A controversial idea that could further hasten the Missouri Republican Party’s sprint to the right will have its day in court tomorrow in Vernon County.
At issue is the idea of candidate vetting, a practice that has already been implemented in several counties. It requires would-be candidates seeking to run as Republicans to fill out a questionnaire — described by some supporters as a “values survey” — as well as have their legal and financial records scrutinized before being given the green light to appear on the party’s primary ballot.
"The crazies want this," says a state GOP insider. "More broadly, the soul of the Republican Party is at stake here.”
He says that if vetting becomes the norm across the state, the implications are massive, as it will mean a small group of people controlling who is really a Republican. But he hopes the lawsuit fails, which he says would portend the demise of the practice writ large.
The hearing in court tomorrow concerns a lawsuit brought by the chairwoman of Vernon County's Republican Committee, Cyndia Haggard. The Vernon County Central Committee is one of the county parties that has adopted a vetting process — and refused to give its blessing to four sufficiently impure candidates.
Yet the county clerk, Adrienne Lee, overruled the committee and put the would-be candidates on the ballot. Haggard then filed suit against Lee.
"Cyndia Haggard sent the county clerk, Adrienne Lee, a list of the people that she could not place on the ballot for Republicans because the Republican Party had rejected their filing," explains Haggard's attorney, the swole gym rat Mark McCloskey. Haggard and McCloskey are now asking a judge to order Lee to keep those four names off the ballot in Vernon County.
McCloskey is on record saying he expects candidate vetting of this sort to “sweep the nation.” Other boosters of vetting include Bill Eigel and Will Scharf.
A vetting process would likely delegate more power to the far-right wing of the party in general and the Republican Association of Central Committees of Missouri specifically. Haggard is a founding director of that organization and their website is long on videos of McCloskey, both being interviewed and interviewing others. The organization released a vetting manual earlier this year saying that state Representative Chris Sander (R-Lone Jack), one of three openly gay state Republican elected officials, is a "poster boy for vetting with consequences." (By which they mean he’s a poster boy for how vetting will have the consequence of keeping politicians like Sander — described in the manual as wanting to change the definition of marriage as between "two individuals … won’t even commit to two ADULT individuals" — off the ballot.)
Recently, some in the pro-vetting crowd have pointed to Darrell McClanahan III as a reason to implement candidate vetting more broadly in the state. McClanahan is the former (honorary) KKK member who, despite that history, made it onto the GOP primary ballot for governor. Coincidentally, he lives in Vernon County, population 19,000.
Haggard herself wrote an email to the chair of the state Republican Party, Nick Myers, arguing that McClanahan's inclusion on the ballot and the public fallout that followed proves the party needs to implement vetting statewide.
"You remain committed to quantity over quality," she wrote. "Your lack of interest in protecting our platform's goals and ideals has now resulted in someone with KKK connections filing for governor."
McCloskey put it this way to the RFT: “As I said from the get-go when that hit the news, if they adopted our vetting process, Darrell would not have vetted and we would not have this situation.”
The GOP insider who talked to the RFT sees things a little differently.
"What if Darrell McClanahan would pass [the vetting process]?" he says. "I don't think that there's anything in the vetting questions about white supremacy or about anything like that."
But McClanahan, for his part, says he’s previously clashed with Haggard — he says she came to his church to tell everyone to “vote for Mark McCloskey and pray for Josh Hawley because Antifa was harassing him.” McClanahan says he objected, calling McCloskey “just another attorney” who will “play politics on abortion,” an assertion for which he was summoned to the church office and told to “be nicer when company is at church.” Whether that pugnacious attitude would be enough to bar him from the county ballot remains to be seen.
Interestingly, it’s the Democratic Party that may have recently put the question of vetting to the test, albeit with a far more informal process. After state Representative Sarah Unsicker (D-Shrewsbury) boasted about drinking basil lemonade with someone who’s questioned the Holocaust and used the n-word on Twitter, her party kicked her out of the committees she served on. And when she sought to run for governor as a Democrat, they refused to accept her filing fee.
Dave Roland, legal director with the Missouri Freedom Center, says the Democrats likely had the right to do what they did, just as he believes the GOP has the right to vet its candidates. But once a party accepts a filing fee — as with the Republicans and McClanahan — they may be out of luck.
The GOP has filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft over the McClanahan case, using its First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights as cause to compel Ashcroft to remove McClanahan from the ballot.
But Roland takes a dim view of their chances, citing a previous lawsuit he filed in 2022.
“I’m pretty confident the Republican Party is going to lose here,” he told St. Louis on the Air last month. “The court said, ‘Look, you accepted the filing fee. There’s no backsies here. By accepting the filing fee, you voluntarily chose to associate with this candidate. Now that you have buyer’s remorse doesn’t mean you get to remove him from the ballot.”
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