Missourians in August resoundingly rejected Amendment 4, an attempt by the legislature to remove Missourians’ ability to initiate and pass changes to our constitution. Missouri voters also saw through the Legislature’s well-funded attempt in Amendment 5 to change the state constitution to let politicians in Jefferson City switch out income taxes (paid mostly by the affluent) to sales taxes (paid by all of us) which would have weighed most heavily on those who live paycheck to paycheck.

But the fight over who decides our future – the people or politicians – is not over.

In 2024, most of us voters decided that certain very personal decisions were none of the government’s business. As a result, the Missouri Constitution now contains in its Bill of Rights a provision that keeps politicians out of decisions around pregnancy and abortion and makes sure those decisions can be made by women with their doctors and their families.

This voter-enacted constitutional “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative” also includes protection from government interference in decisions about birth control, prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, miscarriage care, and protects respectful birthing conditions. It protects doctors and other health care providers who render care within the scope of their licenses.

Now, the Missouri Legislature is asking voters through a new – but definitely not improved – Amendment 3 on the November ballot, to repeal the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative and impose a new abortion ban, basically reviving Missouri’s prior abortion ban.

How do politicians get the voters to change their minds? Answer: Try to trick them.

The first trick: The new Amendment 3 includes a ban on gender transition medical care for minors. But an informed voter says, isn’t that type of care already banned? Hasn’t the law banning gender transition care for minors already been upheld by the Supreme Court of Missouri? Yes, and yes. Furthermore, that type of care will remain banned regardless of the outcome of this election. But the average voter probably doesn’t know that, so a “transgender ban” polls well, and the campaign against reproductive health rights (which has nothing to do with gender transition care) focuses on transgender care for minors. That’s a distraction from Amendment 3’s real purpose, which is to repeal the previous constitutional amendment protecting reproductive decisions from undue state interference.

The other trick: When the Legislature approved Amendment 3 for the ballot, the actual wording of the proposed constitutional amendment would ban abortion in nearly all cases and allow politicians to flesh out the details of how the ban is refined and enforced. How did the Legislature’s proposed ballot wording describe this ban? Here is what they wrote: “Ensure women’s safety during abortions.” Did the Legislature mention that new Amendment 3 would reinstate a ban on most abortions or that it would repeal the Reproductive Rights Initiative the voters approved in 2024? No, it did not.

But the courts did. Because of a lawsuit, the voters will see ballot wording that correctly says that Amendment 3 would “Repeal the 2024 voter-approved Amendment providing reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion through fetal viability.”

This year’s Amendment 3, in the Legislature’s words, “Allows legislation regulating abortion.” That would restore various unnecessary restrictions placed on women’s health care that were struck down after the 2024 Amendment passed. The politicians already have tipped their hand and shown voters laws they would like to impose on us, in addition to the restrictions that would be revived. For example, in 2026, a House bill was introduced that would acknowledge the Legislature’s intent, among several extreme outcomes, to “abolish abortion in this state.” This would include making abortion a crime of murder, which can carry the death penalty in Missouri.

Currently, Missourians are protected from politicians’ extreme attempts to ban abortion, birth control and other necessary medical care, but only because of the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative that a majority of our state’s voters passed in 2024, despite the opposition of a majority of the state’s politicians, placed those rights in the Missouri Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In August, Missourians overwhelmingly rejected the same politicians’ attempt to gut our constitutional right to direct democracy. I understand that some voters find it tiresome to have to keep saying no to bad ideas from Jefferson City, especially when they have to take a second look to figure out what the politicians are trying to sell us.

Yes, we did vote just two years ago to protect the fundamental right to reproductive freedom. And now, we need to vote again to protect our voter-approved constitutional right to reproductive freedom, to stop a new abortion ban, and to keep private medical decisions with women and their doctors and health care providers. This year, to protect the rights we secured in 2024, a NO vote is needed on Amendment 3.

This commentary was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on September 23, 2026 and online at StlToday.com. On the same editorial page is an excellent editorial “How low will they go for A3? This low, (Shameless trans ad show how eager they are to trick voters on abortion rights).” This commentary also was published in the September 24 edition of St. Louis’ excellent weekly, The St. Louis American.

For 118 years, important provisions of our constitution have been proposed by the people themselves, not by legislators or other elected officials.

So why is the Missouri Legislature, and special interests that fund it with seemingly outsized influence, asking voters to severely limit our right to engage in this purest form of direct democracy? We are seeing ads seeking our votes to surrender this power almost entirely by saying yes to Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot.

The centerpiece of Amendment 4 is the requirement that citizen initiative proposals be approved by a majority vote in each congressional district. That sounds nice, of course, but Missouri voters are smart enough to ask the best question I’ve ever heard about proposals for legislative or constitutional change:

“I know what it says, but what does it do?”

If approved, the requirement that a citizen-led amendment win in eight out of eight districts simply means that if it gets less than a majority in a single district, it will lose.

This is quite different from the current requirement of a simple majority statewide. The careful reader will notice that this new requirement would only apply to citizen-initiated proposals, not to proposals referred to our ballots by the Legislature. Some would call this a power grab by Jefferson City insiders; I won’t argue with them. Perhaps it is cheaper to influence a legislature than a statewide electorate.

To see what Amendment 4 would do, let’s look at some recent constitutional changes proposed by citizen initiatives. If Amendment 4 had been in effect, all the citizen initiatives since 2020 would have failed, according to an analysis by The Missouri Independent. Supporters of Amendment 4 say this is a way to empower rural voters and keep measures from being enacted by big majorities in urban and suburban areas.

But that works both ways, as The Independent’s reporting tells us: In 2016, a citizen initiative to keep sales taxes from being extended to previously untaxed services was passed with 57 percent of the statewide vote. If Amendment 4 had been in the Constitution, the sales tax restriction would have failed because it did not get a majority of votes in the First Congressional District (the City of St. Louis and areas of St. Louis County). The result? A proposal favored by a majority of rural voters would have been killed by a minority of urban voters from one congressional district.

Under Amendment 4, the cost of defeating a citizen proposal would plummet. Opponents of a citizen-initiated proposal could (1) find one congressional district where polling indicates the voters would be receptive to a negative campaign and (2) bombard that district with negative messages. So, the battle would be fought between one side that has to wage a statewide campaign while the other side (the opponents) would only have to wage a campaign in one district. No statewide debate. (Divided we fall?)

Amendment 4’s requirement that citizen initiatives pass in all eight congressional districts gives veto power to about 156,000 voters in one congressional district over the votes of most of the state’s 2.99 million or so voters who cast ballots in 2024. That’s a superpower for the nay-voters, who could be as low as about 5 percent of the state’s total who voted in 2024, according to The Missouri Independent’s analysis.

The real problem, according to Amendment 4 backers, is that some of the measures that passed with a simple majority statewide – notably, marijuana legalization and reproductive rights amendments – would have failed if required to get a majority in all Congressional districts. These measures, along with the constitutional sales tax restrictions that passed in 2016, came to the ballot by citizen initiatives because they could not get support from the Legislature.

The citizen initiative, first enacted in Missouri in 1908, is a popular check on legislatures that don’t follow the will of the majority. Missouri’s direct democracy also includes provisions for citizen-initiated changes in Missouri statutes and the exercise of a veto by voters on laws enacted by the Legislature. In each case, the Constitution prescribes the portion of voters whose signatures are required to put the proposal on the state’s ballot. But Amendment 4 would impose its win-every-district requirement only on changes to the constitution proposed by citizens.

Doesn’t that impose a permanent disadvantage on voters in rural areas, who seem to be a concern of Amendment 4’s supporters? Rural voters, though not a majority, helped pass the citizen initiatives that Amendment 4 supporters oppose. Marijuana legalization and reproductive rights protections would have failed without significant support from rural voters. For these voters – as with all voters seeking change – the citizen initiatives give them power when they feel shut out by their representatives in Jefferson City.

Love it or hate it, this is “direct democracy.” . Section 1 of Article I of our Missouri Constitution proclaims: “That all political power is vested in and derived from the people; that all government of right originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted for the good of the whole.”

Without direct democracy, we cannot bypass a legislative majority that won’t do what most Missouri voters want. Do we really want our state government to be a mini version of Washington, D.C.? If so, Amendment 4 may be the answer. But Missouri voters have said no to a lot of cockamamy ideas in the past. There’s reason to hope they will say no to this one.

Voter alert on August 4 ballot issues;

This opinion piece appears on the op-ed page in today’s issue of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Amendment 4 is one of two proposals for constitutional changes that are on the ballot in the August 4 primary. The proposals come from the Missouri Legislature. The other proposal is Amendment 5 which would authorize phasing out Missouri’s income tax and substituting sales taxes and other regressive taxes without having to be authorized by a vote of the people, which currently is the constitutional requirement.

Both have substantial opposition, thank goodness.

