State Senator Jason Plummer (R-Edwardsville) released the below statement following the Senate’s passage of Senate Bill 3649, which bans employers from holding participation meetings for employees that may include any public policy, political, or religious content:
“Sometimes you know a piece of legislation is terrible long before it ever comes up for a vote. This is one of those cases, because we’ve already seen other states ram through similar ill-thought-out and unconstitutional proposals. We’ve heard Democrat Governors and Attorneys General in other states call the idea unworkable and refuse to enforce it. Worse yet, this legislation is clearly unconstitutional, which means it follows in a long line of bills passed by the General Assembly that won’t stand up to judicial scrutiny in court.
“You are either for freedom of speech or you are against it, you can’t pick and choose based on your political preferences.
“We should be voting on proposals to uplift the citizens of this state, help struggling families, and encourage our economy to grow. Instead, we keep seeing more of these proposals that are clearly bad public policy and are designed to do nothing but advance the political ideologies of special interest groups.”