Mayor Lucas goes to Washington

Daniel Desrochers

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas posed for pictures, shook hands, hugged and back slapped his way through the Capital Hilton in Washington this Wednesday, where he was in town for the winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors.

Lucas is the chair of the conference’s criminal and social justice committee and it was in that role that he moderated a panel on how to combat gun violence in cities. He was less moderator and more facilitator, handing the floor over to six speakers who talked about either projects they’ve tried in their cities or — in the case of officials from the Department of Justice — told the cities about resources they can use and asked for their help in tracking down illegal guns.

But when the floor was briefly opened to questions and comments from other mayors, it quickly became a venting session. The mayors seemed particularly concerned about the root causes of violence — how can they make an impact directly with communities? How can they stop the cycle of violence?

The questions may take on a particular salience in Kansas City, where 2020, 2021 and 2022 hold the records for most, third most and second most gun murders in a year, respectively. With a Congress that seems unable to pass many restrictions on gun sales and a state legislature that has passed a law handcuffing cities from coordinating with federal agencies to enforce gun laws, Lucas has to come up with creative ways to address the underlying causes of gun violence, rather than the tools used to commit the crimes.

When asked what he wanted the most from the federal government, Lucas kept it simple.

“Money,” Lucas said. “Money that is, importantly, related not just to more enforcement. Every now and then they’re very good at saying ‘all right, we’re gonna give you a grant, you can hire 18 more cops.’ That’s wonderful. The problem in Kansas City right now actually isn’t money to hire cops, we have actually more money than we need in our budget — let me say it another way to not piss off everybody— we have more money allocated for police officer hiring than our police department’s able to spend right now because recruiting is a challenge. So we don’t actually need that. What we need fundamentally, is something that makes permanent programs like Aim4Peace.”

Finding that kind of funding might be difficult in the new Congress, which is already ensnared in a battle over whether to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans have a narrow majority in the House, which will make passing any spending bills a herculean effort amid a caucus that is loudly calling for restrictions on government spending.

Crime often gets attention but, Lucas said, among politicians on the right, he feels there is a fetishization of crime during election years that tells people “the cities are scary. People are scary. Don’t believe them and trust me.”

“I hope that we say all right, with elections being gone, cities don’t have to be punching bags our crime doesn’t have to be something to exploit,” Lucas said. “But instead, it’s something that actually needs a real solution.”

Lucas will head to the White House alongside a bipartisan group of mayors today for a meeting in the East Room with Biden.

When asked whether he would try to spend even more time in Washington by challenging Sen. Josh Hawley for his seat in 2024, Lucas didn’t take the bait.

“All I’m thinking about right now is how we make sure Missouri, and I’ll say this for the entire state, can be in the best position to become a safer state, a growing state, a state where I think a lot of the successes of Kansas City aren’t just a Kansas City issue,” he said. “So whatever that entails in the years ahead, I’m happy to explore it.”

More from Missouri

In recent years, Missouri voters have used ballot measures to support progressive policies like recreational marijuana and expanding Medicaid, despite sending more Republicans to Jefferson City than ever. Now those Republicans in Jefferson City are looking at legislation to make it harder to amend the constitution.

Here are headlines from across the state:

And across Kansas

A Lawrence man who left a voicemail for Rep. Jake LaTurner saying “this is a threat on your life” was allowed to cross-examine the Kansas Representative on Wednesday at a trial over allegations he threatened to murder LaTurner. Chase Neill is serving as his own attorney and asked LaTurner if he would believe a constituent if they told him they were a messenger from God. Neill was found guilty.

The latest from Kansas City

In Kansas City …

Have a news tip? Send it along to ddesrochers@kcstar.com

Odds and ends

More strongly worded letters

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach this week became the latest Republican to send a strongly worded letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Department of Justice’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.

While Garland has already appointed a special prosecutor for the case, the letter asks him to answer a series of questions about its investigation into Biden and asks him to prevent the White House from meddling in the investigation.

“The President appears to believe that the rules do not apply to him,” Kobach wrote in the letter. “Our nation expects the sitting President of the United States to approach with delicacy and discretion his obligation to protect the most important government secrets.”

Garland has gotten a pile of letters from Republicans in the aftermath of revelations that classified documents were found in Biden’s office the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and at his home in Delaware, as they pounce on his political vulnerability. Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Mark Alford, both Republicans from Missouri, sent letters to Garland last week.

Brown on Hawley

Former Sen. Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican who lost reelection and failed to win a Senate seat in New Hampshire years later, sent a letter to Hawley asking him to withdraw his support from an antitrust bill sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat.

Klobuchar’s bill, introduced last Congress as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, would give federal antitrust agencies more power to regulate large online platforms — think Amazon or Meta, the company that owns Facebook — and allow the government to issue civil penalties and injunctions against the companies.

Hawley has long been an opponent of big tech companies; he wrote a book called The Tyranny of Big Tech. His latest push was to get Congress to ban TikTok from government phones.

In his letter, Brown called the bill a “big government intrusion into some of our country’s most successful private sector companies.”

Porn messaging

The 2024 election is more than a year and a half away, but that isn’t stopping Democratic candidate Lucas Kunce from needling Hawley, who he’s hoping to challenge.

This week, Kunce put out a video criticizing speeches Hawley has made about pornography — which has been part of Missouri’s senior senator’s messaging about masculinity.

“Josh Hawley doesn’t care about working people,” Kunce said in a press release. “He doesn’t care about Missourians who grew up like I did. Seems like the only thing the man cares about right now is pornography.”

Hawley isn’t backing away from his hard line approach to what he calls traditional masculinity. In a fundraising email on Thursday, his campaign

“The radical Left is poisoning our men,” the email says. “They say that being strong and masculine is ‘toxic masculinity.’ They want to make our men’s spirits diminutive, their courage nonexistent, and their protective instincts GONE altogether.”

It then goes on to say Hawley is “leading the fight to save America’s men.”

This campaign might become somewhat of a locker room towel whipping contest. Kunce, too, has tried to answer some of the Republican Party’s performative masculinity (think using blowtorches in campaign ads) with performative masculinity of his own, like climbing a 35-foot-high iron beam.

But Kunce won’t be alone in the race to challenge Hawley. A Columbia community activist named December Meadows announced she’d run in the Democratic primary this week. She describes herself as a “foul-mouth, no-nonsense radical liberal,” according to the Columbia Tribune.

Happy Friday

Here’s an interesting look at a writer’s diary in New York City in the 80s. It’s the Lunar New Year. Welcome the year of the rabbit with some wontons. Here’s Miley Cyrus’ new-ish song.

Enjoy your weekend.

Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent
Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent

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