Amendment 5, if approved by voters, would shift from the people — who have the final say on tax increases — to the Legislature. Amendment 4, as discussed in my op-ed, would make it extremely difficult for citizen-initiated proposals to pass (must pass in all eight congressional districts of the state), while leaving Legislature-proposals to pass with a simple majority statewide. This also would shift power from the people to Jefferson City politicians .

There are excellent analyses of Amendment 5, the tax proposal, in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial, “Amendment 5’s Nightmare Scenario,”, and in Janet Jackson’s column, “Amendment 5 would shift tax burden to those least able to pay.” (Sunday July 12 issue).

Earlier that day, an otherwise pleasant legal discussion brought into focus, with a tip of my imaginary Derby hat, the continuing restoration of the Confederacy occurring these days courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. That was the week that the Court’s backward-facing majority took the Voting Right Act, the legal horse whose leg the Court broke in 2013 and shot it. “Voting Rights Act” is an apt name for a racehorse whose winning days are behind him.

Well, some “knowledgeable” observer said, Voting Rights Act’s not completely dead because intentional racial discrimination remains illegal. But the overwhelming odds are the racing days for Voting Rights Act surely are over. He could be put out to stud, but who would bid?

If your state does redistricting – which apparently can be done most anytime at least here in Missouri -- and split up the Black population sufficiently, you can create all or nearly all districts that are inclined to elect Republicans. Just don’t mention race, even though states with large Black populations can end up with all-white Congressional delegations. When challenged about this, a state’s legislature can say it did it for partisan advantage –nothing wrong with that, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned – and not as an act of intentional racial discrimination. No longer can a challenger look at the racial effects of gerrymandering; he or she must show intent. The Supreme Court majority thus may have set in motion the abolition of a goodly portion of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rest in peace, Voting Rights Act, you’ve had a helluva run.

So, back to The Royale and the Kentucky Derby. The Royale that day had an exhibit of Derby history from 1875 to 1902. During slavery prior to the Civil War (also called the War of Northern Aggression), the enslaved had been various trainers, attendants and groomers for racing horses owned by the wealthy who also owned many of the trainers, attendants and groomers.

With the freeing of the enslaved by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery (1866), some of the formerly enslaved became jockeys.

Did they ever. The Royale’s Exhibit listed the Black jockeys who won the Kentucky Derby between 1875 and 1902 – Black jockeys won half of the first 16 Derbys. In the first Derby in 1875, 13 of the 15 riders were Black.

This period was also the end of Reconstruction, where Union soldiers who had protected Blacks in the South in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant were removed after the election of 1876. There followed the continued rise of the Ku Klux Klan and measures that were designed to keep Blacks from voting, like poll taxes and literacy tests that were mostly administered to Blacks who tried to register to vote. This restoration of Confederate values, known as the Jim Crow era, continued well into the 20^th century when statues of Confederate heroes were erected throughout states that participated in the rebellion, and Blacks were mostly eliminated from federal service during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson.

The Jim Crow era did not bypass horse racing. “By the early 20^th century,” the Royale’s exhibit explained, “prejudice and jealousy of Black jockeys’ success resulted in African American riders disappearing from horse racing. The Jockey Club was formed in the early 1890s to regulate and license all jockeys. Blacks were denied their license renewals and by 1911 they had all but disappeared. James (“Jimmy”) Winkfield was the last Black jockey to win the Derby (he won in 1901 and 1902). Not one Black jockey raced between 1921 and 2000.”

The current Supreme Court majority professes to believe that the Constitution is color blind. Perhaps the same could be said for the Jockey Club’s licensing of jockeys, with the about the same measure of truth.

The current version of the nation’s highest court continues to have echoes of the Court’s most infamous decision, the Dred Scott case, where the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney recited as historical fact that Blacks “ had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and could not – whether or not born in the United States -- be considered citizens. It was the adoption of the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution following the Civil War that explicitly established that Blacks were citizens and provided the protection that enslavement denied them. (Well, at least the Black men. Women would have to wait another 50+ years to gain the most important right of citizenship, the right to vote, which had been granted to Blacks – men only -- by the 15^th Amendment in 1870. American Indians would be fully recognized as citizens a few years after women got the vote.)

The 14^th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. Today’s national administration disputes the plain wording of this “birthright” citizenship, and the current Supreme Court is thinking about it. The most surprising thing about the case is not what the decision may be – it’s the fact that the Court would even consider the question in the first place.

When Chief Justice John Roberts was undergoing confirmation to be on the Court, he famously told the Senate and the public that as a judge he would merely be an umpire calling balls and strikes. Baseball fans should have known better. A strike is not a strike and a ball is not a ball until the umpire says it is. In Supreme Court cases, it takes at least five of those nine umpires in black robes.

I’m glad I stopped at The Royale. I did not know the racial history of the Kentucky Derby. There’s now a lot of whitewashing of American history taking place at the behest of our current leadership. If we do not remember our past, we may be condemned to repeat it, as the philosopher George Santayana and many other wise spirits have reminded us. If we forget and thus repeat our past sins, does that make us great again?

Ray was a peripatetic enemy of greed, incompetence, stupidity. Congruently, the launch of the lethal flying wheel was undoubtedly due to some kind of incompetence, stupidity or neglect he spent most of his waking hours combatting, though Ray’s battles were with usually with overreaching public officials not with underperforming mechanics.

From its inception in the late 1970s when I was fairly new to St. Louis, I became an avid reader of The Riverfront Times (RFT), Ray’s creation. The alternative weekly paper featured local entertainment and, more often than not, entertaining articles about the foibles and screw-ups of local and state politicians. I wanted to meet the RFT’s creator, whose blistering, blazing, and fact-laden opinions greeted the readers as soon as they turned the cover to read what was inside. I especially wanted to meet this guy after (in about 1980) I heard Martin Duggan, the arch-conservative editorial page editor of the Globe-Democrat, praise Ray effusively to a meeting of student editors of St. Louis University’s University News for his entrepreneurial spirit, telling them they should make their student newspaper self-supporting the way Ray did when he founded The Riverfront Times by selling ads for his free alternative newspaper. When I heard this I stifled a laugh, knowing that a lot of the ads Ray sold were for products and (ahem) services that a man of Martin’s deep religiosity would not approve of. I did appreciate that Ray obviously had charmed Martin to the point that Martin either overlooked the nature of the ads or did not read them.

It came as no surprise years later when Martin Duggan teamed with Ray and others in the founding of Donnybrook on St. Louis’ Nine PBS in 1987 which became the longest running and most successful local public affairs program in the world of public television. Ray was critical to the program’s success. He was well prepared and honest. He loved verbal combat. His spark lit a lot of fuses.

I had by then gotten to know Ray when I began committing politics in the 1980s. We became good friends. He endorsed me in two unsuccessful runs for office, which he happily referred to as his “kiss of death” endorsements. To be fair, he had many kiss-of-death endorsements because, I like to think, he had a weakness for under-resourced candidates with good ideas.

Ray was interesting and he was fun. We had lunch fairly irregularly over the years. After he had been on TV weekly, it was entertaining to be at lunch with Ray when he would be approached by viewers to tell him how great he was. He was approachable and, in fact, shy. He quickly and modestly accepted the compliments and, hardly missing a beat, kept talking to me.

Ray spoke in paragraphs. He questioned government officials’ motivations and punctured their conflicts of interest. He battled with Civic Progress (then the pinnacle of the business community), though its members seldom fought back. He savaged local media, attacking the Post-Dispatch in the 1970s and 1980s often for being too conservative (imagine that.) He was a persistent foe of racism, business-as-usual, and welfare for the rich.

To be clear, Ray was a liberal but not doctrinaire. He had a healthy streak of libertarianism. For a period of years, he was a board member of the ACLU where, even there, he at times could be out of step because he absolutely was a free speech guy. No exceptions.

As the publisher of The Riverfront Times, he hired well -- young writers whose talents, curiosity, and bravery matched his. Their work was worth reading. It was the golden age of the alternative weekly papers, and Ray’s was the best. Over the years I asked some of his staff about his management style. Management style? He seemed to make it up as he went along. “He was fun” was the occasional response. His notable writers, too many to mention in full, included Julie Lobbia, who was hired away by the Village Voice in New York, and Jeannette Batz Cooperman, whose profiles and reportage later filled the pages of St. Louis Magazine (which Ray owned for some years after selling the RFT) and whose gracious remembrance of Ray is online at WashU’s The Common Reader https://commonreader.wustl.edu/ray-hartmann/. A later protégé, Sarah Fenske, the editor and writer of St. Louis Magazine’s indispensable Daily online newsletter, also has an insightful remembrance in the online edition for April 27.

Ray’s questions in conversation often had his own take embedded, expecting a response that he was full of crap, which he rarely was. Well, never completely full. When a person responded, Ray would interrupt with new thoughts. He was a world-class interrupter, and as a fellow interrupter (though not world class), I sometimes thought we might lose track of the point we were discussing. Talking with Ray, always enjoyable, was like drinking from a firehose, to use an old expression. You knew what he was going to write about in the RFT or later on Substack, or say on Donnybrook or KTRS, where he did talk radio four nights a week for several years, because he was constantly trying out his ideas, testing out his theories about why his favorite and least favorite public officials were so dysfunctional. I was on his radio show several times, and I’m sure the audience enjoyed listening to him as much as I did. He was relentlessly Socratic, sometimes doing both sides of a dialogue if you were too slow to respond.

