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The Republican state senator from Springfield, Mo., entered the crowded race for the GOP nomination last summer but dropped out fairly quickly. He was underfunded and not very well-known. He never had a chance.

But last week, Dixon was downright gubernatorial.

In circulated around the state, Dixon asked Gov. Jay Nixon to call a special session of the Missouri Legislature to address the state’s public defender crisis.

“Leadership finds a way,� Dixon wrote.

In Missouri, the failure to fund the public defenders’ office has been boiling over for more than a decade.

Since at least 2009, the office has been the in the nation. The result is that justice is delayed for indigent defendants charged with various crimes. The Missouri Constitution guarantees those citizens a proper defense, but with public defenders across the state carrying ridiculous caseloads — some as high as 200 — providing an adequate defense is but a dream.

In Missouri there is little political will to help poor people accused of crimes.

As far back as 2010, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, a Democrat like Nixon, was calling the public defender caseload issue “contrived.â€�

Dixon begs to differ.

“They really need to get the caseloads under control,� he told me Friday. “It’s a legitimate issue. The numbers bear it out.�

In the special session he wanted Nixon to call, Dixon was hoping legislators would create a pilot program that would allow judges in two counties to appoint private attorneys to represent indigent defendants. He doesn’t expect Nixon will accept his request. In fact, he fears that the governor is now making moves that would get the state’s head of the public defender system, Michael Barrett, fired.

Last month, in a move that garnered national headlines, , citing a state law that he believes gives him the authority to do so. Nixon refused and last week got a court to agree with the governor. Then he appointed three new members to the Public Defender Commission and suggested that he hopes the new appointees will help “return to its focus of providing proper legal representation to indigent Missourians.�

In fact, that’s precisely what Barrett was trying to do with sharply worded letters to the governor in each of the past two years criticizing him for withholding funds from the deeply underfunded office.

If anybody’s playing politics here, Dixon says, it’s the governor.

“I understand that the governor doesn’t want to be embarrassed,� Dixon said, “but there’s a better way to handle this. Michael Barrett is excellent. You have to have somebody in that position who is willing to speak truth to power.�

Dixon took an unusual route to his position as a key legislative defender of the judicial system in Missouri and its role in protecting constitutional rights.

He’s not an attorney, but after the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jack Goodman, R-Mount Vernon, left because of term limits, Dixon, who had served on the committee, was asked to take it over.

He went to school on understanding the judicial system, leaning on both Democrat and Republican lawyers. He’s received high marks from people in the legal community on both sides of his aisle for protecting the judicial system from attack.

To Dixon, the public defender issue should be a higher priority for both the governor and for members of his party. The rights to a fair trial are every bit as important as other constitutional issues that members of both parties tend to elevate, he says.

“The courts are a core constitutional function of government,� Dixon said. “It’s not political.�

Dixon thinks Nixon should have taken the case Barrett assigned him.

It would have elevated the issue even further and brought necessary attention to the fact that in Missouri poor citizens don’t have the access to their court system that the constitution requires.

Instead, the governor chose to take Barrett to the metaphorical woodshed. Then he added two law-and-order ex-sheriffs to the board, which, Dixon notes, the entire time this controversy about underfunding had been raging.

The senator hopes the governor isn’t orchestrating a “petty purge� with the intent of Barrett being fired. “This is the biggest game of manipulation I’ve seen,� Dixon said. “It’s really unfortunate.