Republicans in Missouri and Kansas kept losing ballot measures on abortion, marijuana, and Medicaid. So they did what any sore loser with a legislative supermajority does: they changed the rules. Next Tuesday, voters in both states will decide on measures that, if passed, would make it dramatically harder for citizens to win at the ballot box ever again.
You Keep Winning, So They're Burning the Scoreboard
After the Supreme Court torched Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion rights advocates did something nobody in the Republican Party saw coming: they went directly to voters. And voters, even in red states, kept saying yes. Kansas struck down a constitutional amendment that would have gutted abortion protections. Missouri passed a ballot initiative protecting abortion rights until fetal viability. Six states in 2022. Seven more in 2024. Clean sweeps.
The pattern was unmistakable. When you ask ordinary people whether they want the government reaching into their most private medical decisions, they tend to say no. Even in states that haven't voted for a Democrat for president since the Clinton administration. Republicans noticed.
So instead of changing their position on abortion, they decided to change the process. As NBC News reports, Republican legislative supermajorities in both Missouri and Kansas referred new ballot measures to the August primary ballot, not the November general election. That's not an accident. Summer primaries turn out fewer voters. Older, whiter, more conservative voters. The math is intentional.
Missouri's Proposal: Make Winning Basically Impossible
Here's what Missouri Republicans are asking voters to approve: any citizen-led constitutional amendment would have to secure a majority in all eight congressional districts, not just a simple statewide majority. All eight. Every single one.
To understand how absurd that bar is, consider what NBC News found from a September analysis by Bolts magazine, which covers state and local politics. Every single one of the five citizen-led ballot initiatives Missouri voters approved since 2020 would have failed under this new threshold. The marijuana legalization. The Medicaid expansion. The abortion protections. All of them. Dead on arrival.
This is not reform. This is a veto mechanism dressed up in the language of democratic process. The whole point of the citizen initiative process is to let voters bypass a legislature that doesn't represent their actual views. Missouri Republicans are trying to amputate that mechanism while somehow keeping the patient alive long enough to take credit for not killing it outright.
Kansas's Proposal: Let's Just Elect Judges and See What Happens
Kansas is doing something different and arguably even more cynical. Right now, the governor appoints state Supreme Court justices from a list assembled by a nine-member nonpartisan commission. The current governor has been a Democrat since 2019. Democrats appointing judges is, apparently, intolerable.
The new proposal would scrap that system and move to direct elections for state Supreme Court justices. On the surface, that sounds more democratic. In Kansas, where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats two to one, as NBC News reports, it is not more democratic. It is a reliable pipeline for installing conservative, anti-abortion judges onto the court that would ultimately rule on abortion cases.
Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, put it plainly to NBC News: "Make no mistake about it, this is happening because the people have been winning on progressive issues." That's the whole story in one sentence. When your opponents win fair fights, you rig the arena.
This Isn't Just Kansas and Missouri
Republicans across the country are running the same play. NBC News reports that voters in North Dakota and South Dakota will decide this fall whether to require a 60% supermajority for ballot measures to pass, up from a simple majority. Utah voters will face a similar proposal specifically targeting ballot measures that raise taxes.
The coordinated nature of this effort is not subtle. These aren't independent state legislatures arriving at the same conclusion by coincidence. This is a national strategy to close off the one avenue where progressive ideas kept winning in otherwise deep-red territory. Gun safety measures. Minimum wage increases. Abortion protections. Recreational marijuana. All of them sailed through ballot initiative processes that Republicans now want to make structurally impassable.
The timing matters too. Tucking these measures into an August primary, not a November general election, is the kind of strategic low-cunning that deserves more attention than it gets. Fewer people vote in primaries. The people who do are more partisan. Republicans with supermajority control of these legislatures know exactly what they're doing and when to do it.
Meanwhile, Todd Blanche Is Having a Very Bad Week
Elsewhere in the chaos, Trump's acting attorney general and would-be permanent AG Todd Blanche is watching his Senate confirmation crater in real time over a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund Trump wants to create for January 6th defendants and others he claims were treated unfairly by the government.
Two Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, are blocking the nomination over concerns about a settlement between Trump and the IRS that funded the thing. Blanche and others in the administration insisted the fund was dead. Then Trump, at a Cabinet meeting, said: "It is dead, but you know, I wish it weren't." That's not killing something. That's announcing you plan to resurrect it.
NBC News reports Blanche is now unlikely to be confirmed before the Senate leaves next week for a five-week summer recess, with no return until after Labor Day. Trump also took a shot at Cornyn on Truth Social, suggesting the senator was blocking the nomination as payback for Trump endorsing Ken Paxton against him in a primary race. Cornyn did not respond directly, but reposted critics of Trump's comments on X. So that's going great.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe these are just good-government reforms. Reasonable procedural updates to ensure ballot measures reflect broad consensus rather than slim majorities. That is the pitch. What they actually are is something else: a coordinated effort to make the ballot initiative process so punishing and structurally hostile that progressive causes can't win even when most people support them. The initiative process exists precisely because legislatures stop representing their constituents. These legislatures are now trying to neuter the only check on their own power that ordinary voters have left.
The Kansas judge-election scheme is particularly worth sitting with. There is nothing inherently wrong with electing judges. Many states do it. But the specific context here is that Kansas Republicans want to replace a system that produces judges the current Democratic governor picks with one that almost certainly produces conservative judges in a state that's two-to-one Republican. The goal is not democratization. The goal is abortion restrictions that survive legal challenges. The framing as reform is just packaging.
Here's what actually matters: these votes are next Tuesday, in August, when nobody is paying attention. That's the bet. Republican supermajorities in both states calculated that low turnout plus procedural confusion plus a slow news cycle equals victory. Prove them wrong or watch the one mechanism that's been working get quietly strangled on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of summer.
Comments