At least several times over the years, Ray told me he’d like to go to law school, especially because his interest in arguing would have made him a very able lawyer. I told him that law school might be a waste of his talents and time. No doubt you would succeed, I told him, there are many successful lawyers far less talented -- but you have a distinctive voice in the public square. I feared that the law would make him cautious, and one of his great strengths was his willingness to take risks. His risk-taking made him an interesting writer and editor, though not necessarily a successful businessman.

His affinity for risks and his talents did lead to an interesting campaign for Congress. I donated to his campaign, though I had no real expectation that I was buying influence with a future congressman. It was like buying a Powerball ticket: You don’t expect to win but you have a few minutes of pleasure playing “what if…?” Though Ray lost, he was a successful candidate, putting his ideas into the political mix. Wrong district. Wrong year. But it was a risk worth taking, especially for a guy who always was in motion. It led seamlessly to Substack where the frequency of his screeds seemed to imply that we readers were paying for them by the word.

Ray never was arrogant. His range of friends spanned many interests and ideologies. One could disagree with his ideas, but it was difficult to find him disagreeable. He sought advice from everyone. If he didn’t like a person’s advice, he always could find one some more to his liking. No offense; none taken.

For more than half his life he was single; I never kept track of his social life. One time he told me about a speaking engagement at a Catholic girls’ school. To the adoring crowd, he said he implored: “where were you when I was in high school?” (His high school years he fondly called “fighting my way off the mean streets of Creve Coeur.”) His current audience members were teenagers, I gently noted. He told me, on another occasion, that his liking for women did not have a lower age limit; to make sure I knew he was joking he added “but the state of Missouri has one.” (I know, I know: That joke does seem particularly inappropriate in recent years. Humor is risky, after all.)

It did come as a surprise when Ray gave up singlehood for devoted matrimony rather late in life, and in his much later years, his two children became the center of his life. He was a very proud and devoted father.

I say Rest in Peace, old friend. But Ray had no reason to believe in an after-life, nor rest. He expressed this in his relentless efforts to improve conditions in this life, which as far as he knew was his only life. And what a life it was.

As my friend Jeannette Cooperman wrote, “Ray Hartmann, dead in a tragic car crash. It will take years for me to believe it.” Me too.

The objecting legislators – who kept the legislature from having its joint session – did not seem to say that the unanimous court was wrong on the law, but that the court had the audacity to enforce the constitution and strike down a law that violated the constitution.

This Missouri constitutional requirement does not exist in the United States Constitution, which puts no limits on how many unrelated subjects Congress can jam into one big bill, beautiful or not. Missouri legislators often are tempted to mimic their federal counterparts by passing “omnibus” bills that gather support by using a bill as a “Christmas tree” on which to hang various legislative ornaments to attract votes sufficient to achieve a majority needed to pass. That can mean that a legislator must decide whether to vote for a bill whose provisions a legislator disagrees with to get a provision he or she wants.

The Missouri Constitution since 1875 has included the requirement, which today is expressed very simply: “No bill shall contain more than one subject which shall be clearly expressed in its title.” The Constitution also says that a bill cannot be amended in a way that alters its original purpose.

Very simply and plainly, the constitution requires that legislators and the public be readily able to know what’s in a bill.

The Constitution also expressly give the courts the power, and the duty, to enforce the norms set forth in the constitution.

I have noticed over decades of observing the politics of judicial selection that the legislators who pitch fits about the Nonpartisan Court Plan – added by voters in 1940 to the Missouri Constitution – do not seem to represent the views of most Missourians.

Most recently, in 2012 the legislature proposed a ballot proposition to give the governor the majority of appointments to the appellate judicial commission and to allow the governor to appoint lawyers as well as nonlawyers to the commission.

It was a bad idea – the result of Jefferson City people not being able to distinguish the views of the people who hang out in the Capitol and people who live their lives outside the greater Jefferson City area – and the voters agreed. They said no.

The Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan gives the governor the power to name three nonlawyers to the appellate judicial commission and gives the members of the Bar in the three court of appeals districts of the state the vote to name one lawyer from each district. The chief justice – the judge who serves a two-year term in rotation as chief – is the seventh member of the commission. When a vacancy occurs in an appeals court or the supreme court, the commission evaluates nominees and sends the names of three nominees to the governor, who must select from the list. If the governor does not appoint from the list, the commission will do so.

After appointment, a judge must face a retention vote after serving on the bench for a year, and at the end of each term (12 years for a supreme court judge), and must retire at age 70.

Since its adoption by the voters in 1940, Missourians have voted for measures that strengthened the plan. By contrast, voters said no to a measure referred by the General Assembly in 1942 to end the plan and return to having all judges be elected. That lesson was not lost on the Constitutional Convention of 1944, which included the Nonpartisan Court Plan in the state’s most recent Constitution that was adopted by the voters in 1945.

Since its adoption by Missouri’s voters in 1940, 38 states have adopted some form or variant of the Missouri plan for some or all judicial vacancies. Voters in those states, like Missourians, have recognized in their state constitutions that it is not possible to eliminate all forms of politicking from judicial selection, but merit-based solutions can help minimize the influence of partisan politics.

The most sensible reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision enforcing the constitution’s rules is the suggestion by some legislators that they should obey the constitution when doing their work.

Another suggestion: If legislators want to pass big bills, beautiful or not, they could ask the voters to change the constitution to make their work more like the work of legislators in Washington DC.

Good luck with that.

Why a “State of the Judiciary” Speech?

My late friend Tom Simon, who served as clerk of the Supreme Court of Missouri from 1972 to 2011, told me years ago how and why the “State of the Judiciary” speech originated.

During the first term of Missouri Governor Christopher (Kit) Bond, a Republican, some (unnamed) leaders of the legislature hatched a plan in 1974 to invite the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, who had been appointed to the Court by a Democratic governor, to give a “State of the Judiciary” speech to a joint session of the legislature immediately following the Governor’s “State of the State” speech.

The idea was that the legislators, mostly Democrats, would sit on their hands during the governor’s speech and would applaud robustly during the chief justice’s speech.

When the chief justice received the invitation, according to Simon, the chief justice sent word that he would be happy to deliver a “state of the judiciary” speech but not on the same day as the governor’s speech. As undoubtedly advised by Simon – whose duties as clerk involved keeping peace with the other two branches of government – this condition avoided awkward moments for the Governor but put the legislators in the uncomfortable position of having to go forward with the speech without its intended effect.

And so, in recent years, we have had chief justices who note proudly that the speech is a “great tradition” in its 50^th year or whatever. None of us who’ve given the speech – I gave the speech in years 31 and 32 – referred to the dastardly political origins that the chief justice avoided when he was invited to give the first “State of the Judiciary” speech. I doubt that Simon gave any of us a clue as to its origins before we gave the speech; he told me some time after I had spoken.

Most of the chief justices – especially those who like giving speeches – have welcomed the opportunity to do a bit of evangelizing on behalf of the rule of law, the separation of powers and other civic necessities, to say nothing of the opportunity to tout innovative methods courts use to improve the administration of justice.

We’ve used the speech as an opportunity to remind our listeners of what we all might have learned in “civics” classes in high school, keeping in mind the somewhat depressing reality that many schools do not require a course in “civics” and, if anything, include the subject under the heading of social studies or history.

As an aside, I once signed on to an effort to require that all high school students be required to pass the same “citizenship” test that immigrants are required to pass to become American citizens. I am not sure what happened to that idea, but it was a good one.

It does not go unnoticed that innovations in the administration of justice exist largely because of legislative, and hence public, support. It is a challenging environment especially when some legislators are angry because the courts render decisions they don’t like.

Which brings me to the essential question: why have a “state of the judiciary” speech at all? My observation after many years of observing the legislative process from near and afar is that everyone who comes to speak to legislators is seen as a beggar, which I would politely refer to as a supplicant. I know they’re revered as constituents, but both descriptions can be seen at the same time.

The courts, unlike other constituents, have the duty to decide cases based on Missouri laws – which the legislators can change if they don’t like how the courts interpret their work. But when courts apply the Missouri or United States constitution, they may invalidate some of the legislators’ work. In the case of Missouri’s single subject and similar rules, that might require the legislators to go back and do it again, while obeying the constitutional standards.

The courts thus are required to act as referee in disputes in cases that question the validity of the legislature’s work. But the courts, including the Supreme Court of Missouri, largely through its administrators and in cooperation with the Missouri Bar, also act collaboratively with the executive and legislative branches in advancing measures intended to improve the administration of justice.

Referee and supplicant?

Perhaps the Supreme Court chief justice should not give a State of the Judiciary speech. By my rough count, using the internet, it appears that fewer than half of state legislatures invite the chief justice to give a “state of the judiciary” address.

