Gerrymandering, blocking petitions are not ‘Missouri values,’ Gov. Kehoe | Opinion
Let’s talk about the arrogance of “Missouri values.” That’s the phrase Gov. Mike Kehoe used Friday afternoon — right before Labor Day weekend, a classic “news dump” seemingly to avoid public scrutiny — when he announced that he is calling the General Assembly into a special session to do two things: Follow President Donald Trump’s direction to gerrymander the state’s congressional map to steal a Democratic seat in the U.S. House and give it to Republicans, and to weaken Missouri’s century-old initiative petition process to reduce the right of the people to change their state’s laws and constitution when they see fit.
“Today, I am calling on the General Assembly to take action on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform to ensure our districts and Constitution truly put Missouri values first,” Kehoe said in a statement Friday afternoon.
What values are those, exactly?
We note the governor has used those words with increasing frequency lately — on Friday he called them “conservative, commonsense values” — which seems to really mean “Republican values.”
Maybe he has reason. Missouri used to be a bellwether state, but it is now unwaveringly red. There are no Democrats in statewide office anymore, and few truly moderate Republican lawmakers of any influence in Jefferson City.
If the values of Missouri are represented in the votes of its residents, then the Show-Me State is largely (though far from completely — more than 40% of the vote went for Kamala Harris last year) a state of GOP values.
However.
Those votes don’t only represent “Missouri values” for the people — the Republican men and women — the people of Missouri put in office. Those votes also express Missouri values in the issues they have directly voted for, and the ideas that undergird them.
That means “Missouri values” include caring for the poorest among us, in the form of the Medicaid expansion voters approved in 2020. That means “Missouri values” include liberty, including the liberty to use marijuana without the threat of arrest — so long as you’re not harming others — as voters approved in 2022. That means “Missouri values” include the right of a woman to make health care decisions for herself, with her family and medical professionals, which is why voters reversed the draconian GOP-imposed ban on abortion last year. And that means “Missouri values” include the right to be free from worry that getting sick will end up depriving you and your family of income, which is why voters approved paid sick leave during that same 2024 election. Republicans just repealed that last effort, of course.
Math and common sense tell you that many of the Missourians who voted last year to make Mike Kehoe governor also voted for some of those measures. Yet he implicitly claims that “Missouri values” belong to him and his party alone.
Sad to say, we are all getting used to this. Just a week after the people overwhelmingly passed the sweeping ethics and elections reforms of the 2018 Clean Missouri initiative, disgruntled lawmakers set about undoing them. They came up with outrageously misleading ballot language, and only two years later dirty-tricked voters into firing the nonpartisan demographer they’d just hired by a 2-to-1 margin to draw the state’s congressional districts fairly. That Amendment 3 laid the groundwork for this new go at partisan gerrymandering, as we and many other defenders of democracy warned at the time.
We hope Gov. Kehoe’s effort to weaken Missouri’s direct democracy fails, utterly. And we reject a notion of “Missouri values” that silences the voices of actual Missourians.