Hours before the Missouri legislature adjourned for the summer last week, House Speaker Dean Plocher said the quiet part out loud. In chiding the state Senate for failing to pass a bill making it more difficult for citizens to amend the state constitution, he warned that if a referendum to restore abortion rights in Missouri needs only a simple majority to pass, it would. In other words, Plocher admitted that efforts to change the ballot petition process are a blatant maneuver to deny Missourians the right to weigh in on this crucial question. That makes it more important than ever that pro-choice forces get abortion rights onto the 2024 statewide ballot.
The bill that passed the House this session, but thankfully stalled in the Senate, would have required a victory of 57% of the statewide vote to make changes to the state constitution via ballot initiative. Contrary to some legislative Republicans’ straight-faced claims, the timing of this sudden urgency for silencing Missourians was not coincidental — it was entirely about ensuring that Missouri’s draconian new abortion ban doesn’t get overturned by the voters.
The anti-choice caucus in Jefferson City has every reason to be fearful about that. Polls consistently show that even in conservative Missouri, there is strong support for reasonable abortion rights. And they have surely considered that all six states where abortion rights have been put up for a vote since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, including bright-red neighboring Kansas, came down on the pro-choice side.
Thus the sudden interest by Missouri Republicans in overhauling the constitutional amendment system. Their claims that this was just about citizens’ changes to the document becoming too unwieldy never made sense. But that sounds better than saying, “We know the majority of Missourians support abortion rights, so let’s raise the bar to prevent it.”
Plocher apparently missed a memo. At a news conference as the session wound down without Senate action on the ballot-initiative measure, Plocher acknowledged that a ballot referendum to protect abortion rights would “absolutely” pass if it needed only a simple majority. In that case, he said, the Senate “should be held accountable for allowing abortion to return to Missouri.” Oops.
Plocher also predicted that abortion-rights activists would use “ballot candy” to get their referendum passed. Ballot candy is when supporters stick something irrelevant but popular into referendum language to confuse voters into approving it. Which is exactly what Republicans planned to do with their ballot-initiative measure. The “candy” part would have made it look like voters were being asked to ban non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal. That was to mask the real question about making it harder to pass future constitutional amendments.
The bid to undermine democracy having failed, Missouri’s voters should get behind a constitutional referendum to restore abortion rights — while they’ve still got all their voting rights.
This was first published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and is reprinted with permission.
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