When politicians go too far, it doesn’t always look like they’re going too far at first. It comes in as an amendment to an amendment, wrapped in language about how things should be done. It moves quietly through the legislature until it becomes law. That’s exactly what happened with Missouri‘s Senate Bill 22. On January 23, the state’s Supreme Court stopped it.
The whole bill was thrown out by the court’s unanimous decision, which was written by Chief Justice W. Brent Powell. One of the things that makes the decision worth paying attention is that it wasn’t very close or hard to understand. Powell discovered that the bill had changed so much on its way to becoming law that it broke Missouri’s constitutional rule that laws must not deviate from their original purpose. The bill had started out as a fairly limited measure about ballot summaries. People who didn’t like the law called it the “Let Politicians Lie Act.” The court spoke in a calmer tone. But in the end, it was the same.
When the Missouri General Assembly passed the bill in 2025, it made a lot of changes to how language is used on ballots in the state. Courts would no longer be able to change ballot summaries that aren’t accurate. Instead, the secretary of state would have many chances to change the language on the ballot. On ballots, legislative descriptions would have to be written unless they could be successfully challenged. People who support citizen initiatives were already against these changes because they thought the process was being skewed in favor of the person in power.
But the part of the law that killed it wasn’t even about voting. Along the way, lawmakers added an extra part that gave Attorney General Andrew Bailey a lot more power to fight preliminary injunctions that stop state laws from going into effect. This new power can be used in any situation, not just ballot disputes. The court noticed that Bailey quickly used this new power in a Kansas City case about abortion rights that was still going on. Tax money was used to pay for those appeals. Powell wrote that the spending made it possible for a challenge to be made in court.
The lawsuit was first filed in 2025 by Sean Nicholson, a taxpayer from Lee’s Summit, Missouri. His lawyer, Chuck Hatfield, made an argument that the Supreme Court agreed with in the end: the legislature broke basic rules of procedure that it should have known. “Every few years, the Supreme Court needs to remind the Legislature that they have to follow the procedural requirements of the Constitution when they pass a bill,” Hatfield said following the ruling. “It’s not that hard.” Each of them needs to vote on their own issues.
It’s tough not to notice the political background. There was more going on than just the ballot summary fight in Missouri. In 2023 and early 2024, the courts rewrote the language for a petition for an abortion rights initiative because the first version, which was written by Jay Ashcroft, who was Secretary of State at the time, was full of partisan language. When the legislature realized they had lost that battle, they took away the judges’ ability to make changes. With Senate Bill 22, the main goal was to make sure that this kind of judicial interference would not happen again.
Now that the law has been thrown out, a Cole County circuit judge will again be in charge of a case that involves a ballot measure that would change how Missouri redistricts. Denny Hoskins, the secretary of state, has already said through his lawyers that the way he wrote the ballot summary for that measure is, in his words, “close to the line of being inherently argumentative.” That fact alone tells us a lot about how things are going in Jefferson City.
What the ruling makes clear, besides the immediate effects, is how democratic processes are undermined—often not by big actions, but by small changes in the way things are done that, when left alone, change who controls the information voters get. The Supreme Court of Missouri drew a line. It’s a whole different question whether the legislature learns from it.
