Kansas City Star. March 21, 2024.
Editorial: Missouri politicians are pushing to centralize power by restricting citizen petitions
One great thing about Missouri: When legislators won’t act, voters can — and will.
A referendum process allows Show-Me State residents a significant voice in their government by amending the state constitution. Missouri voters used that process to expand Medicaid in 2020, then to decriminalize marijuana in 2022. And with the 2024 election on the horizon, there is a good chance that voters could soon choose to end the abortion restrictions that some conservatives favor.
Republicans in the General Assembly don’t like these developments much.
That’s why — once again — GOP legislators are pushing to overhaul the citizen-led initiative process. Their proposal would entrench authority in Jefferson City while diminishing the political power of voters in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Most important, the proposal would make it much more difficult for Missourians to have a say in how their state is run.
The folks behind the new proposal say that’s a good thing.
“I think it’s important to mention that the Missouri Constitution is the highest document of our state,” Rep. Brad Hudson, a Cape Fair Republican, told the MissouriNet radio network. The point of the new proposal is to “make it a process where it’s not too easy” for voters to amend that document.
Missouri voters should be dubious.
Right now, citizen-led initiatives can pass with a simple majority of votes. If 100,000 voters weigh in on a measure, it takes 50,001 votes to pass.
Republicans in the legislature last spring attempted to raise that threshold to 57% of voters. That measure failed.
Now Hudson and seven other Republicans are back with a proposal that would keep the simple majority requirement, but only as a start. A referendum would also have to get a majority of the vote in five of the state’s eight congressional districts.
It’s a supermajority by a different name.
The idea, plainly, is to shift Missouri’s balance of power away from the two urban congressional districts in Kansas City and St. Louis to give rural voters a veto over initiatives — no matter what a majority of the state’s voters say.
“What you have with concurrent majority ratification is you got buy-in from different areas of the state,” Hudson said. “It makes sure that rural areas have a say in the process and that’s only appropriate when we are amending the highest document of our state.”
Rural Missourians would no doubt be delighted by that idea. So it’s important to note that the proposed reform wouldn’t just disempower city voters. It would also centralize power with Jefferson City politicians.
Why? Because legislators draw the congressional maps. The proposal would let them put their thumb on the referendum scales.
Redistricting is already an ugly process. Remember, legislative Republicans attempted to gerrymander Kansas City Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, out of his seat during the 2022 redistricting process. That effort failed and new maps were only passed after a long stalemate. Imagine the map-drawing battles that might be fought if the fate of citizen initiatives — over abortion and other hot-button issues — was hanging in the balance?
No thanks.
One thing that makes the referendum process great is that it lets voters act when their representatives refuse to do so. That’s also the reason those elected officials want to change the process. They want the power for themselves.
But Missouri voters shouldn’t let them do so lightly. Voters in some of our neighboring states are envious of the democratic powers that residents here enjoy, after all. Seventy percent of Kansans would like to expand Medicaid, after all, but legislators in Topeka refuse to do so. There is no citizen-led initiative process that lets Sunflower State voters duplicate Missouri’s feat.
The Missouri Constitution states plainly that “all political power is vested in and derived from the people; that all government of right originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole.”
We have a government by the people, in other words, not a majority of congressional districts. It should stay that way.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch. March 24, 2024.
Editorial: Missouri legally steals from foster kids. Lawmakers can end it. Why haven’t they?
It’s encouraging, if a low bar of decency, that pretty much everyone in the Missouri Legislature appears to understand that the state should stop its practice of seizing millions of dollars in federal benefits meant to go to foster children who have lost their parents or who are disabled.
Yet that no-brainer of a reform has been stalled by Jefferson City’s usual dysfunction, including attempts by some lawmakers to attach unrelated right-wing nonsense to it.
If Missouri’s elected representatives can’t get it together long enough to agree to stop stealing from the most vulnerable kids in society, what are they even doing in office?
Missouri, like most other states, has long had a policy that sounds like something out of a Dickens novel: When children who are in foster homes get federal benefits, the state seizes them as reimbursement for the cost of the foster care.
A typical situation is that foster kids who have lost a parent are entitled to Social Security survivor benefits based on money the parents had paid into the system — which the state then takes. It also takes disability entitlements from kids.
Last year, those pilfered benefits added up to more than $6 million. The total has been higher in some past years.
The practice often means that by the time the foster kids age out of the system, they have nothing left of the benefits that were supposed to come to them. As reported by the Missouri Independent, one foster father told lawmakers in January that his foster child, who is now 20, “has exactly zero dollars to his name” because Missouri seized his federal benefits while he was a minor.
A 2021 report by The Marshall Project found that around 10% of foster children in the U.S. are entitled to Social Security or other federal benefits either because of the loss of a parent or based on a physical or mental disability.
The report found that most states have had policies of seizing those assets as reimbursement for the cost of foster care. It was a largely unnoticed practice until recently. Several states lately have passed laws to stop it.
Reform legislation pending in Missouri this session would reform how the state handles foster kids’ benefits. It would allow them to be used for the children’s unmet needs that are not normally covered by the foster care system, including tuition, transportation and clothing. But it would specifically bar the state from absorbing that money into the foster care system, as it currently does.
The legislation ( SB 862 and HB 2227 ) has no apparent opposition. Yet it has been stalled by an unrelated filibuster and by attempts to attach amendments that are irrelevant and in some cases controversial — including one addressing (what else?) transgender medical issues.
We have argued here many times that Missouri is among the worst-run states in America, largely because its Republican majority is hobbled by a hard-right klatch of ideologues who would rather engage in culture-war performance politics than responsible governance.
Here’s their chance to prove us wrong by ending this outrageous policy of legal theft from children. Quit the games and pass this measure.
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