Missouri’s ballot petitions legalized weed, expanded Medicaid. Kansans lack the power

Editor’s note: This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

For more than 100 years Missouri residents have exercised more direct control over their democracy than their neighbors in Kansas.

Missouri’s constitution allows citizens to place constitutional amendments on the ballot. The process has led to the successful passage of Medicaid expansion, marijuana legalization, legislative term limits and lobbying restrictions.

But as abortion rights supporters in the state eye the petition process as a way to restore abortion access in Missouri, conservative lawmakers are looking for ways to make it harder.

Meanwhile in Kansas, residents have never had that form of direct democracy. Instead, the state Legislature holds nearly exclusive power over policy-making in the state. Citizens can vote directly on an issue only when lawmakers vote to send it to them.

News organizations across the country are publishing stories Friday focused on democracy in local communities in recognition of the International Day of Democracy, a day established by the United Nations to celebrate and promote democratic principles. The Star is joining the effort with a look at direct democracy, the efforts to undermine it in Missouri and how Kansas’ lack of such a process has impacted policy in the state.

People tend to be more engaged and informed when they vote on issues in addition to politicians, said John Matsusaka, the executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California.

“When people actually are voting on laws they don’t have this feeling that many Americans say that they don’t have any control of government,” Matsusaka said. “Even if people don’t like the outcome of a decision they actually like the fact that they got to vote on it and they’re more likely to accept it as legitimate if it was decided by popular vote.”

Over the years advocates on both sides of the political spectrum have pushed policy through petitions. Often, he said, petitions limit the power of politicians or are used as a tool to push issues the political majority does not want to talk about.

Even as abortion referendums have lawmakers in Missouri and other GOP-controlled states looking to roll back initiative petition policies, Kansas state Sen. Tim Shallenburger, a Baxter Springs Republican and longtime supporter of term limits, said he’s contemplating pushing for a constitutional amendment to bring such a policy to Kansas.

“If you don’t let the people have a voice, then you kind of run their democracy,” Shallenburger said. “There are a lot of people that believe that representative government is good enough, that if they don’t like what we do they can vote us out.”

“But the power of incumbency is pretty strong.”

Politicians are unlikely to talk about or vote on issues that limit their own power, Shallenburger said, and that’s where initiative petition processes come in.

Efforts to weaken petition power in Missouri

For years the GOP-controlled Missouri General Assembly has flirted with tightening requirements on the initiative petition process in the wake of voters approving several liberal-leaning ballot measures including Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization.

The reaction, Matsusaka said, is not unique to Missouri or to conservatives. When a petition passes that the party in power does not like, he said, the reaction for decades has been to work to roll it back on both sides of the aisle.

“Something comes down and passes and they go ‘we want to stop this’ and so they tried to cut it back,” he said.

Those proposals — which have included raising the threshold for initiative petitions to pass on the ballot from a simple majority to 60% — have failed in previous years. However, as abortion rights supporters seek a ballot measure to restore abortion access in Missouri, some lawmakers have signaled that making it harder for voters to amend the constitution would be a priority in the coming year.

Some Republicans, including Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher from St. Louis, have directly tied efforts to make it harder to amend the constitution to the possibility of an abortion rights petition.

Republicans, for the most part, have argued that it’s been too easy to amend the constitution and that the current process gives outside interest groups and money too much of a role in crafting measures that influence Missourians.

“I believe the Missouri Constitution is a sacred document and should not be amended lightly. It must be protected from out-of-state special interests,” Missouri state Sen. Jill Carter, a Granby Republican, said last month, urging Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson to call a special session. “We must reform the current standards and ensure that changes to our Constitution are supported statewide.”

However, after voters in Ohio last month rejected a measure that would have required constitutional amendments to receive a 60% majority to pass, some are looking for another angle. One proposal, which failed earlier this year, would require amendments to also win a majority of congressional districts if they only obtain a simple majority statewide.

The change would empower residents in the rural areas to block amendments even if a majority of voters support them.

Missouri state Rep. Bill Falkner, a St. Joseph Republican, told The Star that he’s working on another alternative where once initiative petitions receive enough signatures, they would either be vetted by lawmakers who wouldn’t be allowed to change the wording or the proposal would have to pass on the ballot at 55%.

“No one really understands what’s in the bill,” he said of initiative petitions. “So if they’re willing to take their bill through the process in both the House and the Senate…then they can take it to the voters and have it pass, simple majority.”

But initiative petition defenders have framed any of the attempts to change the process as an attack on direct democracy.

Tom Bastian, the spokesperson for the ACLU of Missouri, said in a statement that initiative petitions have promoted civic engagement and accountability towards the government, touting the number of policies created from the process.

