His waning days as Missouri’s secretary of state have not been kind to Jay Ashcroft.

Once considered a frontrunner to become governor, he finished a dismal third in the August Republican primary.

A few weeks later, he was forced to certify Amendment 3, an initiative petition clearing the way for voters in November to decide whether to remove Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and embed the right to an abortion in the state constitution.

Back when he expected to be governor, Ashcroft told reporters he would “have to quit” if being in that office meant defending a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. So you know he hated putting that initiative on the ballot.

Now, in the unkindest cut of all, Ashcroft has unwittingly become the fall guy for a last-ditch effort by abortion opponents to stop a vote on Amendment 3. The irony here is rich, because Ashcroft used every trick at his disposal to thwart a public vote on abortion rights. 

He wrote outlandish ballot language, invited legal challenges, delayed and delayed some more in hopes of running out the clock on signature-gathering efforts. 

None of it worked. The campaign, known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, gathered 380,000 signatures in short order. Ashcroft waited until Aug. 13, the last day possible under Missouri law, to place the initiative on the Nov. 5 ballot. 

And then — because this is Missouri, where the will of the people is always at risk — some anti-abortion legislators and lawyers went to court to claim that the secretary of state erred when he placed the amendment on the ballot. 

The rationale of the plaintiffs in the case officially titled Coleman et al. v. Ashcroft is almost incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a lawyer. But they managed to have their case heard by a judge ideologically inclined to agree with them. Cole County Circuit Court Judge Christopher Limbaugh, cousin to Rush, the late conservative radio host, ruled in so many words that “defendant Ashcroft” had indeed screwed up.

Ashcroft announced that “on further review” he now realized he never should have certified the petition in the first place. He removed it from the list of 2024 ballot measures on the Secretary of State’s website.

The Missouri Supreme Court quickly interceded. Judges last week reversed Limbaugh’s ruling and ordered Ashcroft to place Amendment 3 back on the statewide Nov. 5 ballot.

The Coleman et al. v. Ashcroft saga played out over a whirlwind five days, from the time Limbaugh held his hearing in Cole County on a Friday until the state Supreme Court reversed his ruling last Tuesday. 

It was a bad look all around for Ashcroft, and in the end he is left with the task, as secretary of state, of standing watch over a statewide ballot that now contains a constitutional amendment that he loathes and lists Mike Kehoe, the current lieutenant governor, as the GOP nominee for the governor’s post that Ashcroft had sought.

Despite his early lead and name recognition as the son of John Ashcroft — a legend in Missouri politics who went on to become George W. Bush’s U.S. attorney general — Jay Ashcroft was outflanked in the governor’s primary. 

Moderates favored Kehoe and ultraconservatives voted for the anti-establishment state Sen. Bill Eigel. Ashcroft was left in the middle, a bleak no-man’s land in primary politics. 

He will not follow in the family footsteps. He will not impose his controversial beliefs on the people of Missouri.

I say this because beneath the rumpled, somewhat goofy exterior that Ashcroft puts forth to the public beats the heart of an ideologue.

As secretary of state, Ashcroft took it upon himself to draft an administrative rule telling public libraries how to shield children and teenagers from material that he worries may be inappropriate. 

He used his rule-making ability to restrict banks in the state from using environmental and other social factors in investing practices.

In January, Ashcroft suggested that President Joe Biden’s border policies are akin to an insurrection and could theoretically be used to keep him off Missouri’s presidential ballot. 

In 2019, after Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill criminalizing abortion after eight weeks of pregnancy, Ashcroft snuffed out efforts to place a referendum on the new law on the statewide ballot. He simply rejected petitions and dragged his feet until time ran out on signature gatherers.

For nearly eight years, Ashcroft has stretched the limits of his office to get his way. Especially with his handling of abortion-related petitions, he has shown deep disrespect for the volunteers who gather signatures and the voters who provide them. 

If things have gone south for him at the end, a bit of gloating is not out of order. 

But let’s not get carried away. Waiting in the wings to replace Ashcroft in the secretary of state’s office is Denny Hoskins, a member of the far-right Senate Freedom Caucus. Among other worrisome concerns, he believes with all his heart that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. 

Ashcroft politicized the secretary of state’s office, but he did recognize boundaries such as court orders. As impossible as this sounds, we may miss him once he’s gone.