by Pa Rock
Missouri Voter
While Missouri has morphed into a reliably red state over the past quarter century with regard to candidates for political office, the show-me state can take a surprisingly liberal view of specific issues which make their way onto the ballot.
Over the past several years the people of Missouri have rolled back a gun "concealed-carry" bill that had been passed by our legislature (though it was later enacted anyway) and gutted a "right to work" bill that had been passed by our lobbyist-controlled, fundamentalist state legislature by passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights of workers in the state to organize and join unions. A couple of years ago we even enshrined in our state constitution the right of adults to partake in the recreational use of marijuana.
This year Missouri voters, while voting for the GOP candidate for President by a margin of over eighteen percentage points, also managed to pass some surprisingly progressive ballot initiatives. First, there was the issue of sports betting (which I do not regard as progressive because the gambling industry targets the poorest among us and lonely senior citizens). But nevertheless in a state with a high density of self-proclaimed, fundamentalist Christians, and in an election where almost three million votes were cast, sports betting managed to squeeze out a victory at the polls with just over four thousand votes statewide.
Missouri also had one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, again thanks to our rigid moral compass, the Missouri State Legislature - but a constitutional amendment passed by voters this year rolled that back and repealed the abortion ban making abortion legal in Missouri up to the time of fetal viability - while at the same time inexplicably returning anti-abortion zealot Josh Hawley to the US Senate! The abortion amendment passed with 52% of the state vote.
And after ensuring Missouri worker's right to join unions just a few years ago, the people of Missouri delivered another victory to working people with the passage of a constitutional amendment this year that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Missouri over the next two years and will force employers to provide earned sick leave to employees.
Missourians may have their collective heads stuck deep in the sand when it comes to candidates, but with policies that affect them directly, they seem to be paying more attention.
4 comments:
The disappointment for me was that Amendment 7 passed. That amendment was about non-citizen voting and ranked choice voting, two things that don't really have anything to do with the other. It was already a state law that non-citizens can't vote. I suspect that it was only added to the amendment to confuse voters about the real purpose of the amendment, to eliminate the statewide possibility of ranked choice voting. A yes vote prohibited ranked choice voting but it seemed to many that a no vote would allow non-citizens to vote. I think it was designed to seem that way. By eliminating ranked choice voting, we are stuck with the same old primary system that keeps the political parties functioning without much competition from outsiders. One of the negatives byproducts of the current system is that the parties tend to nominate more extreme candidates.
Thank you, Ranger Bob. I agree with your analysis of how our legislature carefully crafted Amendment 7 to confuse voters and try to head-off the possibility that Missouri voters might pass ranked-choice voting at some point in the future. Our state legislature generally does as much as it can to limit the power and thwart the will of its citizens. If a constitutional amendment is proposed by the Missouri State Legislature, chances are that does not represent the actual best interests of the state or its residents, and is probably designed to benefit the legislators, their corporate interests, or their churches.
Perhaps the original legislation should have been contested in court because, as Ranger Bob points out, that original bill pertained to more than one topic. Missouri has a strict one topic per bill constitutional limitation except with legislation pertaining to appropriations, debt and bond matters.
Article III, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution states:
No bill shall contain more than one subject which shall be clearly
expressed in its title, except bills enacted under the third
exception in section 37 of this article and general appropriation
bills, which may embrace the various subject and accounts for which
moneys are appropriated.
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