About The Constitutional Integrity Score Card

This score set is a measure of how careful each legislator is to follow the procedures laid out in the Missouri Constitution for the legislative process.

The People of Missouri, through their Constitution have empowered their representatives in the General Assembly with the authority to enact the law under which they and their neighbors must live.  The People also placed some strict constitutional limits on the legislative process -- limits that are designed to ensure transparency and an opportunity for common people to keep abreast of the process.

Most notable are procedural limits, such as::

• No law shall be passed except by bill, and no bill shall be so amended in its passage through either house as to change its original purpose.  Article III Section 21
• No bill shall contain more than one subject which shall be clearly expressed in its title...  Article III Section 23
•  The general assembly shall not pass any local or special law...  where a general law can be made applicable.  Article III Section 40(30)
• No local or special law shall be passed unless a notice, setting forth the intention to apply therefor and the substance of the contemplated law, shall have been published in the locality where the matter or thing to be affected is situated at least thirty days prior to the introduction of the bill into the general assembly and in the manner provided by law. Article III Section 42

These simple rules are the A B Cs of the legislative process.  Every office holder should understand them and that a vote in favor of a bill that violates one or more of these limits on their power is a violation of their oath of office.

Missouri's landmark Supreme Court case from 1994 involving these principles is called Hammerschmidt v. Boone County, so changes to bills that violate these clauses are sometimes referred to as "Hammerschmidt violations".

In that opinion, the Court explained some of the reasons it is important to make legislators adhere to these limits on their power:

1. Together, these constitutional provisions serve "to facilitate orderly legislative procedure. By limiting each bill to a single subject [and requiring that amendments not change a bill's original purpose], the issues presented by each bill can be better grasped and more intelligently discussed."
    
2. A second purpose of article III, section 23, is to prevent "logrolling"—the practice of combining a number of unrelated amendments in a bill, none of which alone could command a majority, but which, taken together, combine the votes of a sufficient number of legislators having a vital interest in one portion of the amended bill to muster a majority for its entirety.
    
3. Third, the constitutional provision serves to defeat surprise within the legislative process. It prohibits a clever legislator from taking advantage of his or her unsuspecting colleagues by surreptitiously inserting unrelated amendments into the body of a pending bill.
    
4. Fourth, article III, section 23, is designed to assure that the people are fairly apprised, "through such publication of legislative proceedings as is usually made, of the subjects of legislation that are being considered in order that they have [an] opportunity of being heard thereon...."
    
5. Because the governor may not employ a line item veto over legislation generally, the effect of the Constitution's single subject rule is to prevent the legislature from forcing the governor into a take-it-or-leave-it choice when a bill addresses one subject in an odious manner and another subject in a way the governor finds meritorious.

Scoring Methods

Each bill must be voted on multiple times before it can become a law.  A given bill may change from vote to vote and go from constitutional status to a version that violates the Constitution or vice versa.  For that reason, we have evaluated the condition of the bills in this score set at each vote.  If at any given vote the bill had either undergone a change of purpose or included more than one subject, we scored that vote.

The votes in this score set do not represent ALL the bills or ALL the votes that were unconstitutional, but there are clearly enough to evaluate the care -- or lack of care -- each office holder takes to ensure that he or she is "supporting" the Constitution's limits on their own legislative power.

It should be noted that any number of things might motivate a "No" vote for any of these bills - simply voting "No" is not an indication of a commitment to the Constitution.  Voting "Yes", we must conclude, indicates :

• A lack of regard for what the Missouri Constitution says about the legislative process.
   
• A lack of understanding of what the Constitution says about changing the purpose of a bill, adding multiple subjects, or passing local or special laws.
   
• A desire to pass new laws that is greater than their desire to follow the supreme law of Missouri, the Constitution.
   
• Of, possibly, an honest disagreement about whether some of the bills in this score set actually violate the Constitution.  It should be noted, though, that what the courts let the legislature get away with is sometimes clearly still not in the spirit of the Constitution.

For these reasons we have decided to give no points for voting "No" when they should vote no.  One point is deducted for each "Yes" vote when a given bill is in an unconstitutional state.  What matters is the state of the bill at that vote, not what it has been or what it will become.

On tenth of a point is deducted for each missed vote.

The percentage score is simply the total times they voted correctly ("no" on all these bills) divided by the total votes they took.   For example, someone with a numerical score of -5 out of 28 votes voted correctly 23 times.  23 / 28 = .82 or 82%. 

The formula is (numerical score + total votes) / total votes = Percent score.  e.g. (-5 + 28) / 28 = 82%

Missouri Lawmakers  Have Been on Notice

In recent times bills with the sort of procedural infirmities covered by this score set have been litigated in Missouri courts and found to be unconstitutional.  Both the House and Senate have discussed at least some of these cases, so they should be on a heightened level of scrutiny.  Ignorance is not an acceptable excuse.