For the first time in years, the legislative session wasn’t defined by Republican infighting.
The GOP supermajority managed to mend fences and get along most of the year. And even though both the House and Senate left town early last week — an historically rare occurrence that is quickly becoming the norm — they still managed to send 49 bills to the governor’s desk, put two proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot and pass a $53 billion state budget.
It wasn’t until the final week when the wheels came off, though this time the culprit was squabbles with Democrats.
Republicans deployed a rarely-used procedural maneuver to cut off debate and pass bills seeking to repeal two voter-approved initiatives protecting abortion rights and increasing access to paid sick leave. The move effectively ended the session two days early and killed a litany of unrelated bills in the process.
So who were the big winners and losers of the legislative session?
WINNERS
Mike Kehoe
Not everything went Mike Kehoe’s way during his first legislative session as governor.
One of his appointments to the State Board of Education got spiked in the Senate, and he pushed his stadium funding plan so late in the session it will now require lawmakers to return to Jefferson City next month in a long-shot bid to pass it and prevent the Royals and Chiefs from moving to Kansas.
But he got most of the big-ticket items he called for when he laid out his agenda in his first State of the State address in January, highlighted by a capital gains tax cut, state control of St. Louis police and a $50 million private school voucher program.
He also earned rave reviews from state lawmakers, who marveled at a governor actually leaving his office to work personally with the legislature.
“We made it a priority to walk the halls, not just to meet with lawmakers, but to build relationships, have real discourse and understand what mattered most to the people they represent, because progress starts with relationships and open conversations,” Kehoe told reporters Friday.
The state’s budget may never be as rosy again, with federal funding in limbo and state revenues not keeping up with projections. And with tough fights over stadium funding in the near term and a mid-term election on the horizon, Kehoe’s honeymoon with the legislature could be short lived.
Whether his first year as governor will be Kehoe’s high-water mark is anybody’s guess. But he undoubtedly just finished one of the best legislative sessions any governor has had in years.
Dirk Deaton
The pattern of crafting a state budget has become familiar over the years.
The House works for months to get its budget plan in place, then the Senate basically rewrites everything before it gets sent to the governor.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
This year, House Budget Chairman Dirk Deaton certainly had to swallow a lot of spending he didn’t like. But he held firm and won passage of the governor’s $50 million private school voucher program that the Senate wanted to eliminate.
Then, just hours before the constitutional deadline to finish work on the budget, and after the Senate had already gone home for the week, Deaton orchestrated the surprise death of a $500 million construction spending package — sinking projects for health care, education and law enforcement across the state and creating a bipartisan backlash that helped derail the governor’s stadium funding plan.
The long-term consequences of Deaton’s move on the House’s relationship with the Senate still aren’t clear. But it solidified his reputation as a budget hawk willing to take extraordinary steps to keep state spending in check.
Senate Democrats
The session certainly didn’t end the way Senate Democrats would have liked.
Efforts to protect two voter-approved initiatives — an abortion rights constitutional amendment and a paid sick leave law — went up in flames when Republicans went nuclear and shut down debate to force repeal bills to a vote.
The 10 Democrats in the 34-member Senate had already spent months watching a suddenly unified GOP supermajority eliminate taxes on capital gains, take control of the St. Louis police, ease regulations on utilities and implement new hurdles in the initiative petition process.
Yet despite the inglorious ending and parade of GOP wins, Democrats were successful at ensuring no high-profile bill cleared the Senate this year without at least a few Democratic priorities tacked on.
The capital gains tax cut also expanded a property tax credit for the elderly and disabled that has been a longstanding Democratic priority. And it included sales tax exemptions for diapers and feminine hygiene products.
Democrats won additions to the St. Louis police bill banning the shackling of pregnant prisoners, establishing a fund for exonerated prisoners to receive restitution and limiting what jails and prisons can charge inmates for phone calls.
A bill allowing Missouri Farm Bureau to sell health plans also requires all health plans to cover extended supplies of birth control and expands access to testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.
Next year’s legislative session may not be as fruitful for either party (see below). And it’s doubtful Democrats will look back at 2025 fondly. But the small-ball approach of making bills they hate a little less terrible scored the party some unexpected wins this year.
Utility corporations
For the first time in nearly 50 years, Missouri’s major electric utilities will be able to include the cost of new power plants in the rates customers pay for service.
Written specifically to encourage the construction of new natural gas-based generation, the new law could also be used to help finance a new nuclear power station. The law banning rates that include costs for construction work in progress was approved by voters in 1976 in response to the costs of the Callaway Energy Center, a 1,200 megawatt reactor near Fulton.
The utility companies employed “squadrons” of lobbyists to pass the bill, complained state Rep. Don Mayhew, a Republican from Crocker. But they stitched together bipartisan majorities in both the Missouri House and Senate, getting votes from 20 Democrats and 76 Republicans in the lower chamber as it was sent to Kehoe, who signed it.
Just days later, Evergy, a major power supplier in western Missouri, announced plans to construct a natural gas-fired power plant near Maryville.
