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The week Missouri stopped caring
Missouri's latest power grabs are the worst of brazen, cynical politics. Plenty of other states are doing the same thing.
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There are two phrases that adorn the Missouri state flag.¹
Salus populi suprema lex esto, a Latin phrase that translates roughly to “what’s good for the people is the supreme law.”²
United we stand, divided we fall.
If you’ve had the misfortune of paying attention to Missouri politics in the last week or so, what you’ll notice: our elected officials seem to be doing the exact opposite.
Everything is designed to divide; no consideration is given to what’s best for Missourians. They’re gerrymandering our Congressional map in ways that’ll harm the whole state; they’re making it harder for citizens to pass ballot measures; they’re fanning the flames of anger and division.
Why bother with public welfare and unity when you can steamroll through both on your way to power?
Article summary:
The state legislature continues to strip Missourians of their voice, and they seem to be getting more and more creative with their tactics to do so.
The issues here go beyond anything partisan. Kansas City is the reason that Missouri is still growing; the latest gerrymander will hurt the region and the state.
On a more uplifting note: hope isn’t lost. There are diverse groups coming together to fight the legislature’s brazen power grabs.
Salus factionis suprema lex esto
Forget what’s on the flag, that’s the new Missouri state motto: what’s good for the party is the supreme law.³
The state legislature is now meeting for its second special session of the year. They used the first special session to take much-needed money from rural hospitals and education so they could siphon it to the owners of the Chiefs.⁴
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But that’s small potatoes relative to what they’re doing now.
First, as part of the national gerrymandering wars I’ve written about, they’re redrawing Congressional maps to give the Republicans one additional Congressional seat by chopping up Kansas City into three predominantly rural districts.
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As someone who likes to see Democrats win, I’ve got my objections to this. But even taking off my partisan hat, it’s worth noting just how detrimental this Congressional map is for all Missourians.
In these new maps, greater Kansas City becomes a small part of three different districts. What does that mean in practice? Kansas City won’t be anyone’s primary constituency. Three different members of Congress will represent Kansas City, but for all of them, it’ll be just a small chunk of their district.
That’ll lead to less focus on and less investment in Kansas City. Needless to say, that’s very bad. Missouri needs a thriving Kansas City, whose metro area has driven over half of the state’s population growth since 2010.⁵
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For context: Missouri would be the sixth slowest-growing state in the U.S. since 2010 without greater Kansas City. It’s the demographic engine of the state, and what they’re doing with this gerrymander makes it difficult for anyone to properly represent Kansas City in Congress.⁶
“United we stand, divided we fall” is right there on our flag. This is a much more literal division than the original flagmakers could’ve ever imagined. And we’ll all suffer for it.⁷
But the second thing that the legislature is doing is much more insidious.
Government is bad…unless we’re the ones controlling it
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson, on his official website, outlines “7 Core Principles of Conservatism.” The very first one:
The birth of our great nation was inspired by the bold declaration that our individual, God-given liberties should be preserved against government intrusion. That same conviction informs our conservative policy decisions still today.
Going back to the ’50s and ’60s, through the Reagan years and into the present, this idea that individuals are better at making decisions for themselves than the government has been a bedrock of the conservative movement.
That guiding principle is part of the reason citizen-initiated ballot measures exist in the first place.⁸
It’s a critical check on the power of state legislatures, and over the past decade, it’s allowed Missourians to pass everything from nonpartisan redistricting to abortion access to a higher minimum wage.⁹
Missouri’s legislature has done a great job rolling back voter-approved policies through different machinations—a misleading ballot measure to get rid of nonpartisan redistricting, putting up hurdles around abortion access, and a straight-up repeal of the new minimum wage law just months after voters approved it.
But for Missouri’s legislature, rolling back the will of the voters piecemeal isn’t enough.¹⁰ Now, the legislature is trying to functionally take away this right altogether by requiring a majority of voters and a majority of Congressional districts to pass constitutional amendments.
Combined with gerrymandering, what this means: “As few as 5% of voters could defeat initiative petitions.” Which is, of course, the intent.
Conservatives love the idea of checks on government power in theory. Just never in practice.
