Editorial Roundup: Missouri
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 3, 2023.
Editorial: Ashcroft’s blatant abuse of process in abortion fight should be disqualifying
For the second time, a court has flatly rejected Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s blatant misuse of his office in trying to mislead the public about a proposed abortion-rights referendum. Tasked with writing unbiased ballot language to describe the proposal to voters, Ashcroft instead submitted wording that a judge says is “replete with politically partisan language.”
That’s an understatement. Ashcroft’s histrionic ballot language is nothing less than a bumper sticker for the anti-choice movement, spinning outright lies about the referendum effort while violating his own oath to uphold state law.
Undeterred by his latest legal defeat, Ashcroft — who is running for governor next year — has vowed an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, which will almost certainly end in the same way. No matter. His real goal is to run out the clock so Missouri’s voters never even get to consider the question.
On that cynical front, Ashcroft is winning while losing. Because referendum proponents can’t start gathering signatures to get on the ballot until the legal fight is over, he is dragging that fight out as long as he can. He clearly hopes voters in next year’s election will reward this calculated abuse of process. They shouldn’t.
The dispute stems from Missouri’s draconian new abortion ban, instituted last year immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, giving states the power to regulate the procedure in any way they want.
Missouri’s statute outlaws abortion completely, from the moment of conception, even in cases of rape or incest, with the sole exception of medical emergencies. Doctors who violate the ban can face up to 15 years in prison.
But there are strong indications that the ban, which was written by the state’s Republican Legislature, wouldn’t survive an up-or-down vote by the state’s residents. Polls show that regular Missourians (even Republicans) support some level of abortion rights, by significant margins. And in each of the seven states where the question has been put to voters since the overturn of Roe, support for abortion rights has prevailed — even in deep-red Kansas.
So it makes sense that Ashcroft and other Republican politicians in Missouri don’t want a statewide vote on the issue here. They have the right to that opinion.
What Ashcroft doesn’t have the right to do is misuse his office to sabotage the process by which abortion-rights advocates are trying to put the question on the ballot.
Ashcroft’s official duties include summarizing the legal language of proposed ballot measures into short, easily understood descriptions for the voters. State law requires that those summaries are “neither intentionally argumentative nor likely to create prejudice either for or against the proposed measure.”
The referendum proposal at issue here is actually a series of proposals with different wording, a common strategy that gives proponents time to decide which version they want on the ballot. Some of the versions are relatively open-ended guarantees of reproductive rights, including abortion rights; others specify that the state can restrict abortion after fetal viability or after a specified number of weeks. Some also specify that nothing in them requires government funding for abortion.
Yet Ashcroft’s summaries for each of the proposed ballot measures — summaries that, again, are legally required to be unbiased — would ask voters if they want to “allow for dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth … to partial-birth abortion,” as well as tax-funded abortions.
This isn’t political spin, this is lying to the public, plain and simple; and Ashcroft is doing it in his official capacity as tax-paid servant of the public.
A circuit court judge called him on it earlier this year, throwing out Ashcroft’s preposterous ballot language and replacing it with a factual and even-handed description of the referendum proposals.
Ashcroft appealed. A three-judge panel of the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City this week sided with the lower court. “The secretary’s summary statements do not fairly describe the purposes and probable effects of the initiatives,” wrote Judge Thomas Chapman.
Ashcroft isn’t likely to find the Missouri Supreme Court any more receptive to this ongoing partisan stunt. But the process of appeal will take weeks more, at least, further narrowing the window for referendum proponents to gather the more than 170,000 signatures they need by early May to get on next year’s ballot. And that is, transparently, the whole point.
It’s a darkly clever strategy for a politician — but such a blatant betrayal of Ashcroft’s official duties that voters, regardless of their views on abortion, should find it disqualifying for higher office.
END