LOSERS
The 2026 legislative session
The final day of the legislative session ended when Republicans deployed the “PQ,” a rule allowing leadership to cut off debate and force a vote over the objections of any senators trying to slow things down.
The maneuver hasn’t been used by the Senate in five years. Before last week, the Senate had only used it 18 times since 1970.
Democrats were furious, both because the GOP went nuclear after a session marked by negotiation and compromise and because they did so to roll back laws enacted by the voters just months earlier.
Knowing Democrats’ response to the PQ would be to spend the final days of session using procedural hijinks of their own to muck up the process, Republicans adjourned for the year.
Senate leaders have historically been hesitant to utilize the PQ because it generates lasting bitterness — and sparks retaliation. And that’s exactly what Democrats promised as they were leaving town last week.
The bad blood could spill into a special session next month for the governor’s stadium funding plan. But just as likely, it could lead to wall-to-wall gridlock when lawmakers return in January.
“From this point forward…everything is going to be so hard around here,” said Senate Democratic Leader Doug Beck. “It’s going to be very hard.”
Direct democracy
Missouri voters in 2010 overwhelmingly enacted tougher standards on dog breeders in the hopes of eliminating the state’s reputation as the puppy-mill capital of America.
A few months later, lawmakers repealed the law and replaced it with a far less stringent version.
In the years since, the legislature repealed a nonpartisan redistricting plan enacted by initiative petition in 2020; refused to implement voter-approved Medicaid expansion until the state Supreme Court ordered it to in 2021; and this year repealed a paid sick leave law that 58% of voters enacted in November.
Republicans also put a constitutional amendment banning abortion on the 2026 ballot, months after voters enshrined abortion rights in the Missouri Constitution.
GOP lawmakers are quick to note that in the same elections that enacted all these policies, voters also put the GOP in control of every statewide office and sent a supermajority of the party to the legislature.
And they contend voters were duped into supporting the proposals by well-financed campaigns.
“This is one of those things, of the problem with direct democracy,” state Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican, said earlier this year. “This is exactly what our founders were expressively against when they formed this nation.”
For Democrats and the activists who backed the initiative petitions, the reality is Republicans aren’t concerned about the will of the people.
“They disrespect the voters,” Beck said. “They don’t care.”
Bayer
When Bayer purchased St. Louis-based Monsanto in 2018, it inherited an avalanche of litigation alleging the key ingredient in its Roundup weed killer — glyphosate — causes cancer.
The German pharmaceutical and biotechnology group has paid about $10 billion to settle Roundup claims, according to the Wall Street Journal, and still faces about 67,000 pending cases.
Roughly 25,000 of those cases are in Missouri, since Bayer’s U.S. headquarters is in St. Louis. In 2023, a Cole County jury ordered the company to pay $1.56 billion to three plaintiffs, though a judge later reduced that to $622 million.
The legal and financial peril has inspired the company to push legislation shielding itself from lawsuits alleging Roundup caused cancer. Two states — North Dakota and Georgia — have approved shield legislation.
But the stakes in Missouri are especially high.
A group tied to Bayer ran TV and radio ads in Missouri this year presenting glyphosate as a benign, beneficial chemical essential to modern agriculture that is at risk thanks to frivolous lawsuits.
Legislative leaders, along with the governor, lined up in support of the shield legislation.
The bill eked out of the House with barely enough votes to pass before running into a buzzsaw of opposition in the Senate. Leading the charge was the Senate Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republicans lawmakers who in recent years have enjoyed the financial backing of Missouri trial attorneys.
The four-member Freedom Caucus’s effort to kill the Roundup bill was joined by five other Republican senators after they were targeted with a direct mail campaign claiming resistance to passing the bill was a betrayal of President Donald Trump’s fight against China.
The rising opposition sealed the bill’s fate, and few expect it to fare any better next year.
David Wasinger
The first-term GOP lieutenant governor didn’t mince words earlier this month when he decried how the Senate conducted itself while debating the state budget.
It is time for a change, Wasinger declared while presiding over the chamber, and he vowed to take a more active role in proceedings while also working to change the rules of the chamber.
“Uh… no,” was the response from Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin.
A lieutenant governor doesn’t have any of that power. Wasinger was out of line giving a speech in the Senate chambers in the first place, O’Laughlin said, because that is “a right reserved for senators.”
Soon after the kerfuffle, Republican state Sen. Jason Bean of Holcomb demanded Senate staff — both partisan and nonpartisan — be directed by leadership not to participate in any efforts by Wasinger to influence the rules or process.
The next week, with Wasinger presiding, senators began making complicated procedural motions that appeared to befuddle the lieutenant governor. In the confusion, he incorrectly called for a vote on a bill too early, and when he tried to walk everything back left the Senate briefly paralyzed as staff worked to sort things out.
Wasinger presided for a few more minutes before leaving the dais and sending a letter to Senate leaders informing them he would be absent the rest of the week.
The Independent’s Rudi Keller contributed to this story.
