actually take one of his school district lawsuits to trial. Many of them have been laughed out of court. Then there’s the one against Lee’s Summit School District, for which the attorney general recently missed a deadline; or the one in Springfield where the judge told him to leave the partisan politics outside the courthouse; or the one in Columbia where he tried to file a reverse class action lawsuit against every school district in the state and failed.
Schmitt, whose own struggles to follow the Sunshine Law have been well documented, alleges that the school board nonprofit is a “quasi-public” body and is failing to produce documents related to advice offered to school districts regarding mask mandates. For his argument, Schmitt relies on an old attorney general opinion issued by William Webster more than three decades ago.
Attorney general opinions aren’t like Supreme Court decisions. They aren’t legally binding. But they offer important advice, generally to state lawmakers, to help guide them as they write new laws. Most attorneys general throughout Missouri history — Democrats and Republicans — have issued dozens of such opinions, taking their job seriously and providing important guidance to elected officials in the state. Webster, for instance, issued 72 such opinions in 1988, the year of the school boards association opinion.
Schmitt, who is spending most of his time these days running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, prostrating himself at the feet of former President Donald Trump as he begs for his endorsement, doesn’t take his job seriously.
In the more than three years that he has been attorney general, he’s issued one such opinion. That’s one more than his predecessor, fellow ladder-climber Josh Hawley, wrote during his brief two-year stint in office before he became a U.S. senator.
State Rep. Peter Merideth, D-St. Louis, is still waiting for the opinion from Schmitt that he sought. It was on the Sunshine Law, the very topic of the attorney general’s most recent lawsuit. In 2019, after I wrote about Merideth’s constituents having their names and addresses stolen by a public interest group sending fake emails to state lawmakers, the state representative asked Schmitt whether it was legal for House members to redact people’s personal information on correspondence with lawmakers.
House Republicans, after voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring them to follow the Sunshine Law, had passed their own rule allowing the redactions.
Merideth, who is also a lawyer, believed the state constitution trumped the House rule. He asked Schmitt for an opinion on the matter. He never got an answer. Schmitt’s office, at the time, told me that it was “rare” for the office to issue a formal legal opinion.
Well, it wasn’t in Webster’s time. Or in former Attorney General Jay Nixon’s time. Or in former Attorney General Chris Koster’s time. Only Hawley and Schmitt have eschewed the part of the job that has long been a staple for attorneys general.
In Schmitt’s case, it’s easy to see why. He’s so busy filing frivolous lawsuits that don’t even pass the legal smell test that it would be almost a waste of time for him to put his name on any formal legal opinions.
Merideth may yet get an answer to his question on the House rule allowing an obfuscation of the Sunshine Law. In 2019, St. Louis lawyer Mark Pedroli, and his Sunshine and Government Accountability Project, sued the House, alleging their rule was unconstitutional. Schmitt isn’t defending the House in the case, because he personally wrote the letter to Gov. Mike Parson that helps make Pedroli’s case. That letter wasn’t a formal attorney general opinion either, but it suggested the governor should stop doing the same sort of redactions the House was performing.
“All of these communications are open. That is the law of the land,” Pedroli said recently, during a hearing before Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem. “House Rule 127 is a direct violation of the constitution. It’s obvious and everybody knows it.”
Even, perhaps, the state’s attorney general. Just don’t expect him to issue a formal opinion about the issue.
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March 21, 2022 at 01:30AM
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Messenger: Missouri attorney general has issued just one formal legal opinion in 3 years - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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