“We should be encouraging democratic participation, not erecting undue barriers,” Bastian said. “These bills attempt to subvert democracy by preventing people from voting on issues to which the legislature is opposed. Most reduce the amount of no votes needed to well below a majority to stifle popular constitutional changes from happening.

Less direct democracy in Kansas

In Kansas, lawmakers rarely talk about initiative petitions except in the hypothetical.

Allowing an initiative petition process in Kansas would require a constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of the Kansas House and Senate would need to approve the amendment and then a majority of Kansas voters would have to vote yes.

It’s unlikely such a policy would ever clear the extremely high bar in a state Legislature dominated by Republicans. Matsusaka said no state has approved a new initiative petition process since Massachusetts in the 1990s.

“It’s really really hard to do this because sitting legislators do not want the voters to have this right,” he said. Regardless of what party is in power, he said, creating an initiative petition process requires lawmakers to be willing to give up some of their power.

Kansas Democrats have often looked on with envy in recent years as Missouri citizens vote to institute long held goals like Medicaid expansion and legal medical marijuana. But there’s little hope that, under the current political dynamics, a path exists for Kansas to establish its own policy.

“There’s no question: If Kansans were able to vote directly on key issues, nearly 140,000 more working people would have affordable health coverage through Medicaid expansion, medical marijuana would be legal, and Kansans would have seen responsible tax cuts last year,” Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement.

In the absence of a petition process, Kelly said voters need to pressure their elected representatives.

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, said in a statement that establishing an initiative petition process won’t be a priority for next year’s session.

“This isn’t an issue that comes up,” House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, said of his conversations with constituents. “Our efforts will be focused on tax relief, especially property taxes, this coming session.”

Under Kansas’ current system, legislative leadership has nearly total control on what policies get considered. Proposals that limit the Legislature’s power, like term limits, or that face heavy opposition from leadership, like Medicaid expansion, are unlikely to get hearings, let alone votes.

Davis Hammet, founder of Loud Light, a left-leaning voting rights and civic engagement organization, said these dynamics combined with the massive amounts of money in politics, laws that make it harder for some populations to vote, and political gerrymandering in Legislative districts creates a system in which Kansas’ political system “is designed to serve the Republican party not the people of Kansas.”

“The only way to change Kansas is to change the Legislature,” he said.

Failed effort to establish petition process in Kansas

The last serious attempt to add initiative petition to the Kansas constitution came in the 1990s under Democratic Gov. Joan Finney, who pushed for the policy.

Kansas state Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat who was Kansas House minority leader at the time, said he was able to work with Republican leaders in the House to secure the two-thirds majority in their chamber. But the Senate, he said, was uninterested. Sawyer said he remembered concerns about an uninformed electorate and the power of wealthy special interest groups and tax policies that would tie lawmakers hands.

“At the time I don’t think we ever thought about things like Medicaid expansion, there was a lot of fear of what could go on the ballot,” he said.

Shallenburger, the Baxter Springs Republican, was in Kansas House leadership at the time and supported the proposal. He said the root problem came from a rural-urban divide. Rural lawmakers were reluctant to vote yes, he said, because they worried wealthy interests in Kansas’ urban areas would be able to push through environmental regulations without support from farmers.

If Kansas had successfully approved the initiative petition proposal in the 1990s, Shallenburger said, he’s convinced Kansas voters would have imposed term limits on lawmakers and instituted a tax lid. He said citizens likely also would have taken steps to expand Medicaid and legalize some form of marijuana but rejected the idea that the policy would widely benefit the left.

“What the Democrats would bemoan even more is the people are more conservative than their Legislature,” Shallenburger said, arguing Kansans may push stricter regulations on abortion or LGBTQ rights.

But Democrats believe they could force conversations that have long been closed if they had the sort of direct democracy other states have.

April Holman, executive director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, said she believes enough Kansans supported Medicaid expansion five to seven years ago that the state could have approved the policy through that avenue.

But in Kansas convincing people isn’t enough. Advocates need the support of lawmakers.

“There are so many reasons that this makes sense and yet elected officials are doing their very best not to talk about it,” Holman said. “That has been allowed to be the final word.”

When lawmakers considered an initiative petition in the 1990s, Sawyer said there was concern that voters may be more extreme than the Legislature. Now, he says it may have a moderating effect on the state and create a more open process where leadership would struggle to shut down debate on specific issues.

“If we had initiative we would at least be able to debate those issues in the Legislature,” Sawyer said. “The Legislature would know that if we didn’t debate them, if we didn’t have open conversation on those issues, then the public could just go around us.”