The saga of Dean Plocher took yet another twist this week, with the House speaker’s leadership team circumventing the chamber’s rules to try to force the ethics committee to hold a hearing.Plocher has been under investigation by the committee for months, and recently he and his allies have started demanding it convene and dismiss the complaint against him. But because House rules only allow the chair of a committee to schedule a hearing, the meeting scheduled by GOP leadership was quickly scuttled.“The reason why I canceled the meeting is because I didn’t notice it up,” said state Rep. Hannah Kelly, a Mountain View Republican appointed last year by Plocher to serve as ethics chair. She ultimately ended up scheduling a meeting for 11 a.m. Monday.Plocher wouldn’t comment Thursday on what his role was in the push to force a meeting.But the unusual maneuver, coming as the speaker is already being accused of obstructing the committee’s work, has added even more fuel to questions about whether the ethics rules in the House need to be reworked in order to deal with the possibility of the chamber’s most powerful member being the focus of an investigation.“It is deeply difficult to hold elected officials accountable in the process that we have in this ethics committee, particularly when we’re talking about the speaker, who appoints those members and ultimately has authority over how that committee works. Whether or not subpoenas are issued, you know, and the list goes on,” said House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat.House Majority Leader Jon Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican set to take over as speaker next year when Plocher’s term expires, agreed that changes to the ethics rules in light of everything that’s been going on this year are “worth looking at.”“There’s always room to look at things,” he said earlier this week, “and see how they can be improved as we go forward.”Since late last year, the ethics committee has been digging into Plocher’s unsuccessful push for the House to sign an $800,000 contract with a private software company outside the normal bidding process; alleged threats of retaliation against nonpartisan legislative staff who raised red flags about that contract; purported firing a potential whistleblower; and years of false expense reports for travelalready paid for by his campaign.Over the course of the ethics committee’s inquiry, Plocher refused to speak to the private attorney hired to gather evidence and on three occasions over March and April refused to sign off on subpoena requests by the committee.Kelly and the committee’s vice chair, Democratic state Rep. Robert Sauls of Independence, also accused Plocher of undermining the inquiry by pressuring potential witnesses.Last week, the committee voted 6-2 to reject a report recommending a formal letter of disapproval for Plocher, that he hire an accounting professional to manage his expense reports moving forward and that he refrain from retaliation against any legislator or House employee who cooperated with the committee.The rejected report also includes numerous suggested changes to the rules governing the ethics committee process. Among the changes would be transferring subpoena power automatically to another member of House leadership — the speaker pro tem — if the speaker or anyone on his staff are subject of an inquiry.The report also suggests strengthening the House policy protecting legislative employees from unlawful harassment and clarifying that the committee can investigate any alleged obstruction of one of its investigations.

Jason Hancock

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Missouri IndependentDavid Steelman speaks to reporters on Tuesday in Jefferson City. Steelman is an ex-member of the University of Missouri Board of Curators was hired by House Speaker Dean Plocher as his attorney.

