The annual State of the Judiciary address to a joint legislative session scheduled for Wednesday was cancelled when it became clear Senate Republicans were going to boycott.
House Majority Leader Alex Riley, a Springfield Republican, said he found out when he came to the floor that the speech by Chief Justice W. Brent Powell would not go forward as planned.
Senate Republicans, Riley said, were upset about recent judicial rulings, most notably a unanimous decision last week that threw out a law that included changes to who writes ballot summaries and giving the attorney general new appeal power.
“At the moment, our understanding is the Senate is a little tied up in a filibuster of sorts, and that they wouldn’t be coming over to join us,” Riley said. “So therefore there wouldn’t be a joint session. And because there’s not a joint session, there was a decision made to call it off for today, and we’ll see where things go.”
A spokeswoman for the Missouri Supreme Court could not be reached for comment.
Powell wrote the unanimous decision last week that determined the bill enacting the ballot summary law changed too much during its path through the General Assembly. The changes, Powell wrote, violated the Missouri Constitution’s requirement that amendments should not change the original purpose of legislation.
After the House adjourned for the day, Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin of Harrisonville lambasted the court’s decision in the ballot summary case and others in recent years that deemed laws passed by the legislature unconstitutional.
He also pointed to the 2021 decision by the court upholding voter approved Medicaid expansion and a 2024 decision allowing an abortion-rights amendment to appear on the ballot.
“It’s been quite clear that this is a problem with the judiciary thinking that they have carte blanche capability to do the job of the legislature,” Brattin said, adding: “They’re just going to do whatever the heck they want to do. They want to act like they’re the legislature.”
The bill ruled unconstitutional last week originally only contained one section intended to prevent the courts from rewriting ballot language for measures referred to voters by the General Assembly.
By the time it was passed, it changed five sections of state law, completely revising the process for court challenges to ballot summaries and granting the attorney general authority to appeal preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement of state laws or regulations in any field.
Riley, who is in line to become speaker of the House next year, said there is “a lot of frustration within the legislature over, not just recent Supreme Court decisions, but a lot of Supreme Court decisions over the years.”
Five of the seven judges on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican governors, including Powell. Judges are selected for the Supreme Court using a nonpartisan plan that starts with a judicial commission selecting candidates to present to the governor, who then appoints them to the bench.
The commission is composed of three lawyers elected by the Missouri Bar, three citizens selected by the governor and the chief justice, who serves as chair.
That process may need to change, Riley said.
“Our current system does need some reforms,” he said. “What exactly those look like, I’m definitely open to conversations. But I do think the current system is ripe for a conversation that hasn’t happened in a long time.”
Some of the rulings that have drawn the ire of Republicans involve bills deemed unconstitutional because they contain multiple subjects or stretched beyond the original purpose of the legislation.
Riley said that while he disagrees with many of the court’s rulings, “at the end of the day, they do have a good point that these massive omnibus bills that we’ve been doing in the legislature for a long time aren’t good for multiple reasons.”
The legality of these wide-ranging omnibus bills is certainly questionable, Riley said.
But it’s also “a better idea to try and pass smaller, cleaner pieces of legislation over the course of the legislative process,” he said. “That can be challenging, but I do think there is some benefit to getting back to that.”
House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, called the cancellation of the chief justice’s speech “petty.”
“Unfortunately,” she said, “this is just another sad example of majority Republicans throwing a temper tantrum whenever they don’t get their way.”