Missouri legislature kicks off 2022 session with tight deadlines, Republican infighting

The Missouri General Assembly opened its 2022 legislative session on Wednesday with a packed agenda as dwindling Republican numbers in the House and infighting in the Senate threatens GOP power.

Lawmakers have several hefty tasks to complete early this session.

They must approve a new Congressional map in time for the state to hold its August primary election. Candidate filing begins Feb. 22. There is billions in unspent COVID-19-related federal aid to allocate, some with a March deadline.

And Gov. Mike Parson has asked the legislature to pass by Feb. 1 a supplemental budget that includes raising state workers’ minimum pay to $15 an hour to address critical staff shortages.

House Republican leaders are scheduling extra work days this month in the hopes they’ll still have time for other priorities, such as tightening the requirements for voting and pushing back on federal vaccine mandates.

They’ll be doing so with the new challenge of being one vote short of a Republican supermajority, after resignations, appointments to other state jobs and a death have decreased membership to 108 representatives.

“It’s an issue,” House Speaker Rob Vescovo, an Arnold Republican, acknowledged to reporters. “But it’s the cards that we have and we’re going to work through it.”

The primary hurdle it poses is for passage of a Congressional map. Lawmakers need 109 votes — two-thirds of the House — to pass a map with an emergency clause. That would allow it to go into effect in time for the scheduled Aug. 2 primary.

But not all Republicans are happy with the current proposed “6-2” map, which largely leaves intact Kansas City’s 5th Congressional District and preserves the seat for Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Some hardline conservatives have pushed for lawmakers to instead pursue a map that gerrymanders out Cleaver and allows for 7 Republican seats and 1 Democratic instead.

That is certain to alienate Democrats. To pass the emergency clause, Republicans will need some support from across the aisle.

Democrats said they have every intention of using the newfound leverage on their priorities, including seeking a greater say in how to spend federal aid, pushing back on Republican proposals for stricter voting rules and ensuring full funding of the voter-approved Medicaid expansion that GOP lawmakers refused to pay for last year.

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said Democrats also plan to file a Congressional map that would allow Democrats to win three of the seats.

“We’re going to be putting together a whole lot of asks as the time comes when they’re going to need our votes for that emergency clause,” Quade said.

Rep. Dan Shaul, an Imperial Republican behind the proposed map and chair of the House’s redistricting committee, said the dwindling GOP numbers and looming deadline could have been avoided if Parson had called lawmakers into a special session last fall to approve the map.

He said Republican leaders had asked for a special session, but not for any special elections to fill the House vacancies.

The Republican governor’s appointment of two GOP lawmakers to state posts recently — Becky Ruth to direct the Office of the Child Advocate and Wayne Wallingford to head the Department of Revenue – have contributed to the House Republicans’ decline in numbers.

On Wednesday afternoon, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft called on Parson to hold special elections for some of the vacancies. Ashcroft has said he wants lawmakers to pursue a 7-1 map.

Shaul expects the map to be heard in committee as early as next week.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” he said Tuesday. “I believe that the map we currently have, or most forms of whatever we get to, with the emergency clause, at the end of the day, we will be able to achieve that.”

Also hampering the GOP supermajority is infighting in the state Senate, where tensions in the majority caucus have for months boiled over into open hostility.

The self-styled “conservative caucus” of far-right hardliners spent nearly two hours after the Senate convened on Wednesday excoriating Republican leadership for alleged past betrayals.

Those included Majority Leader Caleb Rowden’s support last year of paying for the Medicaid expansion plan and Republicans’ backing of a Medicaid-related tax renewal without allowing the conservative caucus to cut out funding for Planned Parenthood or coverage of certain birth control methods.

The latest source of acrimony within the caucus was a meeting of Republican senators late last year that excluded conservative caucus members, as first reported by the Missouri Independent.

Under questioning from Sen. Denny Hoskins, of Warrensburg, Rowden said other Republicans wanted to “be in a room with people that they knew they could trust.”

“You think it builds camaraderie?” Hoskins said of holding the exclusionary meeting.

“It’s a question you need to ask yourself, Senator,” Rowden, a Columbia Republican, replied.

The legislative session started during another spike in COVID cases in Missouri, this time driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant. As was the case last year, no mask requirements are in place in the state Capitol.

Quade said two Democratic lawmakers were out with the virus Wednesday; Vescovo said he did not have a number for the Republicans. Last year, lawmakers lost days of work because of the virus.

“It’s not a concern to me,” he said. “If we’re sick I’m going to ask the members to stay home. They’re all adults, they can police themselves.”

This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 5:29 PM.