My own observation is that legislators and the public benefit when judges on the local level invite their area’s legislators to visit their courts and see how they operate. Legislators and members of the public can be encouraged to watch arguments in our courts including the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, which increasingly are available online. Legislators and the public can learn a lot more about the courts in those experiences than they can from listening to the chief justice speak, no matter how eloquent the chief justice is (and, of course for the record, they all are eloquent).

We learn and respect the notion of separation of powers, that legislators and courts have their separate and equally important roles. In general, I never have thought it was a good idea for judges to go to the Capitol during a legislative session unless they are invited. They are likely to be viewed as beggars, or as likely, public servants taking time off from their actual job to hang out in Jefferson City. Neither impression is favorable.

Regardless of a speech’s educational value, inviting the chief justice and members of the court to a session of the legislature can be a gracious gesture, an opportunity to see the chief justice and members of the Court in person. This modest gesture may go toward helping keep the public’s faith in their institutions – judicial and legislative – and perhaps benefit the people who serve in them.

To speak or not to speak? That may not be the question. The big question in contentious times is whether these public servants can be gracious and civil to one another in these ceremonial moments, knowing that the ones in the black robes may on occasion undo some favorite bill that legislators voted for.

Legislators, as well as judges, sometimes make decisions that significant numbers of the public believe are against their own interests or the public’s. But not every disagreeable court decision or allegedly misguided legislative enactment is a threat to our republic. Are attacks on our institutions necessary or helpful, other than for seeding the distrust of the electorate that may be harvested at election time?

Observing the constraints of our shared constitution is a necessary and occasionally unpopular task, a task our common oath to uphold the constitution requires. Legislators and judges have a mutual interest in not tearing down the institutions of governance over disagreements of the moment.

Grace and civility are what our society always needs, especially in contentious times when they seem in short supply. Our public servants, legislative and judicial, can set an example. As we try to teach children by example, it’s good to act like grown-ups even when you don’t feel like it.

(A shorter version of the first part of this essay “Cancel a Speech but not the Constitution” was published in the online daily, The Missouri Independent – missouriindependent.com – on January 30,2026.)

“The opposition to data centers,” MoScout reported, “does not seem to fall along predictable ideological lines. Rather, it’s a coalition of disparate concerns (local control, concerns of higher utility bills). Earlier this week, the Warrenton City council approved a data center.” One attendee shared a flyer “left behind by opponents of the proposal:”

Really? The Communist Party USA? Where is Sen. Joe McCarthy now that we really need him?

Take comfort: McCarthy’s late sidekick Roy Cohn left behind his look-alike Stephen Miller, deportation mastermind at the White House. Blame the Communists – that’s the way it was, back when America was great.

With Communists advancing in Warrenton, can we expect an invasion from the Duchy of Grand Fenwick? (For younger readers, that’s a reference to the satire “The Mouse That Roared” starring the brilliant Peter Sellers.)

If you think great satire will relieve your current angst and that perhaps today’s satire doesn’t quite meet our current moment, try watching (again) two Peter Sellers’ classics: “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” or my favorite, “Being There.”

Is it time to re-read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?”

This writing hiatus has had one fortunate effect: Relief. Relief that I have not felt impelled to say something that explains the weird events of recent days and months. In the past I’ve sometimes tried linking memories of life to give context to current events. I’ve watched as some scribes, who are far better thinkers and writers than I, have floundered trying to find the proper context for explaining today’s events and predicting tomorrow’s outcomes. Are we experiencing a Reichstag fire to rouse us against immigrants and forget about Jeffery Epstein? I have no idea, but it’s a fun question to ask. Will the republic survive? Not a fun question. Who knows?

The trick, if there is one, is to keep focus on doing things that will bring us peace in our immediate vicinity but also to pay attention to the big picture, which seems largely out of control. The majority of us live in safe or mostly safe communities and know only longstanding dangers but not the unpredictable presence of taxpayer-funded armed gangs of guys wearing masks riding in cars with changeable license plates. The polls, for what they are worth, show that more and more people have opinions. The golden age of the “undecided” is closing. What they may decide, and whether it matters, is still to be decided.

My friend Jeannette Cooperman, a talented reporter and essayist, writes primarily for The Common Reader, a worthy and free online periodical that publishes eclectic collections of essays and other writings under its editor, Prof. Gerald Early of Washington University. (Commonreader.wustl.edu). Jeannette captures our nation’s everchanging moment in this essay recounting some reflections on recent conversations with her husband, Andrew, a historian. I republish with the author’s permission:

The Uncomfortable Reality of Now

By Jeannette Cooperman

JANUARY 10, 2026

“The lights are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” ~Sir Edward Grey, August 1914

It is hell living with a historian. I talk about Venezuelans’ opinions. My husband talks about an end to the international order. I wonder aloud whether AI will ever “experience” emotion. He asks why we are handing our future to a bunch of tech bros without laying out some ground rules and demanding a plan. I worry about our few puny investments in the stock market. He lists the dangers of oligarchy in an economy that no longer makes the anchor of a middle class attainable.

My mind works small-scale, intuitive, at home with the personal and the domestic. This is a realm I have always defended hotly, insisting that it matters every bit as much as the public square does. We must stay sane; we must continue to tend our surroundings.

I love the way Andrew’s mind can capture huge social and political shifts: the end of a century-long international order; a consolidation of wealth sharper than that of the Gilded Age; a technological revolution that threatens human viability. Yet I tug him away from dire news at regular intervals, insisting that it is too stressful. Many of us have learned to pull back, these last few years. Therapists scold their clients for doomscrolling. People now announce, with a bit of pride, that they no longer obsess over the news.

I am in that group, skimming what seems thoughtful but mainly counting on Andrew to relay crucial news. The rest of the time, he is analyzing what could happen, monitoring the variables. So when he says, mouth set grim, “We are seeing an end to the international order,” I am not sure how to respond—except to love how much he cares and hate what it does to his body.

Several days later, the small, fond smile is wiped from my face. Matte Frederiksen, prime minister of Denmark, has announced: “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance — all of that would collapse.”

I swallow hard. Ah, but this is all still hypothetical, I reassure myself. Childish bombast. The U.S. attack a NATO ally? Preposterous.

“Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller points out, affirming that U.S. policy is to take full control over a self-governing island that is part of Denmark and a fellow NATO member. For the military access we already possess? No, for the minerals our AI needs, so we can keep our stock market puffed up sky high, like a Macy’s parade float.

As I am taking this in, we “arrest” the president of Venezuela, a deft operation you could see as defending human rights except that it turns into a takeover, because all we really care about is the oil. “Between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil,” Trump exults.

We are back to the days of manifest destiny (translated as, we take what we want) and “might makes right.” We have lost the trust of most of the world. Civility has been tossed aside. Favors buy power, and disagreeing gets you punished. In the words of the New York Times editorial board, we have a president who governs “in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.”

This is more than liberal pundits (and my husband) tossing out grim hypotheticals. We are witnessing radical structural changes, both domestically and globally. “Before, when countries violated international rules, they at least generally acknowledged the existence of those rules,” Andrew says. “If countries start saying, ‘Screw the rules; we don’t have to abide, no one else is,’ then where does that leave international trade? International travel? American investments overseas? What Putin began in 2022, Trump is continuing in 2026. We will have a global Wild West.”

On this year’s holiday cards, friends scrawled “2026!” as though the midterm elections would fix everything—but while Donald Trump has exacerbated the effects, these changes began well before his presidencies and will continue after he is gone. We are not seeing a political blip or a temporary aberration. “The destruction of the old order is behind us,” Damon Linker writes in Persuasion. “It has been accomplished. Trump’s unique skills will no longer be needed…. Right-wing dissenters vastly outnumber those who support responsible governance from the center right.”

We live in a country that has been pushed into extremism and manipulated by forces of money, power, and technology well beyond our ken. And somehow, no matter how much it stresses us, we have to wrap our heads around that.

“And then what do we do?” I ask Andrew wearily, having dutifully Sharpied two protest signs and boycotted stores without exactly knowing why.

“This is the big 250th anniversary,” he points out dryly. “Americans revolted against the Crown and Parliament so that the elite could not tell us what to do. We the People. And we need to take action again. Precisely and strategically, with clarity and tight focus, not in a hasty rush of kumbaya. And before we do that, we need to admit to ourselves what is really happening. No more denial or delay.”

He sends me a video by Tad Stoermer, a visiting scholar in the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark who has just finished a book about the history of resistance in the U.S. Without choosing political sides, Stoermer talks about the architecture of effective resistance, which involves a “disciplined infrastructure that can operate when the legal and communication channels are closed.” A situation that once would have struck me as dystopian make-believe but grows more real by the minute. When courts are captured and petitions are ignored, Stoermer says, resistance movements either escalate or surrender.

Historically, in the U.S., only certain kinds of protest are acceptable, he continues. “Don’t be too loud, too violent, or ask for too much. Don’t become radical.” Democrats have been playing their resistance safe, “acting like if they just message better, the system will snap back.” Instead, he says, what is needed is strategy, along with tactics and alliances and “a brutal clarity about things as they are.”

