GOP candidate for MO governor wants to abolish education department, make gold legal tender

If Missouri Republican state Sen. Bill Eigel had it his way, Missourians would be able to pay their taxes and potentially shop for groceries with gold and silver.

He also wants to eliminate the state’s personal property tax and make it harder for citizen-led petitions to pass on the ballot. And he wants to abolish the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Eigel, first elected in 2016 from Weldon Spring, has filed a slew of bills to address these issues ahead of the legislative session and as he mounts a campaign for governor in 2024.

The Republican state senator’s campaign builds upon the central message of his time in the legislature — that state government is broken and Jefferson City needs a “reckoning.” It’s a message that he’s touting both through his proposed legislation and his public statements, which included a promise to burn “woke pornographic books” on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.

“We’ve been looking for this bold, conservative Missouri. And, yes, that fits great into a campaign theme, but it’s really just a continuation of the work I’ve been doing in the Missouri Senate,” Eigel said in a phone interview. “Our elected Republican leaders in Jefferson City don’t reflect the conservative values of the Republicans that are sending them there.”

But while Eigel vows to be the candidate to make government more conservative, his legislative career has been more defined by roadblocks and disputes instead of successfully passing bills, a record that his Republican opponents, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, will likely seize on.

Over the last several years, Eigel has been one of the de-facto leaders of a noisy hard-right faction of lawmakers that have gummed up the Senate and caused stark divisions and dysfunction among Republicans. While he has successfully pushed some bills that later became law such as 2018 legislation to reduce income taxes, his stated goal has been to limit government as much as possible.

“I don’t know that we’re looking for necessarily more legislation and more government to be passed in this state,” Eigel said. “In fact, we’ve got too much government.”

One of the more unusual bills that Eigel has filed for the upcoming year would make gold and silver legal tender in Missouri, requiring state government entities to accept gold and silver as forms of payment for taxes and public debts.

While the measure would not require businesses to accept gold and silver as payment for private uses, such as groceries, it would allow them to do so.

“This is just giving our citizens another option when it comes to how they can pay their bills,” Eigel said. “We live in an age where…the dollar is being inflated and abused by our friends up in Washington, DC.”

Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, in a phone call called the idea “absurd,” questioning how it would work in practice, particularly if a shopper paid with gold and wanted their change back.

“So when I go to a gas station and buy a Coke, a 20 ounce Coke, and I’d say, you know, here’s my gold… Are they gonna give me back money in gold?” Rizzo said. “The general takeaway on that issue is these guys are all wanting to go back, right? These guys all want to go backwards and they know that nostalgia feels good.”

Asked how receiving change back would work under his bill, Eigel reiterated that private companies would not be required to accept gold and silver as payment.

“For folks that decided they wanted to accept gold and silver as legal tender, we would let the free market kind of work those details out,” he said.

The Republican state senator has also railed against schools’ ability to teach lessons on the role of systemic racism in the U.S., echoing a familiar Republican refrain that pushes back against classroom discussions considered to be too liberal. Eigel, in a bill filed ahead of the 2024 session, takes that effort a step further and is pushing to outright abolish the state education department.

The legislation would give the governor power to transfer the powers of the department to other agencies as part of a reorganization plan. The agency’s education commissioner would continue to serve as an employee of the Missouri State Board of Education under the bill.

Eigel claimed the agency has become too bureaucratic, creating too many mandates for the state’s public schools. If elected, he said he would be “defunding many of the non-needed aspects of that department.”

“This is a direct attack on one of Jefferson City’s biggest bureaucracies,” he said.

Ashcroft, however, questioned the constitutionality of Eigel’s legislation, saying in a statement that abolishing the department would require a change to the constitution, which establishes the state board of education.

“It looks like he wants to continue his perfect record by introducing legislation that has no chance of passage, and in some cases, isn’t even constitutional,” Ashcroft said.

Missouri House Majority Leader Crystal Quade, who is running for governor as a Democrat, also attacked Eigel’s proposed legislation in a statement to The Star, saying that his push to abolish the state education department while vowing to burn books “sounds like a bad joke.”

“This is a candidate for governor who isn’t serious about making Missourians’ lives better,” Quade said. “Instead of fighting to make sure our government works better for the people, he’s focused on shoring up the far-right’s support for his campaign.”

The Springfield Democrat acknowledged, however, that she did agree with another piece of legislation from Eigel that would limit foreign ownership of farmland, an issue that has loomed over the race for governor and highlights a 2013 law that has since allowed foreign entities to own more than 100,000 acres across the state.

One central part of Eigel’s campaign strategy has been his push to eliminate taxes, particularly the state’s personal property tax. A bill he filed ahead of the upcoming session would require local governments to gradually reduce personal property assessments, with a goal of eventually eliminating the tax altogether.

Eigel has also filed a bill that would limit Missourians’ ability to file amendments to the state constitution, raising the threshold that measures have to pass when they reach the ballot. The bill would also outright ban citizen-led ballot measures that seek to raise sales taxes on food and taxes on real and personal property.

The bill is part of a Republican-led effort to whittle away at the state’s initiative petition process. That push comes in the wake of Missouri voters approving several liberal-leaning policies through changes to the constitution such as marijuana legalization and as abortion rights supporters consider a potential ballot measure in 2024.

Another bill from Eigel would require that all ballots cast in an election be cast in paper form and counted by hand rather than machines. The legislation would also empower any registered voter to challenge the results of an election through an election contest in court.

The legislation builds upon years of false claims of voter fraud and election irregularities touted by former President Donald Trump supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden.

Eigel said in an interview that he doesn’t “trust machines,” saying that he doesn’t think his bill will lead to delays but will “restore a lot of the transparency in our elections that really has been missing since 2020.”

The Republican state senator has also pushed to further loosen laws around guns in Missouri, which already has one of the loosest firearm regulations in the country. Ahead of the legislative session, he filed a bill called the “Anti-Red Flag Gun Seizure Act” that would attempt to nullify federal orders that seek to confiscate a person’s guns.

The bill would also block federal funding that could be given to local agencies for enforcing confiscations of guns, firearm accessories or ammunition. The legislation comes after Biden signed legislation last year that offers financial incentives to local agencies that enact red flag laws.

While Eigel and other Missouri Republicans push for looser gun laws, polling released last year from Saint Louis University and British pollster YouGov suggests widespread support for some gun control measures including criminal and mental health background checks and age requirements.

As the Republican state senator mounts his campaign for governor through a platform of hard-right legislation, Eigel is trying to cast himself as a break from Republican leadership that he feels is not conservative enough.

“The anger that I’m sustaining and feeling from actual Republican voters is not because the Republican principles of less government and more protection of rights is wrong,” he said. “It’s because statewide leadership…Mike Parson, Mike Kehoe and Jay Ashcroft have been promising things and promising a protection of rights that they’re simply not delivering on.”

But for Rizzo, the top Democrat in the Missouri Senate, a Missouri under the leadership of Eigel would be chaos.

“If you enjoy chaos and dysfunction like you see everyday on the Senate floor, Bill Eigel’s your guy,” he said. “We have seen him…throughout his career in the Senate become gradually more and more chaotic in his legislation.”