Plocher has insisted he can’t say anything while the investigation is ongoing.“I can’t comment on anything on ethics,” he told reporters Thursday. “I just can’t comment.”But his attorneys have not been nearly as hesitant to weigh in on the speaker’s behalf.On Tuesday, one of those attorneys — former member of the University of Missouri Board of Curators David Steelman — said there was nothing at all wrong with the House ethics rules.The problem, Steelman contends, was that Kelly and the committee didn’t follow them.“The rules work fine if the committee chairman would have applied them,” Steelman told reporters. “It was not the procedure that didn’t work. It was the chairman who ignored the procedure. That didn’t work.”The committee should have dismissed the complaint at the start of its inquiry in November, Steelman said, and throughout the process the committee seemed to be ignoring its mission and digging for dirt.After rejecting the draft report last week, the ethics committee has held no other meetings. Steelman says the committee has no choice but to convene and finish its work.“Dean Plocher,” Steelman said, “has a right to a resolution.”As speaker, Plocher also has the power to approve — or refuse to approve — subpoenas issued by the committee. And three times, the speaker’s office informed the committee he would not be granting its request.Steelman said Tuesday that two of the requested subpoenas were for Plocher and his chief of staff, Rod Jetton. They both agreed to testify willingly, so no subpoenas were needed.As for other requests, after roughly a month of resistance, Plocher eventually recused himself, allowing Speaker Pro Tem Mike Henderson to sign off on some of the subpoenas.When, exactly, Plocher decided to recuse himself remains unclear.Asked why Plocher didn’t recuse himself from the start of the investigation, or at least when subpoena requests started showing up to his office, Steelman told reporters the speaker recused himself “when it mattered.”Steelman did not respond to an email seeking details on when, exactly, Plocher recused himself from the committee’s subpoena process.Plocher also has the power to take away Kelly’s position on the ethics committee. He declined to answer whether he was considering that when asked about it at a recent press conference.As for this week’s kerfuffle over committee hearings, Marc Powers, chief of staff for the House Democrats, said Sauls was approached by the speaker’s office about convening a hearing and informed them that only Kelly had the authority to do that.However, Powers said Sauls doesn’t object to having another hearing in order to close the investigation for good.Regardless of how the Plocher saga turns out, any rule changes will have to wait until next year.House rules are proposed at the beginning of a General Assembly, which convenes the January after Election Day, and voted on by the entire chamber. They govern the House for two legislative sessions.Quade, who is running for governor and in her final term in the House, said the allegations coming out of the ethics committee against Plocher “are deeply concerning.”“There are conversations around potential obstruction,” she said. “There are conversations around employee treatment. There’s a lot of concerning pieces in there.”She hopes those who return next year will make the issue a priority.“I do hope that the members who will remain after my time here will look at what is the most effective way to hold folks accountable,” she said, “when they are doing something that violates our code of ethics.”This story was originally published by The Missouri Independent, part of the States Newsroom.

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The Missouri Senate’s budget plan approved in a committee Wednesday has more money for workers who help people with developmental disabilities, more to help low-income families afford child care and more for counties to defray the cost of holding people convicted of felonies.There are also big new road projects and a boost to higher education funding.The committee did make some cuts to House-approved items, including slashing $2.5 million for schools to install artificial intelligence gun detection equipment and $10 million for medical research with psilocybin mushrooms to treat mental illness.Over two days, the Senate Appropriations Committee dug through thousands of individual lines as it prepared a spending plan for floor debate. Totals were not immediately available but the additions mean the Senate plan will be closer to Gov. Mike Parson’s $52.7 billion proposal than the $50.8 billion spending plan the House approved.The budget will be on the Senate floor next week. Final approval could prove difficult with the six-member Freedom Caucus promising extended debate by digging into every item added to the budget for the coming year.Republicans on the committee also injected a new issue into the budget at the end of Wednesday’s hearing – a provision, targeting Kansas City, that punishes any city declaring itself a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants with the loss of all state funding.Among the larger items added during the markup session are:$171 million to increase pay to at least $17 an hour for people helping adults with developmental disabilities in their daily lives. There is also $9 million to pay a $2 differential for night work.$80 million for reconstructing U.S. Highway 67 in Butler County. There is also $30 million for road improvements near a beef processing plant in Wright City and $48 million for improvements to U.S. Highway 65 between Buffalo and Warsaw.$5 million to increase payments to counties for jail time served by inmates who are later convicted of felonies and sent to state prisons. With $5 million added by the House, it would increase the per-day rate to $27.31 from the current $22.58, an amount that has not been increased since fiscal 2017. State law in effect since 1997 allows up to $37.50 per day but it has never been funded.Restored $25 million cut from child care subsidies for lower income families and set new rates based on the latest rate study. The House directed that a rate study produced for the 2021-22 fiscal year be used.Restored cuts the House made to Medicaid budget lines that pared back the amount set aside for anticipated cost increases. The restored money in Medicaid lines, and in other places in the budget, is to make sure departments can function until lawmakers can pass a supplemental spending bill next year, said state Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Republican from Springfield and chair of the appropriations committee“I don’t want any of those things running out of money while we’re not here,” he said.The money for developmental disability services will help diminish a waiting list, said Val Huhn, director of the Department of Mental Health. A boost in pay last year helped recruiting and the waiting list stopped growing, she said.“Our waitlist is kind of stagnant, but we’re not seeing an increase,” she said.Hough said he was disappointed last year that the full boost wasn’t possible.“It’s one of those things that takes a long time, and we ended up kind of with half of what I really wanted to do,” Hough said. “This was finishing off, more or less, a commitment from last year.”Another change made in the budget that won’t add costs is to take one employee from each of the state’s prisons and assign them to a centrally directed investigations unit. Their job will be to improve interdiction of contraband coming into the prisons.That has proven difficult and arrests of corrections officers in recent years for carrying drugs into prisons illustrates the issue. In one instance, a corrections officer brought drugs in soda cans and another brought rolls of paper soaked in synthetic cannabinoid.Trevor Foley, director of the Department of Corrections, said contraband gets into prisons in a variety of ways and catching it will also require a variety of approaches.“There’s prevention, there’s perimeter security, there’s searches, there’s body scanners, there’s pushing our perimeters back, there’s drone monitoring,” he said. “There’s staff reviews, there’s visitor reviews, there’s vendor and delivery screenings.”A wrongful death lawsuit filed earlier this month over a prisoner suicide describes the ease at which items can move from cell to cell even in the administrative segregation unit. Prisoners run strings that can move items as heavy as bed sheets from cell to cell. Sometimes goods are moved between floors, the lawsuit says, based on video obtained from the department.It is very difficult to catch those types of activities, Foley said.“I would need to triple my staff to have eyes watching every camera, even splitting them up by floors,” he said.As of Friday, there will be two weeks left for lawmakers to finish a budget before the constitutional deadline. The deadline has only been missed once, and legislative leaders expressed confidence they can meet it again, although it will be close.“Time is of the essence,” House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith said Thursday. “We do have enough time but certainly we are on the countdown.”Smith said he needs time to study the changes made by the Senate to determine which he can accept.‘I will reserve judgment until I understand what’s in the legislation,” Smith said. “I don’t think I really have a clear understanding of that.”This story was originally published by The Missouri Independent, part of the States Newsroom.