As Rebecca Solnit put it, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”

Times change. But not always for the better. After World War I, my husband reminds me, the U.S. helped build a new international system. After the devastation of World War II, we helped strengthen that system. “Now, we are threatening the very system we helped to create. Is this really what we want? Have we thought about where it will lead?”

Feeling helpless, I retreat to our cozy kitchen and calm myself by cooking dinner. After dessert, Andrew mutters a quote from Star Trek the Next Generation: Captain Picard wondering aloud whether, as he saw the Visigoths come over the seventh hill, the emperor “truly realized that the Roman Empire was about to fall.”

A Closing Wolff Thought

Decades ago I was a laborer on a crew led by Joe Sader, a World War II Navy vet who was a career noncommissioned officer who made things happen. He lived in the appropriately name town of Plainview, MN. His sage advice was simple, frequent, and loud: “Do something … even if it’s wrong.”

It’s inspiring to watch thousands of people in Minneapolis, where I was a reporter while attending law school, demonstrating peacefully (so far), despite freezing cold weather. Their city is no stranger to organized demonstrations, as I found while covering late 1960s antiwar protests, also peaceful. It is a city that in the Depression had a general strike in 1934, led by Teamsters, that resulted in a strong organized labor. Minneapolis is the city where I first learned of the advice of long-ago working sage, songwriter and activist Joe Hill, when he was facing his execution in 1915: “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

Governor, governor:

don’t tax me,

tax the man behind the tree.

No matter what the fate of the state income tax, the real questions are: (1) for what purposes does the state take our money? (2) How much money does government need? and (3) who’s going to pay?

The income tax, like all taxes, starts out with a bad rap.

The more money you make, the more income tax you pay. An income tax can be progressive – before that word came to mean “bad” to some people and “good” to others – which means that the higher your income goes, the higher the percentage the government takes. Missouri’s income tax can hardly be called progressive because it only goes up from 2% to about 4.8% -- it used to be 6% but in recent years, legislators in charge of the rate could not resist the urge to “cut” taxes even if the cut was modest and triggered by some supposedly good news about tax collections.

The brutal unforgiving fact is that government costs money, and it’s got to come from someone.

If you cannot find the man behind the tree… well, you can’t tax the tree.

Somebody’s got to pay for public education, roads, bridges, public transportation, public health, health care, mental health, courts, law enforcement, state parks, recreation areas, protection of the natural environment, and of course for the National Guard we need for natural and other disasters.

The public goods that we buy collectively through our governments are what we need to help us make and keep our civilization. Civilization ain’t cheap. A society can go cheap, but going cheap costs a lot. Just look around. You may see some things that inspire you but a lot of other things that really need improvement.

The quality of our state’s civilization is what attracts people to move here and keeps young people from moving away. St. Louis, for instance, has public institutions like the zoo, history museum, botanical garden, science center, art museum, public libraries, well maintained public parks that are free, all supported by taxes and augmented by charitable contributions.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society….”

How much money does the government need to nurture a civilized society? Actually, it’s “governments” plural.

School districts are governments that get about half of their budgets from the state, and most of the rest in local property taxes. Some school districts are being driven by rising costs to four-day weeks, leading us to ask President George W. Bush’s famous question: “Is our children learning?”

Sewer districts, water districts, fire districts, library districts, mosquito control districts, counties, municipalities all need money. State universities and community colleges need money. Unfortunately, over the past 50 years, an increasing amount of universities’ money comes from their customers because students and families can borrow money from federal student loan programs and other more predatory lenders, so that state budget cutters have dramatically cut the portion of tuition costs borne by state taxpayers.

The state’s major source of revenue is the income tax. Local governments, school districts, and other special districts “own” the property tax; and municipalities and counties “own” the sales tax, with a few exceptions.

Real estate taxes are unpopular because they are based on the rates set locally and the valuations of real property are set by assessors, who in most counties are elected. Disparities exist. The loss of your job does not affect how much property tax you pay; the same is true for the annoying annual personal property tax.

The sales tax is popular, at least in comparison with income taxes, among the rich and the near-rich – those who don’t spend all their money on necessities. The sales tax only taxes certain things you buy, mostly goods but not services.

Missouri’s “modern” sales tax was enacted when the economy was largely goods. Services, by and large, are not taxed. A few states exempt food and clothing: not Missouri. When I was young, I heard some radical push back against pay toilets in public buildings on the grounds that there are some things even in a capitalist society that government should not tax. My memory is that radical politics did not kill the pay toilets (“Here I sit, brokenhearted, paid the nickel but only farted”). There was a time not long ago when we were a kinder, gentler nation and that’s why public toilets are mostly free.

Now that we are mainly in a service economy, the current sales tax does not cover enough. If the state broadens the base of what is taxed as sales – as a way of making up for ditching the income tax – then the burden of taxation will fall disproportionately on those who need to spend all or most of their money on necessities.

In the 1970s U.S. Rep. Al Ullman, a Democrat and committee chair from Oregon, proposed a “value-added tax,” a consumption tax that is added to a product at each stage of production or distribution.

The value-added tax would have replaced some or all the federal income tax. It is used in more than 160 countries including the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom. At Rep. Ullman’s next election his constituents voted that he should retire from public service. Sadly, for him, there was no man behind the tree.

I can recall no serious discussion of the value-added tax after Ullman’s defeat.

But fear not, Our President says TARIFFS are the answer –“billions and billions” pouring in from foreign countries –and of course he says that Americans don’t pay them. Maybe he’s found the man behind the tree. (Somewhere, I hope, Sen. Russell Long and his populist daddy Huey Long are smiling.)

Unfortunately, Missouri, unlike the federal government, has no right to levy tariffs. So how do the governor and his legislative allies eliminate the state income tax? Eliminating the tax is easy; replacing it is hard.

If our Governor and his allies eliminate the income tax, the replacements are likely to benefit their big donors – their donors’ economic elevator continues to go up, but their working-class voters get the shaft — regressive taxes.

Watch for this: One approach is a “phase-in,” meaning that our leaders will do “tax reform” over a period of years, so their voters presumably won’t notice, unless Democrats (and a few nouveau populist Republicans) find their voices. But if people fail to notice, it will be like the old “boiling frog” story -- if you put a frog into boiling water, he will immediately jump out, but if you put the frog in cool water and gradually turn up the heat he will stay in the pot until he’s cooked.

Bad ideas are bad ideas even when they are phased in. The challenge for our leaders will be to find good and equitable replacements for the income tax, if they exist. Voters who pay attention, I hope, will not fall for any proposal that starts with the prefix “re” – as in reform, reorganize, reallocate, etc.

Especially as concerns taxation, if we go for “reform” that is “phased in,” we may get cooked.

A condensed version of this essay is published in The Missouri Independent https://missouriindependent.com/2025/11/20/abolish-missouris-income-tax-find-the-man-behind-the-tree/?emci=c4915926-8fc5-f011-8196-6045bdfe8e9c&emdi=6f55f26d-08c6-f011-8196-6045bdfe8e9c&ceid=125870

Now that the battle over Congressional redistricting has come to mid-decade and has become a pitched battle between Red States and Blue States, attention must be paid, I suppose, because the U.S. House is divided nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans. A few seats would seem to be the fulcrum on which control of the House – and the MAGA leaders’ hold on the throat of our democracy – depends.

In the current chaos of our national government, where the Congress seems asleep and the top end of the judicial branch seems to be at cheerleading practice for the big game of (actual) executive power vs. (theoretical) legislative branch power, a lot seems to be riding on the current Red State vs. Blue State Congressional redistricting battle, and my state, Missouri, is uniquely in the middle as I will explain.

The stakes are high, even though the 2025 redistricting law in Missouri – done at the behest of our state government’s White House overlord – is expected at most to yield a gain of one seat (out of 435) next year as a result. If Team Blue wins a majority next year in the Congressional election, Team Blue expects the legislative branch will be awakened to engage actively in the give-and-take of governing that the Founding Fathers envisioned. If not, some Team Blue members can continue their quest for figuring out how to return to their forebears’ countries of origin or to make other plans.

First, some historical context: Redistricting has been a feature of our politics ever since the Founding Fathers compromised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and agreed to allocate Congressional House districts by population, agreeing that each state would get its share determined by the state’s population (with a guarantee of at least one seat), and each state would get exactly two senators regardless of size.

House redistricting has been tied directly to the census, the constitutionally required count of the American population that must be done every ten years. The current era began with a federal law enacted in 1929, when the Reapportionment Act set the number of House seats at 435, and 1967 when the Uniform Congressional District Act required a district for each seat. Each state must do redistricting within the two-year term of the current session of Congress. In some states, redistricting is done by law – that is, a bill passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor – and some states have enacted commissions to do redistricting. While the federal Constitution refers to the “legislatures” of the states, the courts so far have not interpreted this to mean only the legislature can do it.

