For someone who has never been elected to anything, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sure is comfortable wielding his state office to push his own ideological agenda. In his six months on the job, Bailey has repeatedly shown an eagerness to use — and, we'd argue, misuse — his official powers to launch blatantly ideological crusades while pushing the envelope of his legal authority.

It's all part of an obvious effort to woo the far-right Republican base, which he will need to win election to the office in his own right next year. Bailey's latest front in this cynical campaign is his highly unusual intervention on behalf of a white former Kansas City police officer convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a Black man.

Bailey's predecessor as attorney general, Eric Schmitt, routinely used the powers of his office in questionable ways: suing China over the pandemic, suing dozens of Missouri school districts over their masking policies, even suing for the emails of Mizzou-connected journalists to harass them for negative press coverage. These political stunts — which had nothing to do with the attorney general's official duty to represent Missouri's legal interests — helped Schmitt win a U.S. Senate seat last year.

The lesson clearly wasn't lost on Bailey, who was Gov. Mike Parson's general counsel when Parson appointed him to fill Schmitt's vacancy as attorney general. Upon taking office Jan. 3, Bailey immediately adopted Schmitt's strategy of hyper-politicizing his tax-funded authority — then turned it up to 11.

During his short tenure, Bailey has filed or continued multiple showy lawsuits of questionable seriousness against the Biden administration, including litigation over policy regarding a southern U.S. border that sits almost 1,000 miles from Missouri. He has tried to ban gender-affirming care not just for trans kids but adults as well, raising eyebrows nationally. He dropped the effort when it turned out to be too extreme even for Parson and other prominent Republicans.

Then there was Bailey's determined attempt to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner from office. She needed to go, but not with the dangerous precedent of an unelected state official unilaterally overruling city voters.

Bailey is currently using a transparently phony fiscal argument, and legal powers he claims to have but doesn't, to prevent Missourians from being allowed to vote on the state's draconian new abortion ban. As we've outlined before, Bailey presumes to overrule an official state audit that says a successfully passed constitutional amendment reversing the abortion ban would create about $51,000 in annual governmental costs. Bailey insists the true cost would be billions of dollars per year, based on lost future tax revenue from aborted fetuses.

In addition to foisting an unsupported and ideologically loaded assertion into the sober realm of fiscal projections, Bailey has no legal authority to overrule the state auditor on the issue. A Cole County judge this month called the very claim "preposterous." Bailey is appealing. He will almost certainly lose, but in the meantime, he has managed to freeze pro-choice activists' ballot campaign, preventing them from even gathering signatures until the legal dispute is resolved. How convenient.

It is in all of this context that Bailey on Monday filed a brief in the case of former Kansas City detective Eric DeValkenaere, who was convicted of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action in the 2021 fatal shooting of Black resident Cameron Lamb.

DeValkenaere shot Lamb as he backed his truck into his garage after a car chase involving his girlfriend. The defense claimed Lamb had pointed a gun at DeValkenaere's partner; the prosecution maintained the gun found on the scene was planted and that in fact Lamb was unarmed.

DeValkenaere requested a bench trial before a judge with no jury. The judge ultimately ruled the officers had no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed and no right to be on the property. He sentenced DeValkenaere to six years in prison. DeValkenaere is appealing his conviction, as he has every right to do.

Bailey's motion seeking to overturn DeValkenaere's conviction is extremely unusual. Normally when a state attorney general files a motion in a criminal conviction that's being appealed, it is to back the prosecution — as Schmitt did when he sought to keep Black defendants Kevin Strickland and Lamar Johnson in prison for murders for which both were ultimately exonerated.

Bailey's 67-page motion in the Kansas City case asserts that "the evidence credited by the trial court does not, as a matter of law, support the trial court's findings of guilt." It offers no new evidence, but merely presumes to substitute the legal judgement of Bailey's office — which had no involvement in the original trial — for that of the prosecutor who presented the case and the judge who presided over it.

The attorney general's website displays a "mission statement" saying the office is duty-bound "to serve as the People's lawyer." It says nothing about harassing Missourians for their personal medical decisions, preventing them from voting on crucial issues like abortion rights, or intervening in a racially charged criminal case in a way that appears designed to leverage white grievance within the Republican base.

And it certainly doesn't say that only people on the right end of the political spectrum get to have their interests represented by the state's publicly funded top legal official. But six months in, that's the clear message from this attorney general.

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