Editorials

    A bill currently floating around the Missouri Legislature seeks to change the way our state votes in primary elections. Rather than allowing citizens to choose what party ballot to use at the election, it would require that we all register our party preference in advance. What it doesn’t include, however, is a requirement that political parties pay for the cost of such an election, and it should.

By Brent Hampy, State Executive Director, Farm Service Agency and J.R. Flores, State Conservationist, Natural Resources Conservation Service
    At USDA, we celebrate Earth Day 2019 by thanking farmers and ranchers here in Missouri for all they do. Every day we see their efforts to conserve natural resources while producing food, fiber and fuel for people in their communities and around the world. They are doing what needs to be done to make sure we all enjoy the benefits of clean and plentiful water and healthy soils, ecosystems and wildlife habitat.

By Nicole Galloway, CPA, Missouri State Auditor
    When Missourians filed their taxes this year, they probably didn't spend a lot of time thinking about money that had been held back from their paychecks. Since these withholding amounts hadn't changed much before, why be concerned?

By Phill Brooks
    As the Kansas City Star noted just before the legislature went on its spring break, it's been a rough beginning for Missouri's Republican governor. The Republican-controlled House sidelined Mike Parson's idea for a state bond-issue debt to repair bridges.

    While some of our elected officials are calling for bigger and taller levees to hold back the annual spring flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which would ultimately just make the floods higher downstream, there is currently a movement in the Missouri Legislature to do something that should have been done decades ago—reduce development in the state’s floodplains.

By C. Dale Walton
    The United States is, increasingly, a country in which free speech exists only in the most limited, legalistic sense. First Amendment jurisprudence still makes it very difficult for the U.S. government to directly punish speech and expression under most circumstances. In that regard, Americans are better off than their counterparts in Britain, Canada, and many other places where speech laws often are aggressively used to punish “thought criminals” who express themselves in an unapproved manner.