In Missouri, in a special session in September 2025, the legislature passed a new redistricting law, and the governor signed it. Fourteen years ago, following the 2010 census, the legislature passed a redistricting bill, and the governor vetoed it, which was enacted when the legislature overrode the veto.

The 2025 Missouri redistricting law reawakened the Democratic Party, the sleeping (former) giant. The new state redistricting law seems to provide an advantage to Team Red in seven of Missouri’s eight districts – in a state that can provide 40 percent or more to Team Blue candidates statewide. This amount of “gerrymander” would presumably embarrass even Eldridge Gerry, the Founding Father whose name became part of the verb and noun, gerrymander. After the September redistricting bill passed, Team Blue swung into action. Democrats filed lawsuits. (Why more than one lawsuit? you ask. Because, obviously, we are talking about Democrats, and “Democrat” by definition means all are heading in the roughly same direction but taking different roads.)

Most prominently, the lawsuits point out that the Missouri Constitution says that “when” the state gets the census data showing the number of Congressional districts the state shall have, that’s “when” the state “by law” is to provide the districts. “By law” is a handy phrase used in the Missouri Constitution to mean a bill passed by the legislature and approved by the governor or enacted over the governor’s veto. “When,” of course, means “when.”

Team Red responds that the Missouri Constitution does not say explicitly that redistricting can only occur once every ten years, which presumably would mean that the legislature could pass redistricting bills every time it feels like it. In the 1944 Missouri Constitutional Convention that drafted the provisions approved by the voters in 1945, there was a discussion about doing redistricting in 1945 immediately after the new Constitution was to be voted on, but the drafters chose to say redistricting occurs “when” the state gets its census results. In other words, no census, no bill. There was no census prior to the 2025 bill; we are about midway between the 2020 Census and the 2030 Census.

We wait to see how Missouri Courts, which rightly pride themselves on having a Supreme Court (and Court of Appeals and trial courts in several circuits) chosen under a plan called “nonpartisan,” will read and understand the words in the Constitution, which is written, conveniently, in English, the official language of Missouri since 2008 when our voters placed the language requirement in the state constitution.

Failing that, there is a democratic solution (note the lower case “d”): Missouri is one of only a few states where the citizens can require a vote of the people on a bill before it becomes law. In other words, our Constitution writers – and voters who enacted their work – did not trust the politicians enough to give legislators full power to enact laws on their own. The constitution not only gives the governor a veto, which all states do, but also gives citizens a veto, which few states do. Missouri’s Constitution says that after the legislature passes a law, citizens can make that law subject to a statewide vote if the opponents of the law submit a petition signed by five percent of voters (based on the last election for governor) in six of the eight Congressional Districts, which currently would require collecting about 110,000 valid signatures within 90 days after the legislature adjourns. When the signed petitions are filed, the law does not go into effect unless and until the voters say yes.

Because of this provision, and because our state’s cranky voters have vetoed legislative enactments 25 of the 27 times that enactments have been referred to them over the decades, we may be uniquely poised to push back on the current DC overreach on redistricting. Despite the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) efforts of state officials, the opponents are likely to meet that five percent threshold and force a vote.

But fear not, Team Red. Enter the new Attorney General, Catherine Hanaway, the third AG in the Hawley succession since 2017 when Hawley ran away to become a U.S. senator. The current Attorney General has filed suit in federal court asserting that the effort to overturn the redistricting law under the Missouri Constitution violates the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit is accurately described as a Hail Mary pass (sports analogies unfortunately are not forbidden in legal discussions) that seems not be well grounded in the U.S. Constitution and seems, as well, to be unbecoming of Team Red whose members used to be faithful devotees of states’ rights, to say nothing of the traditional role of the Attorney General to defend the Missouri Constitution. Ignoring the state constitution is not defending.

The main justification for this federal court action seems to be that the federal district court in St Louis is now populated with seven of nine active judges who are appointees of the exalted leader of Team Red.

As an aside, in a past life I pushed back or actively ignored anyone who tried to link a judge’s predilections to the views of those who appointed the judge; sadly, there now are too many instances where this connection is hard to ignore. I believe the mainstream press does try to be fair to the judiciary – I define mainstream, more or less – as media with editors, which sometimes takes note when an appointee of a certain judge votes against the interest of the appointing President and sponsoring senator. But it has become common to note the connection between a judge’s appointment and the judge’s decision, so common that the public is led to believe that the law is nothing but a more polite version of raw politics. The activities of some U.S. Supreme Court justices on and off the bench, unfortunately, have reinforced that belief which is reflected in the current abysmal approval ratings for the highest court in the land in recent polls.

To turn specifically to the question of redistricting, my observations about the role of the judiciary are, unfortunately, part of the continual stream of distractions of which the mid-decade redistricting efforts are a part. When every act of public officialdom becomes highly charged and partisan, the patience and attention of the average voter is exhausted. Perhaps that is the purpose of the current redistricting fight. Its stated purpose is to gain a few seats to keep Team Red in power. Its effect, which may be its real purpose, is to dissuade the average voter from paying` attention to the diminution of our democracy and leave the fate of the republic in the hands of those who can persist in their struggle to win. But if the idea of winning is to “own the libs” or defeat “the deplorables” what will the winners have won?

To echo the question posed in the title: Can we make redistricting great again?

It never was great, but necessary. The Founding Fathers who provided for apportionment of legislative seats by population, and the drafters and voters of the Missouri constitution who provided the means for redistricting, no doubt understood its partisan nature. What of their wisdom can we acknowledge?

In the spirit of discerning the Founders’ original intent, I conjure this thought: this partisan exercise, where the majority can gerrymander to take more than its proportionate share of seats, should only be done once every ten years. If the majority takes too much – and does so too often – we Americans can become consumed with doing battle among ourselves year after year at the expense of what people actually need from their government. (Just like the culture wars.) If done more frequently than necessary, that is, every 10 years, we may be distracted, as we’ve been with other contentious political battles, so as not to pay attention to the fulltime influencers and practitioners of real politics who, while we are looking away, may steal everything that is not nailed down. Including our democratic republic.

The comedian Pat Paulsen, known for his satirical take on politics during the 1980s when he ran for President, said repeatedly: “All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.” Perhaps this remark resonates in today’s discussions about identity and migration, even though it doesn’t seem as funny as it was in the 1980s.

Schmitt’s speech made a few points worth noting:

America as a Homeland: Schmitt characterized America as the homeland for “Americans,” that it primarily belongs to “Europeans who settled America and conquered,” rather than coming here to embrace ideals of equality and freedom.

Exclusivity: Schmitt declared: “America belongs to us and only us.” While the phrase “white Christian nationalism” was absent from his speech, its underlying sentiment was palpable. (It would have been a much more interesting occasion if he had delivered the speech at an NAACP convention.) But the “us,” I guess, were the people in the room. If “us” means Christians, you can convert and become one of “us” but if you’re non-white, becoming “us” is challenging.

Cultural Narrative: Schmitt’s rhetoric aligns with a broader narrative embraced by substantial parts of the conservative movement, distinguishing them from traditional conservatives. This narrative appeals to those who feel their values are under threat from cultural elites and non-European immigration. Traditional conservatives are usually about low taxes, small government, and concentrating power locally. Today’s non-traditional conservatives seem fine with use of governmental, even federal power to control the personal lives of Americans and overrule decisions of local authorities they don’t like. Can we all agree that we like freedom? (Apparently, we’ve never had complete agreement on what “freedom” means.)

If you’re interested in the full text of Senator Schmitt’s speech, you can read it here. Additionally, a critique by Bridgette Dunlap in the Missouri Independent offers a different perspective, which you can find in this link.

To be fair, the question of whether we are a “Christian nation” has some interesting sources. The United Supreme Court, for one: Its 1892 decision, Holy Trinity Church v. United States, dealt with the question of whether a federal law forbidding the importation of foreign labor would apply to a New York City church that recruited a minister from England. The Court said the law clearly was aimed at barring unskilled foreign labor, not men of God. Citing many instances of governments in America invoking the Almighty, the Court said: “These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” The author of the opinion, Justice Brewer, took pains later in his life to make clear he did not mean you have to be a Christian to be an American, though his words surely have been quoted to that effect, particularly by those who felt diminished by the Court’s later cases barring sectarian prayer from public schools.

American Identity – the “Melting Pot”

As a schoolboy, I remember how teachers celebrated the idea of America as a “melting pot.” This metaphor suggested that immigrants from various backgrounds could come together, adopt a new identity, and contribute to a unified society. This narrative, however, often overlooked the darker aspects of American history, particularly the exclusion and elimination of Indigenous peoples and the complexities surrounding immigration, and of course, the status of the formerly enslaved.

A great deal of what marks the American identity has been produced by immigrants. Many early English and European immigrants, and their progeny played crucial roles in establishing American civilization. Yet, it’s essential to recognize that non-white individuals, including those brought here for involuntary labor, as well as non-European immigrants seeking opportunities, have also significantly shaped the nation. We are recognizing the contributions of indigenous people – with the growing economic and political power of American Indian nations in our midst – regarding the land and our relationship to the land. We can continue to ignore their wisdom at our peril.

