Missouri voters decided Tuesday that when they pass a law, the legislature cannot simply undo it. Amendment 6 won by about 20 percentage points, according to Bolts, and it ends a long fight over who gets the last word in Jefferson City.
Under the amendment, lawmakers need 80% of both chambers to change or repeal a measure voters approved since 2010. Even then, voters must approve the change at the ballot box. The amendment also writes the right to pass initiatives by simple majority into the constitution and keeps courts able to correct misleading ballot language, as ProPublica reported.
The Republican-led legislature has tried to reverse voters before. It tried to unwind Medicaid expansion, paid sick leave and the 2024 abortion rights amendment, and it did repeal puppy mill limits that voters approved in 2010. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins argued the amendment would “cut our legislature off at the knees.”
For Black Missourians, the clearest example is health coverage. Voters approved Medicaid expansion in 2020 with 53.25% of the vote, and Kansas City voters backed it 87.7% to 12.3%. Advocacy group Community Catalyst estimated at the time that about 36,000 Black Missourians would gain coverage. Black residents are more likely to be uninsured or in low-wage jobs without employer coverage, so they are first in line when a program like this is cut. Republican leaders then refused to fund the expansion, and protesters gathered on the day it was supposed to start in 2021, as the Missouri Independent reported.
Those same cities carried the fight. Missouri voters also rejected the Republican congressional map on Tuesday, 62% to 38%, a map that would have split Kansas City in three and endangered Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. Two lines on one ballot, one message: the people who live in Black and urban Missouri were not being heard in the capital, so they went around it.
They were not alone. Bolts counted seven states where voters sided with direct democracy on Tuesday. Montana’s Initiative 133 passed by about 30 points. North Dakota and South Dakota rejected 60% supermajority requirements for constitutional amendments, by 14 and 16 points. South Dakota’s 2022 Medicaid expansion passed with 56% and would have failed under the rule it voted down. Idaho voters rejected a ban on drug policy initiatives, 66% to 34%.
Hoskins is right about one thing: the amendment does take power away from the legislature. It takes it from lawmakers who spent years ignoring the voters who elected them, and gives it back to those voters. Black Missourians, who have had to win health care, wages and fair maps at the ballot box because the statehouse would not deliver them, now have a guard on the door. The test comes when the next Republican bill to change a voter-approved law is filed in Jefferson City, where it will now need 80%.
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