By Tony Luetkemeyer
Last week, the Senate took up bills for passage for the first time during the 2020 session. A few bills cleared the Senate, and we saw or first filibuster of the year.
In the Senate Judiciary Committee, I presented Senate Bill 677, the Narcotics Control Act. This legislation establishes a statewide prescription drug monitoring program in Missouri. Passage of this act has been a priority of mine since my election. Opioid abuse has become a public health crisis and deaths from drug overdoses now outnumber automobile crash fatalities. I am committed to providing physicians and other health care professionals the tools they need to combat this epidemic. Missouri is long overdue for a statewide PDMP.
On a lighter note, I had an opportunity to introduce the Senate Rules Committee to some delightful young ladies as I presented Senate Concurrent Resolution 28. This measure recognizes St. Joseph as the main starting point of the Oregon Trail. The star witnesses for this hearing were seven members of Girl Scout Troop 2801 from Parkville, who are attempting to earn Inside Government merit badges. Each of the girls came prepared with a memorized fact and, collectively, they shared the history of St. Joe as the gathering point for more than 200,000 pioneers who began their arduous journey across the Oregon Trail in the 1850s.
DEBATING INTO THE NIGHT
The highest stakes legislative battle of the week was the beginning effort to pass Senate Joint Resolution 38. This measure asks voters to decide an issue that will affect local representation and the democratic process in Missouri. In short, SJR 38 gives the people of Missouri an opportunity to strengthen certain ethics provisions of the state constitution and protect local representation when drawing state legislative districts.
In 2018, Amendment 1 was passed to amend the Missouri Constitution. Presented as an ethics reform proposal, Amendment 1 limited political campaign contributions, capped the dollar value of lobbyist gifts legislators could accept and closed the revolving door on lawmakers becoming paid lobbyists. I support those proposals and, in fact, campaigned on many of those items when running for office.
But these popular provisions, were combined with another provision buried deep within Amendment 1. The proposal also rewrote the rules for drawing Missouri’s legislative districts. Traditionally, the boundaries of legislative districts were drawn by bipartisan citizen commissions. The guiding principles for their decisions were that each district should contain a roughly equal number of people, and the districts should be compact and contiguous. Local representation was the goal.
Amendment 1 uprooted all of that. Instead of relying on bipartisan citizen commissions, districts will now be drawn by a single unelected bureaucrat, a newly created position of state demographer. Instead of creating compact and contiguous districts that follow natural geographic boundaries, each legislative district is drawn in an attempt to create partisan competiveness. For those who have seen an electoral map of Missouri, you know most of rural Missouri is colored red while most urban areas of Missouri are blue. Creating equal partisan splits in Missouri’s legislative districts will require drawing shoestring districts where rural and urban areas are combined. I believe this will destroy local representation and result in situations where a senator from St. Joseph could represent constituents in St. Louis or vice versa. This potentially could destroy local representation and could make elected officials more disconnected from their districts.
I want to give voters an opportunity to fix this broken redistricting process, while also strengthening current ethics reforms in the constitution by completely eliminating lobbyist gifts and lowering campaign contribution limits further. This is what SJR 38 will do if approved by the Legislature and voters.
SJR 38 came up for debate on the Senate floor last week. Opponents kept us in the chamber until the wee hours of the morning, filibustering the measure until it was finally tabled. I know debate on this resolution isn’t done, and I trust that voters will ultimately get to decide this matter.
It is my great honor to represent the citizens of Platte and Buchanan counties in the Missouri Senate. Please contact my office at (573) 751-2183, or visit www.senate.mo.gov/mem34.