The current national administration is waging war on efforts to encourage diversity in our government, educational and cultural institutions, and places of employment. The DOGE boys (Department of Governmental Efficiency) with their mighty computers, have sought to eliminate programs that promote “diversity” throughout the federal government. Have they gone too far? Consider agriculture — where grants and programs were computer scanned and, if they included “diversity,” they were largely eliminated. The DOGErs were not intending to be funny. But many of these programs aimed to enhance plant diversity, which is crucial for resilience and productivity. One could observe the same thing about people as well as plants.

Ultimately, while some may work hard to erase the concept of diversity, it remains a fundamental strength of both our plants and our society. As we struggle to survive and to thrive, it’s important to recognize that our losses may lead to gains for other societies. The question of what it means to be an American is more complex than political slogans, and understanding this complexity is vital for our collective future.

The question is not how to define Americans by excluding certain groups or people with certain beliefs, but rather this: Can we identify what Americans have in common? If our Constitution protects our right to our own beliefs, which it does, what are the attributes or beliefs that unite us or at least unite most of us? In short, what forms our identity?

The Journey

To begin this inquiry, I remember meditating on what it means to be an American a couple decades ago when I drove alone from San Francisco to St. Louis, a journey that renewed my impression of how big and beautiful this country is. On a long solo trip, I like to have dinner at a regular café in a typical town along the way. My first dinner stop was a town in Nevada, where I entered a café with a typical American name in the center of a typical American town. To my surprise everyone there was speaking Spanish and seemed to be from Central America. In Wyoming a couple days later, I repeated my quest. In another typical cafe with a typical American name, I found I was the only Anglo in the place. Wow, I thought, this big country with big open spaces seems to be filling up with people who seem happy to be here, generating enough income to be dining in cafes.

Are they, too, Americans? Was their arrival here like that of my maternal family forebears from Ireland in the 19^th century who came to Minnesota as tenant farmers, or my paternal Pennsylvania Dutch forebears, also farmers, who came from the Dresden area of Germany in the late 18^th century? My Irish Catholic mother (though to tell the whole truth her mother was German and more strictly Catholic) told stories of signs reading: “Help Wanted – Irish need not apply”. Because my mother had red hair, the addition of the married name Wolff did not erase her Irish identity. To be complete I add my father’s Pennsylvania Dutch origins: the arrival of those Germans to Pennsylvania after the American Revolution was not greeted with enthusiasm by the relatively established owners of large parts of Pennsylvania. My Pennsylvania Dutch forebears, however, were here long enough for my great grandfather, the Rev. Andrew T. Wolff, a hundred years later to be a Presbyterian minister around the turn of the 20^th century and gain some renown as an anti-papist preacher.

I am fortunate, of course, to be some generations removed from the era when earlier-arriving Americans wanted to kick my later-arriving forebears out. Catholics have moved past the time when many Protestants thought giving power to Catholics would mean the Pope would come here and run our country and that Catholic schools would get tax support because of how we propagated. Al Smith, in 1928 the first major party Catholic nominee for President, faced widespread disapproval based on his religion. When he lost, he joked that he sent the Pope a one-word telegram: “Unpack.”

In my lifetime, we’ve had two Catholic presidents. The first, John F. Kennedy, gave an historic speech to the Baptist Convention as candidate in 1959 assuring them that he wasn’t that good a Catholic and surely would not do what the Pope said, and the second, Joe Biden, was criticized by some Catholic clergy for not adhering to the clerics’ political-moral position on abortion. Now the Supreme Court has five or six Catholics, depending on how you count. I believe they all are Americans, though in truth there are a few I would not let in my club if I had one. (No danger there; I’ve only been in one club since college, Sam’s Club briefly, and that probably was a mistake.)

Our Disparities

We’ve been taught as children that our non-indigenous non-enslaved forebears came here for freedom from religious or political persecution. I guess that would also include refugees from wars in which we were involved. Correct, but not complete. Many immigrants came for economic freedom, the opportunity to get rich or at least be better off than they were in their countries of origin. Many ended up comfortable compared to the rest of the world, but not rich. (A sobering fact is that currently the average income in Mississippi, our poorest sate, is higher than that of Germany.) After a while, some who migrated here came to resent those who came here and got rich or more comfortable than they.

Some have come to resent recent immigrants who, they believe, are taking their jobs. Perhaps so, but after a tornado struck St. Louis neighborhoods in May, I’ve noticed a lot of Spanish speaking men on our roofs. Don’t tell ICE; I believe we need these non-native guys to get the roofs replaced. As a teenager I did a fair amount of climbing on roofs when I was hired to paint houses –it’s hot and dangerous up there – and I also picked raspberries for five or ten cents a pint briefly until the mosquitoes drove me into another line of work. In retrospect, perhaps these opportunities in my youth were a sign that there was a shortage of migrant labor. (The raspberry gig drove me to my too-short but storied career in journalism, which started as a paperboy for the Rochester MN Post-Bulletin at age 12. Storied? You ask. Yes, every reporter’s career is storied, perhaps poor in money but rich in stories.)

America, the land of opportunity, has always seemed a place with sizable disparities in wealth and opportunity (think the Gilded Age of the 19^th Century; think again, today’s gilded age) But since the 1980s the gap between rich and the not-rich has become excessively large. Polls in recent decades show that many Americans no longer believe that their hard work will mean a more prosperous future for their children than they have had. This belief is reflected in the grievances that have become increasingly influential in our political life. Except somehow, those with grievances do not resent allegedly self-made politicians and nepo-babies who’ve figured out whom to blame for working people not getting rich or at least comfortable.

In my younger years of committing politics, I learned that successful politicians take money from the rich and votes from the poor and promise to protect each from the other. The current national leadership has been rather brilliant at this. Perhaps they learned that in politics, love motivates but hate moves mountains. That is what makes America grate. (My spelling of grate is intended.)

So, if we cannot blame the rich for what ails us, who else? Immigrants, that’s who. It is, of course, common sense that a prosperous country such as ours should protect its borders, and we have done so, more and less, for at least the last 100 years. Fear of the invading hordes, who will take the jobs of real Americans, will keep us from resenting the rich too much.

But much of our politics is distraction. We can lose sight of the beliefs that unite us if we indulge too much in our grievances.

Our 18^th Century Enlightenment forebears, who wrote the Constitution, forged a series of compromises on how we are to govern ourselves, with the states assuming the primary role of governance, and the Bill of Rights protecting us from the national government. The post-Civil War amendments (c.1866) broadened our concept of who was to be protected, by the elimination of slavery and the requirement that all governments, including states and their localities, be reined in by the concepts of equal protection and due process, which came to apply much of the original Bill of Rights to the states. That left out the right to vote for women, remedied by constitutional amendment in 1920, and the citizenship of American Indians, added by federal statute in 1924. (Persons born in the United States are citizens under the 14^th Amendment, but under Article One of the Constitution Indians were classified as “Indians not taxed,” and if living on tribal land, could not become citizens except through naturalization, legislation or the provisions of a treaty, an interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott case. Stay tuned to this term’s case where the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether the “birthright citizenship” provision of the 14^th Amendment means what it says.)

The Beliefs That Define Us

There is a belief that we can define ourselves and our governance by looking back to the Founding Fathers and what they believed us to be 250 years ago. That may sometimes be helpful – certainly the current majority of the U.S. Supreme Court think it is controlling except when it’s not – but that belief often misses the larger point. We as Americans have actively been defining ourselves for 250 years. The beliefs of our constitutional fathers may be necessary, but they are not the whole picture.

Here is something I said in a speech nearly 20 years ago, as though anticipating Sen. Schmitt’s recent question as to what is an American. I opined:

“We have no common national origin or ethnicity that currently forms our shared identity as Americans. Instead, our identity has been forged by the rule of law and by our common experience that faithfulness to the law guarantees liberty, equality of opportunity and a functioning society even in the face of those who, through ambition for power or wealth, would seek to impose their will on the less powerful. (It may be a sign of dotage when a writer quotes himself; forgive me.)

The Declaration of Independence, which embodies these ideals, now hangs in the Oval office, apparently with no irony intended. With the common beliefs derived from the Declaration and enabled by the Constitution, we have accumulated our national experience without most of us having to be concerned day-to-day with a government that oppresses us. We also are comforted by the belief that we can make ourselves heard in our governance, certainly at the local level, even if it seems less so at the state or national level. We get to vote, and sometimes our side loses. As Dick Tuck, California politico, candidate and trickster famously said when he lost a state senate race in 1966: “The people have spoken – the bastards.”

Most of us also have had the luxury of not paying much attention to our governance. We’ve been comforted that ours is a government of laws, that our elections are generally free of corruption, and we live with the implicit understanding that due process, equal protection, and various laws will ensure protection from the government and some modicum of fairness. But it was Jimmy Carter, probably our most Christian president, who reminded us: “Well, as you know, life is not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the Federal Government should take action to make these opportunities exactly equal.” Many of today’s politicians may use this thought without the word “exactly.” I miss Jimmy Carter: Christianity is a fine idea. It’s too bad so few of our politicians and other noisy believers who preach it practice it.

