Adam Watson (00:00)
Welcome back to “Simplifying the State,” the podcast where we break down politics so you don’t have to try to figure out why the French government has collapsed yet again and why, when Emmanuel Macron appoints a new prime minister — supposedly later this week — France will have gone through five prime ministers in the last two years. It’s kind of crazy if you think about it. OK, so — as always, I am Adam Watson. You may notice Nicholas is not here, and that’s because this is a little special episode that we have.

So in a few seconds, you’ll hear my conversation with Missouri state Rep. Ian Mackey. We talked about a number of things, including the recent bill that banned cellphones in all Missouri schools. We also talked about what might be next for him in politics at the end of this, which is his final term as a Missouri state representative. And also, you know, kind of the Republican effort to gerrymander Missouri, possibly gain another House seat in the midterms.

So yeah, here is that conversation now.

Adam Watson (01:04)
Welcome, Rep. Mackey. Thank you so much for sitting down to talk.

Ian Mackey (01:09)
Sure, happy to be here.

Adam Watson (01:10)
OK, so obviously, there is a new phone ban in Missouri, and that’s kind of what I wanted to talk with you about today. So my first question is: you voted in favor of the bill, which included the phone ban. Would you be willing to maybe kind of take us through your motivations and your reasons for voting in favor of this bill?

Ian Mackey (01:34)
Sure, yeah. So — for a little while during the session, the cellphone ban was a standalone piece of legislation. And as a standalone piece of legislation, it wasn’t something that I supported. I didn’t think that it needed to be in state policy. I thought schools were doing a pretty good job of handling that decision and that policy at a local level when it came to cellphone use. But as often happens, especially on our education bills — all of us, you know, there’s 163 in the House and 34 in the Senate, and we all have ideas for how to improve our schools and how to improve our education system — what ended up happening was a lot of different ideas all started getting piled together into one big omnibus education bill. And that included lots — mostly good things, almost everything. There was stuff I agreed with. There was a curriculum change around reading that I didn’t agree with. There was a cellphone ban that I didn’t agree with, but neither of those were such strong disagreements that I thought I could oppose the bill. And in fact, I actually had language in that bill to prohibit schools from using zero-tolerance discipline policies when they’re disciplining students for various actions. You know, lots more reasons to support that bill than not support it. And so, you know, when it was written about, when the press was sharing their stories about it and there were headlines made about it, it obviously became known as the cellphone ban.

The chief sponsors of that bill were also sponsors of that standalone legislation. I think it was one of the first pieces put into that bill. And obviously, it was something that affected every district and got a lot of folks’ attention. So it became known as the cellphone bill, but it was way, way more than that.

Adam Watson (03:05)
Yeah. So could you sort of — I’m not sure if you 100% know the reason — but could you share why the ban was for the whole day, including lunch and free periods, as opposed to more harsh language when it comes to class time, like why it’s a full-day cellphone ban, if you know the reason?

Ian Mackey (03:23)
Yeah, that’s probably a better question for the sponsors of that bill. You can search, and I can help you with that if you need to. But you could search the House website and find that standalone cellphone bill before it became this big bill. I know on the Democratic side, one of the sponsors of that standalone bill was Kathy Steinhoff, a retired teacher from Columbia. I don’t remember if her language had those carveouts or not. But you know, the other sponsors of that legislation — they would be able to articulate why they felt the need to say a total ban from the beginning of day to the end. I don’t really have enough information to speak on their behalf, especially because I was opposed to it in its standalone form. So I’m probably not the right person to ask. I absolutely don’t think a ban is necessary, particularly when students are on free time. You know, when you guys at Clayton have an open campus, I mean, the idea that your cellphones would be policed as you’re going out to lunch or sitting outside in the grass or whatever else you might be doing is just, you know, silly, really.

And I know you all are texting from your laptops anyway, because I talk to the parents.

Adam Watson (04:25)
Yeah, no — we’ve certainly gotten some workarounds around that, and that’s become a pretty common thing.

