Quick Notes on Missouri Amendment 4 of 2026 (Initiative Petition Reform)
I was asked last night after the Lawrence County Information Meeting to post these quick notes to counter persistent bad assumptions about Amendment 4 of 2026 (Initiative Petititon Reform). They are mostly the raw bullet points from my own notebook, but I have tried to touch up some of the links and citations to other notes and PDFs so that they will go somewhere for you. This is just a summary of what I talked about&em; I have written in more detail in various places.
Ballot and Amendment Text
The ballot language and the full amendment text can be found on the Secretary of State's Website. I do not ever recommend that anyone decide whether to support a constitutional amendment from the ballot summary alone, no matter who writes it.
What It Does
- For amendments proposed by initiative petition
only . - The amendment must pass by a majority in each of the 8 congressional districts rather than
- a majority statewide only
Amendment 4 is a clumsy tool: of all of the different proposals for IP reform, I like it the least. Ron Calzone is correct on that point. But it plugs a hole now and it can be adjusted later (see below).
Two Major Wrong Assumptions
Initiative Petition is "the People" vs "the Legislature"
This is simply not true.
- "the people" had two options for amending the Constitution in the original design:
- amendments proposed Legislature they elect and ratified by statewide vote
- amendments proposed by delegates they send to constitutional convention and ratified by statewide vote.
- Initiative petition (Ch III:§49 & Ch III:§50) was bolted onto this as part of an early 20th century (Wilsonian) Progressive movement to bypass the structural guarantees of the constitution(s).
- IP is "direct democracy", which experience has demonstrated does not represent the "deliberate will" of "the people".
- What you are really looking at is the different methods by which "the people" amend the Constitution.
- Initiative Petition is the worst of the available methods
- Amendment 4 does not touch either the legislative approach or the convention approach.
The Legislature Will Never Vote to Reduce Its Own Power...
- ...therefore (says the argument), once Amendment 4 passes, we will never be able to fix the threshold for legislative amendments (which probably ought to be done).<.li>
- This is false for at least two reasons:
- The convention approach is still open
- IP itself was proposed by the legislature (88th GA, Amendment 3)
- So was, e.g., the addition of §18(e) to the Hancock in 1996
- Legislatures will vote to reduce their own power when they fear each other or fear a future legislature.
- This argument does not play strongly enough at the moment, but it will eventually.
- If it does not, a convention can force the change.
Additional Background
Dinan, J. (2019). Amending Missouri’s Constitution: Accounting for the Frequency of Amendments and Considering Revisions to the Amendment Process [Technical report]. https://showmeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20190731%20Amending%20the%20Constitution%20-%20Dinan_1.pdf
- This is often quoted by the opposition to Amendment 4 because it shows that the majority of amendments passed (1945-2019) are passed by the legislature, not by IP.
- While this is true,
- The report breaks amendments into categories with different dangers
- Policy-enactment amendments which bypass deliberative process and put policy in the Constitution (where it does not belong) are the worst danger
- Such policy-enactment amendments ALL come from IP
- A rash of IPs were passed between 1908 and 1945, so much so that the 1945 convention tried to tweak IP to dampen them
- A rash of damaging IPs has occurred since 2019.
- The report itself is very good and worth reading.