Our journey to elaborate on the identity of Americans continues. To date, the long path has been toward inclusiveness, not exclusivity, regardless of what the DOGE boys’ algorithms say. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lie-filled anti-Communist crusade disrupted and threatened our political life in the 1950s his own political life started to unravel with a simple question that Joseph Welch, a lawyer hired to defend the Army, asked in a widely watched televised senate hearing. When McCarthy attacked a young lawyer on Welch’s team for having Communist ties, Welch responded: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

There may be no singular trait or belief that identifies and unifies all of us as Americans. But a sense of decency in our discourse is essential to a common understanding of our identity, whether we are white or Christian or neither, regardless of what we say or believe. I don’t agree with a lot of what Sen. Schmitt said to the National Conservativism Conference last month, but I respect his right to say it (even though I may not be willing to die defending that speech). He and I are Americans, after all. We Americans should continue the journey to find all that defines us, even when we disagree about it, guided I hope by a sense of decency in our discourse – a sense of decency that is not legally required but is nonetheless what I believe we owe to one another as well as to ourselves.

For starters, let’s find more ways to give one another the thumbs-up gesture and avoid the negativity of the middle-finger.

(A condensed version of this essay appears in The Missouri Independent https://missouriindependent.com/2025/10/17/what-is-an-american-are-they-christian-are-they-white/

About six months after I moved to St. Louis in 1975 for a job teaching at St. Louis University Law School, my colleague and friend Roger Goldman, a lifelong St. Louisan, asked me how I liked it here.

I paused, reflecting on the great, highly regarded (and self-referential) cities where I had lived: Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver; and, on a smaller scale, Rapid City SD, and my hometown, Rochester MN, and college town, Hanover NH.

“I really like St. Louis,” I replied. I’ve been here six months, and nobody yet has told me how lucky I am to be here.”

Change of Perspective

Of course, I have since changed my mind about the virtue of such civic modesty.

My wife Pat and I planned (if you want to call what people do in their 20s as planning) to be here for a few years and then move on, like the nomads many of us become when our education or other circumstances make such mobility possible.

A few years became a few more, and with a bigger house and two children, the next thing you know, we found St. Louis to be a great place to live and raise a family. The place has its faults, God knows ….

When a person who was raised in a Scandinavian-influenced Midwest culture, as I was, there is an interesting adjustment that occurs when one lives, works, plays, and gets active in St. Louis and Missouri. St. Louis (I call the place St. Louis regardless of whether you reside in the city or a suburb) and the state of Missouri where it is situated don’t always appreciate one another.

Studying the Civil War in Missouri is instructive. St. Louisans saved the state from leaving the Union and joining the Confederacy. Missouri had a real civil war – families, neighbors, communities split and literally fought and killed one another. As St. Louis native and favorite comedian Kathleen Madigan has noted, Missouri had a slogan – “Fight Local.”

By contrast, when I was school in Minnesota, the Civil War was just a bunch of battles and a great president who freed the slaves (that great and most interesting president also approved hanging 39 Indians in Mankato MN in 1862 but we Minnesota kids didn’t study that). But in Missouri where families were split and the divided state was occupied by the Union Army, historical memory remains real. Some refer to it as “the War of Northern Aggression” or “the Lost Cause.” Much of contemporary politics of the state and nation seems a continuation of the War Between the States. If you study the history of Missouri, you can learn a lot about the country at large. Humans are complicated; so are their histories.

I’ve come to appreciate what a gem the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park is. The History Museum, known formally as the Missouri Historical Society, is funded in part by a local tax -- a tax that also supports the zoo, the art museum, the science center, and the botanical garden and makes these great institutions largely free.

Located centrally in St. Louis in Forest Park, the museum draws thousands of visitors each month; it also operates the inspiring Soldiers Memorial downtown and the research center just west of Forest Park. The museum and its environs are a comfortable gathering place for all.

The study of history is not only to understand our collective past but to be a guide to the future. You can see the effects of centuries of racism and discrimination against marginalized groups, but you also can see the stories of hope and courage and vision that can shape a better future for all St. Louisans.

“I am St. Louis (and I don’t believe we’ve met)” is an effort – birthed in the History Museum and, I hope, spread from there -- to bring a unifying message of civic pride to our place.

Is it possible for a person who’s not from here -- and did not go to high school here -- to fall in love with St. Louis?

I answer with the understatement that lives in my Midwestern soul: St. Louis is okay. It’s really really okay. Super okay. I suppose a bit of civic bragging is okay – as St. Louis Cardinal great Dizzy Dean often said: “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” (I know that Dizzy Dean’s friend Satchell Paige said much the same thing but, sad to say, he didn’t play for the Cardinals.)

Please watch the video; it’s only a few minutes long. I am St. Louis 🎥

Television, Postman said, degrades public life. Complex policy discussions become soundbites and images, to my mind, the intellectual equivalent of bumper stickers. Education comes to value fun rather than serious intellectual development. Religion becomes spectacle and “televangelism” transforms spiritual practice into entertainment. News evolves from providing information to emphasizing dramatic visuals and emotional impact -- “if it bleeds, it leads” – rather than educating its masses of viewers on important issues. I grew up a fan of professional wrestling; little did I know that it would become a major cultural force.

The value of news to commercial television has become more profit, less public service. Take pharmaceutical advertising, for instance. America is rare in allowing televised advertising of pharmaceuticals. The evening news, catering to an older group of viewers, has ads with the tagline “ask your doctor if (insert name of impressive sounding drug) would be right for you.” The news provides images that provoke anxiety, and then ads that offer treatments that make us healthier and, perhaps, less anxious. Will these bromides help us live longer? Will we want to?

When Postman wrote, in 1985, we already were deeply into the television age. Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 turned to Madison Avenue for ads that persuaded, while his opponent Adlai Stevenson, could not bring himself to be sold like soap. John F. Kennedy, whose family connections included Hollywood, “won” his 1960 debates by his cool looks and poise, while Richard Nixon – who radio listeners thought “won” the debates – appeared sweaty, shaky and unshaven. Ronald Reagan, who came to politics from Hollywood, first as governor of California and eventually as a two-term president, elevated the stagecraft of the Presidency mightily. His media guru, Michael Deaver, whose understudy Roger Ailes later founded Fox News, understood television and directed most if not all of Reagan’s great visual moments.

In our current administration, visuals are everything. Politics is entertainment. The old and worn-out joke was that politics is show business for ugly people. No more. Cabinet and other highly visible aides seem mostly sent from central casting (or Fox News) for their appearance in their Senate-confirmed roles (Does the Secretary of Defense/War really have a make-up room at the Pentagon?) rather than life accomplishments or minimal competence. Blind loyalty, of course, trumps all. Senators, meanwhile, seem to be candidates for best supporting actor, and dominant members of the House are back-up singers.

And so here we are. We are challenged not to let the current Orange man daily show live too many months rent-free in our heads. The weapons of choice are in the media, and in our ability to compartmentalize. Satire is one weapon. Fifty years ago, the great lyrical satirist Tom Lehrer, who left show business and went back to teaching math, pronounced that “satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.” He may have been right. Today, it is difficult some days to distinguish the headlines in the daily newspapers (there are some remaining, actually) from the headlines in The Onion. Except that it is dead serious. To circle back to Tom Lehrer, who died recently, it is no coincidence that the current commander-in-chief seems actively to be campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly he should have his wish – after all, the five-member Nobel Committee, picked by the Norwegian Parliament, gave the world’s most prestigious prize not only to Henry Kissinger for not timely ending the war in Vietnam, but also to Barack Obama shortly after the 2008 election, simply for the feat of being elected to the Presidency. And one wonders why the current leader-of-the-free-world is so cranked about DEI, other than his habit of appealing to our lowest instincts. He did, after all, promise to end the War in Gaza and Russia’s War on Ukraine, and he did neither. Perhaps that’s Nobel-worthy.

The problem with satire is that it frequently descends into mockery. When cruelty is the coin of the political realm, mockery replaces more subtle art of satire and often makes it difficult to have polite and witty conversation. Or does it?

In these Tracks, I will try to divert from the muck that seems to envelop us. Some current events, some local and state, some national and international.

Attention is the most valuable commodity in this tele-visual age. I am not sure that a Typographic Man can provide sufficient distraction in the tele-visual age, but I will occasionally take a stab at it. The rest of the time I will provide filler – observations on current events, bits of history not presented in the Smithsonian, and memories of past lessons, real and imagined, and law, of course. Some specific to Missouri and the Midwest, and some national and international. I have no deadlines yet; as always, I will discard much of what I write, and the remainder that I post will be priceless or cost-free, take your pick. Until a better plan comes along. If I get around to graphics and visuals, you will know that I have learned something. Don’t hold your breath.

Best wishes,

Mike

If you follow the Wolff Tracks you find the Wolff. This one’s rather sociable, not scary, and says he means no harm.

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