Efforts by Missouri citizens to place a constitutional amendment on the November 2024 ballot to un-do the near total abortion ban enacted immediately after the Dobbs ruling of 2022 have been thwarted again.
Earlier this week, on September 5, a Missouri judge had to intervene for a second time to correct grossly misleading "explainer" language written by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft to mislead voters about the intent of the amendment by claiming it would allow abortions through birth and would leave all reproductive care providers unregulated and accountable for their actions.
That September 5 ruling AGAINST the anti-abortion partisans was immediately appealed and that appeal was heard by Judge Christopher Limbaugh on Friday, September 6. The anti-abortion plaintiff resurrected a prior legal challenge to the amendment, arguing it addressed too many topics.
The judge hearing the motion didn't toss the measure off the ballot because it violated the one topic / one amendment law. Instead, he went in a new direction, ruling that the organization that worked to get the initiative on the ballot failed to meet legal requirements because...
...wait for it...
...the organization did not adequately inform people being solicited for signatures that the amendment would un-do Missouri's abortion ban. Missouri's cutoff for finalizing the November ballot is September 10. Limbaugh stayed his ruling that would drop the initiative from the ballot until September 10 to give backers a chance to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Of course, this curveball literally DAYS before the cutoff means that ANY change ruled necessary after the state Supreme Court rules will not have time to be reflected in the final ballot so ANTI-abortion forces wanting to continue thwarting the will of a majority of citizens in the state will have succeeded in pushing off a correction for at least another year, maybe two, maybe four.
I was one of the 380,000 Missourians who signed the petition to get this on the ballot. I was approached in probably four different parking lots outside big box stores over multiple months by workers soliciting my signature. EVERY one of those solicitations started off with words to the effect of "Would you like to sign a petition to re-instate abortion rights in Missouri?" There was NO DOUBT about the intent of the campaign or the intent of the language of the ballot initiative.
This abortion rights effort in Missouri is perhaps the poster child of conservative extremist schizophrenia that has taken over much of the country. In this case, anti-abortion forces first attempted to tamper with consideration of this initiative by fraudulently wording a summary description that had virtually zero correlation with the actual language of the proposed amendment.
Anti-abortion partisans LOST that first round when a Missouri judge tossed out flawed language written by the Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft in September of 2023.
The petition was circulated statewide and collected 380,000 signatures. Missouri's population is about 6.2 milliion, 75% of which are of voting age so the petition gained support from 8.1% of adults. Anti-abortion partisans trying to preserve Missouri's draconian anti-abortion law enacted in 2022 filed suit claiming the proposed language covered more than one topic, something prohibited under Missouri statute for constitutional ballot initiatives. (Missouri legislators fear Missouri voters are too dumb to read multiple clauses in a single sentence. Missouri voters fear that Missouri legislators are too dumb to read multiple clauses in a sentence.)
The too-many-topics argument was dropped at some point only to have Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft AGAIN tamper with the process by AGAIN writing a completely false "plain language summary" required by state law for for display in sample ballots at polling locations. Like the first time, Ashcroft's intent was to scare voters into thinking it permitted abortions up to birth (it does not) or completely removed all regulation from reproductive care providers (it does not). That triggered a suit from abortion rights backers which was heard by a judge who tossed out Ashcroft's language entirely and specified alternate language to use for the summary.
The rejection of Ashcroft's SECOND attempt to mislead voters triggered the counter-motion here that led ANOTHER judge to latch back onto the theory that the amendment addresses too many topics and those poor ignert Missourians couldn't have possibly understood the impact of the petition they were signing in the parking lot at Wal-Mart or the spring boat show. This must now be decided by the state Supreme Court on the last day that any changes can be made to November ballot content. That means the Supreme Court can defer the appearance of the initiative by simply requiring a slight wording change which would never be approved in a single day.
Keep in mind, Judge Limbaugh's ruling that puts this amendment in jeopardy assumes enactment would trigger the changes claimed in the false language drafted by the Secretary of State and claimed by the anti-abortion plaintiff. Those claims are verifiably FALSE.
The judge is intentionally and falsely claiming the amendment requires creation of a new regulatory structure around reproductive care and abortion and fails to specify any of that detail. As a result, it was impossible for signers of the petition to properly understand the impact of the amendment they were supporting and thus the initiative should be dropped. Note that one of Ashcroft's fraudulent descriptions of this amendment was that it eliminated ALL regulation of reproductive care providers. So which is it? What day of the week is it?
The actual amendment does not call for a NEW regulatory structure, it simply calls for reverting to the pre-Dobbs status quo in which
- women had a right to abortions up to viability and where needed to protect the life and health of the mother
- women and care providers had rights to discuss all care options
- doctors could not be prosecuted for performing abortions
- all reproductive care would be subjected to existing medical regulations
- other parties could not discriminate in hiring, etc. based on reproductive care decisions
Regardless of the decision made by the Missouri State Supreme Court, this charade illustrates how far Republicans will go to preserve their fringe policies against the wishes of a strong majority of voters, even in a state dominated by their own party. There's probably no better example of how extremism feeds on itself, continuing to insist on ever-higher levels of philosophic purity and conformity to positions that sixty to seventy percent of the population find abhorrent.
And for those curious, Christopher Limbaugh is the son of a federal judge and cousin of Rush Limbaugh. It shouldn't have anything to do with it, but the cynical hypocrisy in this case was too much coincidence to ignore and leave unverified.
WTH
