Midwestern Voters Reject Republican Power Plays

In the Show Me State, the GOP’s attempt to make it more difficult to pass citizen-sponsored constitutional amendments suffered a crushing defeat.

After Missourians had approved a series of these ballot initiatives in recent years that the state’s Republicans opposed, including those that enacted a higher minimum wage, established the right to have abortions, and expanded Medicaid, GOP legislators felt that it was time to take action.

Instead of listening to the will of the people and modifying their own policy platform, they sought to make it more challenging for future ballot initiatives to pass.

Specifically, they wanted to do away with the current requirement that a citizen-sponsored amendment needs a simple statewide majority to pass and replace it with a more burdensome one, i.e., that any such amendment needs to get majority support in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts.

What was especially cynical about their plan was that the new requirement would not have applied to amendments that the legislature itself placed on the ballot, which would still only have required a simple majority.

Well, Missourians weren’t having it. More than 80 percent of them voted against this attempt to curtail their own power.

Of course, passing citizen-sponsored amendments is only half the battle in Missouri. The state’s Republicans have a long history of rolling back the initiatives that their citizens approved, including a repeal of the sick leave mandate that they voted for and cutting back the minimum wage increase.

One state over, voters in Kansas thwarted the GOP’s attempt to change how state Supreme Court justices are placed on the bench.

Currently, they are appointed by the governor, who happens to be a popular Democrat. To take that power out of her hands, and in order to get a Supreme Court that will overturn a 2019 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion in the Sunflower State, Republican legislators wanted the justices to be elected by the people.

Kansans, however, were happy with the way things were and soundly rejected the GOP’s ploy.

These results are bad news for a party and a president who have been trying to undermine democracy at every turn and make it more difficult for American voters to have a say in who should run the country.

This year, Trump spurred red states into embarking on an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering campaign that could net the GOP as many as 10 seats in the House.

In addition, the president also wants to make it more difficult to vote by mail and impose new proof-of-citizenship requirements on eligible voters that will be burdensome and/or costly to meet for tens of millions of Americans.

While these threats to democracy don’t usually get voters nearly as excited as economic issues, we are keeping hope alive that this election might be different. Then again, the American people elected a man as their president who staged a coup after he lost in 2020, so we’re not holding our breath.

Still, it is nice to see when people in red states stand up against these kinds of power plays, which is why it was especially nice to see voters in Missouri swat down the GOP’s latest ploy so thoroughly.