It didn’t have to be like this. While there are a lot of thoughts and emotions that come to mind when I think about the disaster that we all watched unfold in Afghanistan these last few weeks, I’ll save many of those for a later date. Today, I want to take some time to honor the 13 brave American heroes that were killed in the August 26th terrorist attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz of Wentzville, Missouri was just 20 years old when his life was cut short by that cowardly terrorist attack. He had decided to become a Marine in high school,...

On August 10, 1821, Missouri became the 24th state to enter the union. At the time, fewer than 150,000 folks called this frontier land home. While many things have changed over the last 200 years—including the number of families working, living, and growing here in our great state—one thing hasn’t changed: our no-nonsense attitude and penchant for getting things done.

It’s no wonder we earned the moniker the “Show Me State,” because we see right through all the noise and call things like we see them. It’s a trait we’ve seen in our leaders, like President Harry S. Truman, who...

Early last month, I wrote to you all about a bill I introduced to help bridge the digital divide—the E-BRIDGE Act. I’m proud to report my bill passed out of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week. Now, it will head to the whole House for consideration.

It’s not a big or flashy bill, it’s just six pages long—and one of those is the title. Only in Washington, right? What it lacks in length though, it more than makes up for in common sense.

See, it doesn’t create some massive new government program or try to re-...

Earlier this week the Office of Management and Budget finally withdrew their disastrous proposal that would have redefined “Metropolitan Statistical Area” to exclude cities between 50,000 and 100,000 residents. Such a drastic change would have upended decades of precedent, changed the way these small cities can access federal programs, and for what? Was this going to streamline some existing programs, save taxpayer dollars, or do anything to clean up the mess that is the federal bureaucracy?

No.

They did it just because they thought they could.

Indeed, their only...