Is there no good idea a politician cannot spoil?
Take what’s on next Tuesday’s Missouri ballot. “Amendment 4 was my idea, but I am voting against it,” Ron Calzone wrote on Monday in The Missouri Times.
Mr. Calzone had advanced what is called a Concurrent Majority Ratification process. It was introduced into the legislature by Representative Bill Kidd as HJR 132 in 2022. And then politicians started revising.
Everyone agreed, says Calzone, that Missouri’s constitution “was too easy to amend,” considering “the fact that 50% + 1 of the vote can come from just the urban areas” and thereby inflict upon less-populated rural regions a “Tyranny of the Majority.”
The original notion was “to require a broad consensus before imposing laws on the People.” Before the state constitution could be changed, a majority of voters in a majority of legislative districts would have to concur.
The current Amendment 4, however, though promoted as a solution, really adds three humongous problems:
- The amendment applies only to citizen-initiated constitutional revisions — not legislative ones.This is the double standard regarding initiative processes we’ve seen legislatures try over and over again, across the country. Politicians like carving for themselves all sorts of advantages.*
- The current measure would require approval of measures in all, not just a majority, of the state’s eight congressional districts. Almost impossible to achieve, it would reinforce a status quo, certainly not rein current powers in.
- It shifts the power to alter the constitution from the people to the legislature.
One could write whole histories of how politicians can screw up a good reform. Amendment 4 is now no reform at all.
Doesn’t deserve the name.
Thankfully, Missourians can kill it. On Tuesday.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Legislators complain there have been too many amendments but as Calzone points out: “The fact is, over 80% of the amendments to the Missouri Constitution since 1910 were proposed by the legislature.”
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