Ian Mackey (04:31)
Uh-huh. Well, and that’s the case with, you know, I know you’re talking about the cellphone ban specifically, but as somebody who’s been down there for seven years, there’s a lot of different bills around the adults and most of them are geriatric in Jefferson City and their ideas about how to regulate through state law the interactions of youth, children, young people and technology — it just could not be more ignorant sometimes. Just such a disconnect. The idea that they wouldn’t think you guys could text from your laptops. And so many of the other ideas that we see — and they come from good places. They come from wanting to keep you guys safe and wanting to keep you guys engaged in school. Their motivations are definitely aboveboard and terrific, but their way of executing it and trying to figure out — I think you guys could probably teach them a lot more about technology and a lot more about how to be safe on technology and how to use technology responsibly than they’re ever going to be able to teach you because they don’t know anything about it.

Adam Watson (05:32)
Yeah. Kind of get into that point. I understand the point that they often make that phones can distract from education. But do you feel — or did you feel when you were voting — that there should be exceptions when phones might be used as educational tools, such as photojournalism, recording interviews? For our journalism class, we use our phones a lot to record stuff and use them as reference tools and other class-appropriate activities. Was that something that you and some of your colleagues who didn’t support the phone ban, but overall voted for the bill felt?

Ian Mackey (06:08)
So I think those exceptions are in the bill. If I’m not mistaken, I think the educational exceptions are still in the bill. So, a teacher — I assume there’s a process or policy for a teacher to either have an ongoing standing sort of exception or to have an exception for a certain assignment. And I don’t think any of that is prohibited under the language.

Adam Watson (06:26)
OK. Yeah, I think I may have misread the Clayton policy, but I don’t think I saw anything about any educational exception. I think I saw “unless directed by a teacher,” although I’m not sure 100% if that’s a one-and-done situation, or in this class, you can always use your phones for X thing.

Ian Mackey (06:43)
Yeah, so I think that is the educational exception. That language “directed by a teacher” — that’s saying a teacher has decided that they want to use the phones for an educational purpose, and then they’re allowed to do that.

Adam Watson (06:56)
Right. Yeah, because I don’t think teachers have really talked about that much, primarily because I think it was passed and then there was like a chaotic process where the teachers didn’t really get any training because of the time between the passing and then between the lawyers interpreting what it meant and then the districts interpreting what it meant and all that stuff. Yeah. So mobile phones have kind of become an essential way to communicate in our lives.

Ian Mackey (07:15)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Watson (07:21)
You kind of talked about, particularly during emergencies — such as the tornado we had here in St. Louis last May — do you see a total phone ban as something that might generate more anxiety among students, knowing that they have limited ability to communicate during emergency circumstances?

Ian Mackey (07:39)
Sure, yeah, I think so. I think that’s one reason why the ban doesn’t make sense. I mean, most adults are probably — you know, adults who support it, the bill sponsors, maybe even some of them too — it’s a little hypocritical to think that it’s OK to use our phones all day and be connected to the outside world and talk about what’s going on outside the four walls that we’re confined in, but it’s not OK for young people or students to do that. It’s, I think, just hypocritical and unrealistic.

Adam Watson (08:08)
Moving in the same direction as that safety issue, though — as you, I’m sure you know, the recent school shooting in Minnesota and many others — gun violence in schools is top of mind for me, and so do many of my peers. I wanted to know what your take was on this bill, which has a lot in it about school safety. This bill certainly aims at school safety and focuses on the threat of phones, but also kind of does nothing to focus on the threat of guns or weapons or other stuff like that on school campuses.

Ian Mackey (08:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is definitely the thinking of folks who control Jefferson City, the party and the folks who run it down there — zero interest in getting anywhere near any sort of common-sense gun reform legislation. Their ideas of keeping you safe involve anything other than doing anything about the prevalence of guns and assault weapons and easy access that even kids have to those weapons. They’re not going to touch that at all because it’s complicated for them to do so. It’s much easier to ban your cellphones.

Adam Watson (09:23)
Yeah. Much easier to find something they can easily ban, get a win than do something that’s more comprehensive. So some states and other school districts, including Texas, are requiring lock boxes or mandatory confiscation of phones at the door. I know that was not included in the language of the bill. Do you know if that was something proposed as it was being debated?

