Maries County resident Ron Calzone, who's a director of the group "Missouri First" and frequently appears at legislative committee hearings to testify on various bills, said in a Sunday news release that members of the group have won two court victories recently, seeking to enforce existing constitutional limits on the Legislature's power to pass bills.
Calzone represented himself in a May 2015 lawsuit against Attorney General Chris Koster and the directors of seven executive departments, challenging the passage of a 2014 law that began as a bill involving county prosecutors but, ultimately, also included law enforcement officers, initiative petitions in Savannah, ambulance districts and asphalt shingles, among others.
Earlier this month, Cole County Circuit Judge Dan Green agreed with Calzone's argument that the final bill violated the constitutional prohibition against bills that "contain more than one subject."
Green wrote, as part of an 11-page judgment, that Calzone had raised four claims the bill violated the state Constitution, and "the state presented no evidence against" the claims.
Calzone's lawsuit was aimed at the legislative practice of "log-rolling," or adding provisions to bills to make them easier to pass.
"Such bills are often the result of the legislative "feeding frenzy' that takes place near the end of each legislative session," Calzone wrote in his news release, arguing more than 90 percent of the bills passed in the 2013 General Assembly "were passed in the last 2½ weeks of the session. During that time the volume of legislation and the speed at which it is thrown at the lawmakers makes it virtually impossible for them to truly know what they are voting on.
"For the legislators who don't care about following the Constitution, the feeding frenzy makes it easier to expand bills to unconstitutional levels - and for good legislators who want to follow the rule of law, the fast pace of those last few weeks of session greatly diminishes their ability to properly evaluate legislation."
Green ruled: "Even the most sympathetic reading of this bill leads to the inescapable conclusion that the single subject rule has been violated."
He issued a permanent injunction to state officials prohibiting them "from taking any action, including but not limited to the use of public funds, to implement or otherwise effectuate any provision of (the law)."
Green also ordered the state "to rescind all actions taken to implement or otherwise effectuate any provision" of the 2014 law.
Koster's office could appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court, but hasn't indicated, yet, what it will do.
Calzone's news release also cited the Supreme Court's Jan. 12 ruling in "City of DeSoto v. Jeremiah Nixon, et al.," which challenged a 2013 law defining how DeSoto should pay a fire district after an annexation moved part of the district inside the city limits.
That lawsuit, originally filed in Cole County on Feb. 24, 2014, argued the bill was a "special law" because it only could be applied to one city in only one county, and that violated the Constitution's prohibition against passing "any local or special law ... where a general law can be made applicable."
Calzone predicted the Supreme Court ruling would provide "much needed legal ammunition when fighting against bills that are unconstitutional, because legislators tried to hide their intention to pass a local or special law by couching it in language that makes it look like it could be applied more broadly."