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St. Louis resident Desiree White has witnessed Missouri’s unpredictable voting patterns.White, a volunteer signature gatherer for the group circulating a petition to overturn the state’s abortion ban, said she’s seeing ample evidence that Missouri isn’t too Republican to put abortion rights protections in the state constitution.“Missourians don’t like it when you take their freedoms away. Absolutely not,” White said. “Whatever it is, we don’t like that.”Missouri abortion rights supporters are hoping to join voters in GOP-leaning states like Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas who have supported legalization through statewide ballot initiatives. Polling shows that a significant slice of Republican voters would back the initiative that would legalize abortion up to what’s known as fetal viability — a bloc that may be necessary to pass the initiative in a state Donald Trump won by double digits.In some respects, Missouri could be a barometer of the down-ballot impact of abortion rights ballot initiatives. While backlash to abortion bans could matter in more competitive states like Arizona or Florida, it may not cause electoral doom for Missouri Republicans.“People know where they stand on abortion rights,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia-based Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “We know from polling and from results in other states that there are a fair number of Republican voters who will vote Republican in other elections, but they don’t agree with their party on abortion rights.”

Eric Lee

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St. Louis Public RadioBryan Pyle on Thursday at his home in Kirkwood. Pyle is conservative in his political views but is against a ban on abortion.

Polling shows split voting dynamicBryan Pyle may be a good example of the split voting phenomenon that’s defined Missouri politics for a number of election cycles.The Kirkwood resident signed the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom abortion rights initiative, even though he classifies himself as a conservative on a number of issues.“It is kind of sad to see anyone, whether they’re Republican or Democrat or whatever they may be, to push their opinion on someone else,” Pyle said. “I’ve always been this way.”Pyle voted for Republican candidates in 2016 and 2020 — and may do so again in 2024. But he said he’s going to vote for the abortion proposal, which would allow the procedure up to a point where a medical professional determines a fetus could survive outside of the womb.“We don’t need to have people take the rights from other people because they don’t like it,” Pyle said. “And we should all have the right to make our own decisions.”A February poll from St. Louis University and YouGov shows that Pyle is part of a noticeable trend. That survey found that 24% of GOP respondents will vote for the abortion legalization initiative. And while that’s much less than the 71% of Democrats who said they would vote for it, St. Louis University political science professor Steven Rogers said it shows that voting behavior on abortion rights doesn’t fit into neat partisan boxes.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioEnola Proctor, 75, of Olivette, signs a petition for a Missouri constitutional amendment that would legalize abortion up until fetal viability on Feb. 6 at The Pageant in St. Louis.