Ian Mackey (09:32)
I don’t remember a lot of conversations around that specific piece. I’d have to go back and look at some of the standalone bills to see if they included something like that. That’s really prescriptive. We really don’t, even when we pass — and this bill is probably one of the strictest all-out bans that affects every district — generally, we are not a state that tells schools exactly how to do something or exactly what to do, even in the instance of this ban. We’re not really a state that goes into great detail about telling schools how they should be going about following the law. Locally, for the most part, local control is really how our schools are run. You have states where the governor has a lot of control over the schools. That’s not the case here. You have states where mayors have lots of control over schools. That’s not the case here. Our school boards really run their districts, so in most instances, they’re given discretion to figure out how they want to implement.

Adam Watson (10:49)
Yeah. Real quick, though, moving away from this bill: as you know, at the president’s request, the governor has called a special session of the Missouri Legislature to consider a mid-decade redistricting of House seats. Under the Republican proposal, Democrats could potentially lose a House seat — specifically Emanuel Cleaver’s in the Fifth District. What’s your perspective on this, and how do you and your colleagues plan to approach it?

Ian Mackey (11:19)
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s clear the reason they’re doing it mid-decade for the first time ever in our state is because they are afraid they’re going to lose the next election nationally. They’re afraid they’re going to lose the House of Representatives. That means Democrats control the Oversight Committee. That means Democrats begin investigating Donald Trump and his administration the way every House Oversight Committee has done since the beginning of our country, to whoever is in the other branch of government. That’s their job. That’s what they’re going to do. But they’re terrified of that.

So they’re going to do everything they can to try to hold power, including changing the rules of the game midway through the game. Think about any game you’ve played — board game with friends. I like board games; I like to play cards too — and there’s always somebody at the table who gets so mad because they’re losing, they just start changing the rules. They start saying, “No, that’s not a rule now; this is the rule now.” They blame the game, they blame the rules, and then they try to change them because they just can’t stand losing. They cannot stand the thought of losing. And that’s what they’re doing.

They’ll succeed. They’ll get it done. It’ll be challenged in court. I have hope there are a lot of reasons why the court would throw this out, most specifically the fact that they’re using census data from 2020 to draw maps in 2025. I think that’s pretty cut-and-dry illegal. So hopefully, for that and maybe other reasons, it gets tossed out.

The reason they didn’t do this in 2022 — three years ago — was because they were afraid of making these districts too competitive. There are Democrats in Missouri. We make up about 40% of the population. Under the new lines, Emanuel Cleaver will have a fight on his hands to hang on to the seat. He may or may not prevail. I think most folks understand that if we had another year like 2008, you could end up with three Democrats from Missouri and not just one. They are going to end up having to make more districts competitive. So this is a fight already in 2022 in their caucus, and the red map now, they’re going to possibly regret it.

Adam Watson (13:40)
Right. Yeah, definitely. It just kind of seems, if you think about it for more than 10 seconds, it’s insane that they’re allowed to do this — that they’re allowed to change the districts mid-decade to pick up a House seat in Missouri or any other state. Redistricting shouldn’t be allowed mid-decade, but you know.

Ian Mackey (14:05)
Yeah, I totally agree. They point to other states like Illinois that are gerrymandered for Democrats. That’s true. The difference is we did it at the right time. We followed the rules. We did it when everybody did it. Doing it midway through is unprecedented and really embarrassing and really shouldn’t stand.

Adam Watson (14:25)
Absolutely. This is your last term in the Missouri House of Representatives. I’m sure many people are wondering what’s next for you in politics. Have you considered running for another office, like the U.S. House seat in St. Louis, or do you see this as the end of your political career? Or maybe the Missouri Senate? What might be next after this term?

Ian Mackey (14:51)
No immediate plans to run for the state Senate or the U.S. House seat. I am a big supporter of Wesley Bell and the job he’s doing in Congress. I have a gentleman named Steve Butz who’s been in the House with me for the last several years who’s running for the state Senate seat, and I support him strongly. So no interest in that at all. But I’ll stay involved in politics. Before I was elected, I was managing folks’ campaigns, helping them run for office, and I plan to continue to do that afterward.

Adam Watson (15:16)
All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today about all this stuff. Thank you for your time. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Ian Mackey (15:25)
Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Watson (15:27)
All right, thank you so much for listening to “Simplifying the State.” We hope you enjoyed this episode with our special guest, Rep. Ian Mackey. If you did enjoy the episode, please be sure to rate it. It would mean a lot to us if you did. It would also mean a lot if you followed the show wherever you’re listening — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever.

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