Other state senators have proposed a similar measure with an important twist: Instead of requiring the support of a majority of state legislative districts, it would require the support of a majority of the state’s congressional districts. That difference would be a troubling one. While state legislative maps are drawn by the bipartisan commissions, Missouri’s congressional districts are drawn by the state legislature, where partisanship is the lodestar. Only one of the state’s eight districts is competitive and Republican lawmakers used the last census to give GOP candidates in it a little more help, according to local news outlets.
Requiring majority approval from the state’s congressional districts would effectively lock Democrats and their preferred proposals out of the constitutional amendment process, while posing no hurdle to Republican-favored ones. In the hopes of winning public approval, the amendments again included ancillary provisions that have little to do with the actual substance of it. One GOP-backed proposal would ban amendments that imposed sales taxes on food and property taxes. Another would prohibit amendments that would defund police departments or make it harder to “[assist] in the defense of the national borders.”
State Democratic lawmakers derided those provisions as “ballot candy,” meaning that they had been intentionally added to distract from the substance of the amendment. “They put the most important part at the very end, but they put all the other things in front, the candy, the stuff that they see first and they know that’s why because it’s gonna do well that way,” Senator Doug Beck, a Democrat, told St. Louis Public Radio earlier this week.