Missouri Republican Senate leaders on Tuesday won confirmation for all of Gov. Mike Parson’s pending appointees to state office as members of the Freedom Caucus backed down from a demand that the upper chamber approve initiative petition changes as the price for confirmation.
For almost 16 hours, members of the caucus and their allies held the floor as Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden sought a vote on more than 40 people appointed to state jobs, local government posts and roles on boards and commissions. One of the Freedom Caucus’s leaders, Sen. Bill Eigel of Weldon Spring, tried to release half of the appointees held hostage as a compromise, but that wasn’t acceptable to the leadership.
“’I’d like to make a motion maybe to push through 19 to 20 gubernatorial appointments as really kind of a show of good faith,” Eigel said on Monday evening.
The Freedom Caucus has been in open warfare with Rowden and Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin for the past two weeks. As tempers escalated, Rowden removed four caucus members as committee chairs and O’Laughlin mused aloud to an assembly of newspaper reporters and editors that she would vote to expel Eigel.
O’Laughlin said Tuesday that she doesn’t think the Freedom Caucus won this battle.
“We get what we want,” she said.”And we brought up (initiative petition changes) anyway. You know, it’s not like people don’t want to do it.”
In turn, the Freedom Caucus has repeatedly called for O’Laughlin and Rowden to resigntheir leadership posts, renewing that call on Monday. Sen. Andrew Koenig of Manchester said the Freedom Caucus won this round even though none of their demands have been met. The caucus allowed appointees to be confirmed because time was growing short, with a deadline this week to get the Senate vote, he said.
If the appointees named before the session began were not confirmed this week, they would have been barred for life from serving in those roles.
The heart of the fratricidal conflict is what changes to make in the Missouri Constitution to make it harder to pass an amendment by initiative petition. Currently, if proponents get the signatures needed to put a proposal on the ballot, it will pass if a bare majority of voters approve it.
Republicans have made changing the majority a major priority. They fear that a proposal restoring the right to an abortion will be on the November ballot and want to make it more difficult for it to pass.
Dueling rallies added to the charged atmosphere Tuesday in the Capitol, with about 200 opponents of the initiative changes on the first floor and about 300 in support of the Freedom Caucus on the second floor near Eigel’s office.
At the first floor rally for voting rights, Liz McCune of Progress Missouri said they were gathered to protect majority rule. There is no need to change the threshold for passing an initiative, she said.
“This is a process that’s been used in Missouri for more than 100 years,” she said. “And from our perspective, it’s not broke. It’s a way for ordinary Missourians to have their voice heard on issues that matter to them.”
Conservative commentator Doug Billings speaks to a rally Tuesday in support of the Missouri Freedom Caucus (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent),At the Freedom Caucus rally, speakers railed against what they see as betrayals by Republican leaders and thanked their supporters for coming out to pressure the politicians.
“This is exactly what our founding fathers envisioned,” said Doug Billings, a conservative commentator.
During a three-hour hearing Monday, the Senate Local Government and Elections Committee heard testimony on 15 different versions of the proposal. The committee met Tuesday, after the appointees were confirmed, and voted 5-2, with only Democrats opposed, to require a proposed constitutional amendment receive a majority vote in 82 of 163 Missouri House districts as well as a majority statewide.
The sponsor of the proposal sent to the Senate floor, Republican Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman of Arnold, told the committee on Monday that she wants to protect the Constitution from measures that should instead be passed as statutes.
“It should be harder to change the Constitution than to change state statute and no one in this bill is attempting to take away the ability of the people to change state statutes using the existing process,” Coleman said. “But it is making sure that we aren’t making statutory changes through a constitutional process.”
The proposal has several items opponents call “ballot candy,” including provisions declaring that only citizens can vote in Missouri and that no foreign entity can sponsor a ballot initiative. Neither provision would change state law. Non-citizens are already prohibited from voting in Missouri, and it is illegal for foreign individuals, companies or governments to engage in political campaigns.
Fred Steinbach, former mayor of Chesterfield and part of the Respect Voters Coalition, told the committee those add-ons are “a terrible idea. I think the wording is BS if you’re allowed to say that here to try to mislead the people. And I am very much against this taking the right of the people away to have their vote that they so well-earned over many wars.”
Before it settled into Freedom Caucus members reading from their favorite books to kill time, the filibuster produced some sharp moments that preview the fights likely to consume much of the attention for the remainder of the session.
Eigel, at one point, demanded that Sen. Mike Cierpiot of Lee’s Summit reveal if additional punishments were planned for Freedom Caucus members. Those who lost chairmanships also lost a $10,000 add-on to their office budgets and were exiled to parking spaces as far from the Capitol as possible.
“Do you think that there should be more punishment for the senators that have already been canceled?” Eigel asked.
“That depends on what happens from here on out,” Cierpiot replied.
Eigel was involved in another testy exchange with Sen. Lincoln Hough of Springfield.
Hough wanted to know who wrote the partial list of appointees Eigel said he was willing to allow to come to a vote. Eigel replied that it was a list where “no one we knew of had any further objections” to confirmation.
At that point, Hough said Eigel hadn’t talked to him and didn’t include an appointee he supported.
“I’m shocked,” he said, “that the person who comes out here talking about being someone who wants to communicate all the time, didn’t find it necessary to talk to anybody else.”
