Among the thousands of words filed in legal briefs in the historic battle before the Missouri Supreme Court over the expansion of Medicaid to thousands of poor people who need it, three sentences stand out.
They are part of a brief that doesn’t even argue the merits of the case, which is about whether the Missouri Legislature and Gov. Mike Parson failed to follow the state constitution, as amended by voters in August. That’s when voters chose to expand Medicaid to cover about 250,000 more Missourians living in poverty.
The brief by two state representatives, Crystal Quade of Springfield and Richard Brown of Kansas City. They are both Democrats. They are objecting to a brief filed by House Republicans which portends to speak for the entire House. That brief supports the Republican position that lawmakers have every right to ignore the state constitution. But the House didn’t take a vote to file such a brief. Despite having supermajorities in both the House and the Senate, Republicans can’t simply file a legal brief representing the position of a body whose members didn’t vote on that position, the Democratic lawmakers argue.
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Quade and Brown’s brief concedes that if a measure in support of the Republicans’ brief been put to a House vote, the Republican majority likely would have authorized it. “But political realities do not diminish the necessity of upholding the requirement that members of the Missouri House must be afforded the opportunity to vote on these matters.â€
That’s the first key sentence. Here are the other two:
“This is particularly true for members of the minority party, as circumventing the Missouri House’s process signals to Missourians that unless they are represented by a member of the majority party, their voice does not matter. That is not how our democratic republic is meant to function.â€
Indeed, this entire debate is about whether voters’ voices matter; whether the constitution matters. What Republicans in the Legislature did by refusing to expand Medicaid, as called for in the constitution, is determine that those two things — voters and the state constitution — don’t matter to them. What they did, further, by filing a brief and claiming it speaks for the entire House, is decide that Democrats don’t matter.
Some Republicans might find these sentiments to be just fine in our particularly divided political times. But imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Take, for instance, the debate over the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. There, Democrats have a slim majority. Many of their priorities — protecting voting rights, passing an infrastructure bill, fixing the nation’s immigration system — are stymied by the filibuster.
What if Democrats, following the lead of Missouri Republicans, just ignored the rules? Forget voting to get rid of the filibuster, just declare it dead by filing a legal brief. Pretend that whatever Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says is the official position of the Senate, despite rules, and, well, Republican votes.
It’s absurd, right?
But that’s the current Republican position in Missouri, that now must be unraveled by the Missouri Supreme Court. In arguments before that court, at least one of the judges seemed to point to this issue as the one that underlies all others: “How is it that we can now look back at an election on an amendment that has passed and decide that it was invalid?†asked Judge W. Brent Powell, one of the most conservative judges on the bench.
It’s the question that Powell and his fellow judges must answer before poor people in Missouri will be able to access the life-saving health care voters decided they deserved. But even if the judges decide to respect the will of the voters, the Republicans who run the Legislature — and the governor who leads the bureaucracy that must carry out the health-care plan — still have to decide whether, in a democratic republic, they will respect a co-equal branch of government.
If the voters, the constitution and the Missouri Supreme Court all end up on the same side, will Missouri’s elected Republicans concede that their decade-long fight against Obamacare has finally been lost for good?
More than health care for poor people is at stake.