That same SLU/YouGov poll shows a Republican would easily win the governor’s race 52% to 38%.If Missourians approve an abortion rights amendment and back Republican candidates, it would follow a trend in which the GOP dominated elected offices while voters approved Democratic-backed efforts to boost the minimum wage, expand Medicaid and institute campaign donation limits.Some of those ballot initiatives may have benefited from underfunded or nonexistent opposition campaigns. But Kondik said this type of result showcases the consequences of states like Missouri with a robust initiative petition process.“The best bet that Republicans have in the state is that they get the voters to put their ‘red jerseys’ on and look at the abortion rights issue as a kind of partisan issue,” Kondik said. “But again, my guess is there’ll be a significant number of voters who don’t do that. And you can imagine it passing even in the midst of an otherwise Republican environment.”

Eric Lee

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St. Louis Public RadioMissouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a candidate for governor, speaks during a campaign event on April 18 at the Ethical Society of Police in Fountain Park. Ashcroft, like the other GOP candidates for governor, is opposed to abortion rights.

Republican opinion mixedSome Republican candidates seeking to make it to the November ballot aren’t overly worried that an abortion ballot initiative will hurt their chances of winning.Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, said it’s possible that the prospect of undoing decades of abortion restrictions could mobilize socially conservative voters — especially in rural counties and right-leaning suburbs where Republicans have gained recent ground.“Even if there’s Missourians who say there might be some medical exceptions or exceptions for rape or incest, I think if they knew how far it allows it to go — it would give them pause,” Kehoe said.

Dominick Williams

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Special to St. Louis Public RadioU.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, speaks with potential voters on Feb. 17 in Kansas City. Hawley is opposed to abortion rights with the exception of rape, incest or life of the mother.

And while some Republicans have expressed alarm that the abortion ballot item could go before voters, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley said he welcomes Missourians deciding for themselves on the issue.“My whole adult life, I said Roe is wrong, because the Constitution gives us the choice of the people,” Hawley said. “My view is, you gotta let the people decide. So if the people want to vote on this, we should vote on it. We can vote on it every year, if they want to.”Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, said it’s possible that abortion rights could affect some state legislative contests — especially in suburban districts that are more evenly divided between the two parties.“Maybe there’s certain suburban districts, those kind of 50/50 House districts or one or two state Senate districts, where maybe that changes the electorate enough to change who gets elected,” Ashcroft said.

Eric Lee

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St. Louis Public RadioMissouri state Rep. Ashley Aune, D-Kansas City, on Jan. 25 in Jefferson City. Aune has been a critic of efforts to make it more difficult to amend the state’s constitution.

Consequences for ballot initiative changesUnless Ashcroft expedites the signature verification process, Missourians will vote on the abortion initiative in November if abortion rights backers turn in enough signatures by May 5.One question is whether there could be a separate ballot initiative that would make it harder to amend the state’s constitution. If that passes in August, it’s possible that the November abortion initiative may need to pass in a majority of congressional districts in order to make it into the constitution.“Folks are rightfully looking for Republicans in the legislature to lead on this issue and protect the constitution,” said Sen. Bill Eigel, who is also running for governor.Making it harder to amend the constitution failed in states including Ohio and Arkansas.“The voters are not going to be fooled by this effort,” said state Rep. Ashley Aune, D-Kansas City. “What they’re trying to do is to essentially end majority rule.”Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, D-Independence, said he’s tried to warn his Republican colleagues that a successful effort to gut the initiative petition process could backfire on the GOP.“That’s the thing that allows them to go around the legislature,” Rizzo said. “And if they can’t do that, and they can’t go around the legislature, they’re going to start changing the legislature.”

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