Missouri Legislature overrides several Jay Nixon vetoes, but not the ones GOP leaders really wanted

If Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones was off somewhere licking his wounds after Wednesday’s veto session for the Missouri General Assembly, he wasn’t showing it Thursday morning.

Jones, a Eureka Republican, took to Twitter early Thursday morning to proclaim that the real story coming out of the veto session was that the Legislature managed to override a record number of Gov. Jay Nixon’s vetoes. And that’s true; lawmakers mounted enough votes to outmaneuver Nixon’s disapproval of a record 10 bills that, among other things, would impose harsher penalties on uninsured drivers and outlaw local government restrictions on federal holidays.

But GOP-inspired measures to invoke deep tax cuts and an ill-conceived bill to fend off federal firearm regulations in Missouri didn’t garner enough support to bypass Nixon’s veto.



The tax-cut bill was a nod toward Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s way of thinking as it relates to stimulating the economy – by taking a deep stab in income taxes, the state looks better for companies looking for places to do business. But like Kramer’s and Newman’s road trip to Michigan to recycle glass bottles, the numbers in Missouri’s tax-cut bill never made much sense.

Speaking of making no sense, a majority of Missouri lawmakers with fingers in the air to test the direction of political winds took time during the legislative session to send an all-too-likely-illegal gun bill to Nixon’s desk, which quickly found its way to the gubernatorial trash can.

The bill purported to nullify federal laws governing firearms in Missouri, even though decades of legal precedent proves that such bills don’t square with the Constitution. It did other things, too, like make it a crime for federal agents to enforce firearm regulations and prohibit state and local law enforcement from cooperating with the feds in investigating things like federally prohibited gun sales.

The bill was enthusiastically cheered by many GOP lawmakers, but they couldn’t do enough horse-trading this week to gather enough votes to make the gun-law fantasy into reality. Perhaps enough legislators had read Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster’s takedown of the measure.