I wish that were everything
Thought that was the extent of divisive elected officials doing things to make our lives harder? Nope. Also from the past week:
There’s an enormous backlog of public records requests, which are critical to knowing what our government is doing and saying behind the scenes, and a critical part of how reporters do their jobs. We have former Attorney General Andrew Bailey to thank for that, who slow-rolled responses.
Republican Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt delivered an anti-immigrant screed at the National Conservatism Conference, despite the fact that a) Missouri has one of the lowest foreign-born populations of any state in the country, and b) we have 150,000+ unfilled jobs and an above-average unfilled job rate. Immigrants could help fill that gap.
Where there’s hope
We’ve got our work cut out for us. But it’s not hopeless.
First, I’m not convinced that the legislature will succeed in stripping away our power to introduce ballot measures, because voters will still have to approve the measure. North Dakota and Ohio both tried this gambit and both failed; voters (rightly) don’t like reducing their own voting power!
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and people are lining up to defeat the measure: everyone from the AFL-CIO to the Missouri Association of Realtors.
As for gerrymandering, there are early efforts underway to repeal the gerrymander via the ballot—something I mentioned two weeks ago as a possibility. And it’s a winnable fight: gerrymandering is unpopular, even in Republican states like Missouri.
The fight isn’t over yet. It’s just beginning. But we’ll be fighting on their terms, and that puts sanity—and what’s good for Missourians—at a disadvantage from the get-go.
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Missouri’s flag is pretty underwhelming, but evidently it leads the nation in both “number of bears” and “number of stars.” So that’s fun! You’ll enjoy the video if you’re into vexillology.
An expression I’m only familiar with, somewhat embarrassingly, because it’s what Kenneth says to Jack Donaghy after rejecting a bed-bug-infested hug in an episode of 30 Rock. (Sorry, I couldn’t find the actual clip on YouTube, so you’ll have to watch the full episode to get there.)
In any event, there are different ways to translate this phrase—Wikipedia references a few different options—so I’m sticking to one that more closely aligns with the state’s official translation.
Salus populi suprema lex esto—translated by Missouri as “let the good of the people be the supreme law”—is Missouri’s official state motto. I assumed it would have something to do with the “Show-Me State” nickname, but no, it’s been this Latin phrase for more than 200 years.
Whose net worth, I will once again note, is $25 billion. They do not need taxpayer subsidy.
Data here comes from the list of counties that make up Greater Kansas City (Bates, Caldwell, Cass, Clay, Clinton, Jackson, Lafayette, Platte, and Ray Counties), Census data, and of course, Wikipedia.
Greater Kansas City includes lots of Kansas (including, but not limited to, Kansas City, Kansas). Any data from Kansas has been excluded to make it an apples-to-apples Missouri comparison.
Finally, I’m resharing this post I wrote a few months ago, which is relevant and (in my opinion) one of the best analyses I’ve written:
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That goes beyond just policymaking: corralling resources, advocating for infrastructure funding, running constituent services, etc.
Even Governor Mike Kehoe isn’t that into it, but national pressure is just too great, and like just about every Republican in this era, he caved.
At the state level, the right for citizens to circumvent their state legislatures this way emerged in places across the U.S. during the so-called Progressive Era, when voters were pushing back against monopolies, income inequality, poverty, and entrenched political interests with too much power.
In fairness, it was also used to pass sports gambling, which becomes legal on December 1. If you’ve been watching sports in Missouri lately, just about every commercial is about how soon you’ll be able to start gambling.
Anyway, in case you need the reminder, this is bad and we shouldn’t quit fighting to outlaw it in Missouri:
Nor is sending voters flagrantly misleading language. For context, this is the proposed ballot language for the repeal of abortion that we’ll vote on in ’26.
Guarantee access to care for medical emergencies, ectopic pregnancies, and miscarriages;
Ensure women’s safety during abortions;
Ensure parental consent for minors;
Allow abortions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, rape, and incest;
Require physicians to provide medically accurate information; and
Protect children from gender transition?
This is, to state the obvious, insane, and designed to be actively confusing. It’s an abortion ban couched as an abortion guarantee! They’re doing this because they know that they can’t win the issue on its merits.
I do think it’ll ultimately get rewritten in the courts, but we’ll see.
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