Missouri’s incompetent attorney general wears no mask — and has no clothes

This week Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt attacked St. Louis officials for trying to protect their city’s residents from COVID-19 illness and death. “Incompetence can’t be masked,” Schmitt wrote, in what could be the most unintentionally autobiographical sentence in modern political history.

He is not much of an attorney. His lawsuits are routinely tossed out of court, dismissed before they even begin. But then, Schmitt doesn’t file cases in order to win, or even argue. He files them to get on TV.

He lost on Missouri Medicaid expansion. He lost on voter fraud and the 2020 election. He lost on the Affordable Care Act. He sued China. He’s suing the Biden administration. Poke your head out the door and he’ll sue you too, and charge you for it.

He routinely butts into local criminal cases, even seeking authority to prosecute crimes in St. Louis. He lost that one as well.

Schmitt’s performative pandering to the Republican base in hopes of winning higher office is not only craven, but dangerous: Now he’s sued Kansas City, to prevent it from imposing a very limited mask requirement to slow the spread of the much more contagious delta variant of COVID-19.

“This continued unconstitutional and unreasonable government overreach must stop,” Schmitt said Tuesday. Again, Eric, a legal lesson: The U.S. Supreme Court has said states can require vaccinations, a fact schoolkids already know. Public safety rules are quite constitutional.

The bigger concern is Schmitt’s willingness to sacrifice the health and safety of your kids on the altar of his ambition. “Requiring children to mask all day in school is not based in science, and is completely ridiculous,” he said.

Really? As many experts have noted, we’ve known for 500 years that masks do work. Karen Jubanyik, a Yale Medicine emergency medicine specialist, pointed out recently that “there are pockets in this country and entire other countries where there aren’t many people who are fully vaccinated and infection rates are high. I think it is important to realize it could be potentially dangerous to you, as well as other people, to not wear a mask.”

“Masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in mid-July. Since children under the age of 12 cannot yet be vaccinated against COVID, all elementary students, at minimum, should wear masks this fall.

Almost exactly a year ago, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson understood that some school districts — and local governments — would want to pursue their own strategies to mitigate the risk from COVID. “There is no ‘one-size -its-all’ approach,” the governor said. In fact, he said it so often that it became a mantra.

Yet from that day to this, led by Schmitt and Parson, Missouri Republicans have worked tirelessly to usurp local COVID decision making and impose their own top-down, no-compromise, one-size-fits-all rules, based on wishful thinking and political expediency rather than on health and safety.

The results are clear. COVID is killing Missourians, again. It threatens us all.

“I ask every parent in Kansas City, in Missouri and in Kansas, do you want your kid to fall sick with COVID-19?” asked Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. “Do you want to just roll the dice? Because the attorney general thinks it’s a decent idea.”

Kansas Citians must have the ability to decide for themselves if COVID prevention measures are reasonable and effective.

Years ago, science largely conquered polio, smallpox, tetanus, whooping cough, even the measles and mumps and chicken pox, through widespread inoculation. The Missouri attorney general — and U.S. Senate candidate — would throw away that progress, ostensibly in the name of “freedom.”

It’s true: Incompetence can’t be masked. Nor can ignorance, fear, or cynicism.