Several challenge Hartzler in 4th Congressional District race

For more than three decades, Missouri’s 4th Congressional District belonged to Democrat Ike Skelton.

Although the territory was at least marginally Republican, voters in the west-central part of the state regularly returned Skelton to Capitol Hill as a moderate who looked after the military interests in the district, which covers all of Cass County.

As longtime chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he could protect the programs at Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base. The B-2 stealth bomber fleet is anchored near Knob Noster in large part because of Skelton’s particular clout.

Then came 2010 and Vicky Hartzler.

She convinced voters that a right-wing Republican better represented their outlook than a right-leaning Democrat. She scored an upset victory.

Two years later, Democrat Teresa Hensley posed a relatively well-funded challenge. Still, Hartzler breezed to re-election with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Now Skelton has passed away, and Hartzler faces a field of less prominent candidates. Voters have an increasingly clear record of where she stands. Reliably to the right.

The American Conservative Union gives her a voting score of 80 percent, about four percentage points to the right of the average House Republican.

Likewise, she gets a 75 from Citizens Against Government Waste, 100 from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 90 from Gun Owners of America, 88 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 100 from the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee.

Predictably, labor, abortion-rights and liberal groups give her correspondingly low scores. The Human Rights Campaign gives her a zero for opposing same-sex marriage. She gets the same nil score from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and a 9 from the AFL-CIO. Both Planned Parenthood and abortion-rights group NARAL give her zeroes, as does the American Civil Liberties Union.

The most recent campaign finance filings show Hartzler far ahead in fundraising, having pulled in more than $700,000.

Her closest challenger on the money front was Democrat Nate Irvin, at about $8,300. The others had no funds to report.

Hartzler’s Republican challenger is John Webb, a former Kansas City police officer from rural Cass County. He’s now a self-employed information technology professional.

“John is a constitutional fiscal conservative,” said his wife, Mary. “He believes that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document. God gave the men the inspiration to come up with the things they came up with in the document. It was a collective of people who had a faith, and through faith they came up with their document. We should get back to its original powers.”

Irvin, the Democrat, is a small-business owner and fireworks distributor from Columbia. He’s critical of Congress generally — “The 113th Congress is the most ineffective and partisan in our nation’s history” — and Hartzler and the Republican majority in particular.

“They have utterly failed to live up to their promises, disgraced our longstanding tradition of pragmatism, risked our economic standing in the global economy, and sold out the interests of the American people, for personal political gain,” his campaign said in an email. “Good government is a cooperative enterprise.”

Two Libertarians are also running for the House seat: Randy Langkraehr and Herschel Young.

Langkraehr is a real estate broker with a bookkeeping business who has run for Congress several times and governor once.

Young is a former Cass County commissioner who lost his elected position because of a felony conviction for assault.

This story was originally published July 26, 2014 at 12:51 AM with the headline "Several challenge Hartzler in 4th Congressional District race."