By Rudi Keller
If the court decides the first question by ruling the map is unconstitutional, the answer to the second won’t matter. That’s because the bill would no longer be enforceable and if lawmakers want to revise Missouri’s congressional map, they would have to go through the entire process again.
In the first case — appeals of two cases which were combined during trial court action in Jackson County — the judges will be asked to overturn Circuit Judge Adam Caine’s ruling that the map is permissible under the Constitution’s requirements for districts to be compact and contiguous.
In the second case, proponents of a referendum on the map will argue that the submission of more than 300,000 signatures intended to force a vote on the bill means the new map did not take effect in December.
If the court finds the map passes constitutional muster in the first appeal, the outcome of the second will determine whether the map passed last year or the one approved in 2022 is used for the Aug. 4 primary.
The fight over gerrymandering is the biggest ongoing partisan political battle in the state. It began last July when President Donald Trump began putting pressure on Missouri Republicans for help to maintain the slim Republican majority in the U.S. House.
Republicans hold six of Missouri’s eight seats in Congress and the partisan goal of the new map is to oust 5th District U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, by splitting Kansas City and adding voters in 14 counties along the Missouri River.
Cleaver’s current district includes most of Kansas City and a portion of Jackson and Clay counties outside the city. Cleaver filed for re-election in February and said he will stay in the race regardless of which district is used in this year’s elections.
Five Republicans have filed for the nomination to oppose Cleaver in hopes of exploiting the partisan advantage in the map passed last year.
The map and the drive for a referendum by a political action committee called People Not Politicians has spawned nearly a dozen lawsuits directly or indirectly related to the gerrymandered map and the petition drive.
People Not Politicians has raised $6.5 million for the petition drive and campaign costs, much of it from out-of-state organizations. A rival PAC, Put Missouri First, has raised about $3.1 million to oppose the referendum.
The high court has already decided two threshold issues on redistricting in rulings issued March 24. The court said Gov. Mike Kehoe had the authority to call lawmakers into special session to write the bill and lawmakers were within their constitutional power to enact it.
The appeal challenging the constitutionality of the new map was filed by National Redistricting Foundation, which argues that the circuit court focused too much on mathematical analysis of the districts without taking into account the new features, such as splitting Kansas City among multiple districts.
The map violates the compactness standard by stretching the lines in the 5th District from the Kansas-Missouri border east to Columbia and Osage County, Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, said in a Monday briefing for reporters.
“The 2025 plan flies in the face of that requirement by tearing apart cohesive areas that share transit, housing, economic and civic interests and more,” Jenkins said. “The circuit court’s decision was wrong in a number of distinct ways.”
The referendum case challenging whether the new map is in effect will decide the meaning of the Missouri Constitution provision stating that any measure passed by lawmakers and sent to the public for a vote does not take effect until approved in an election.
In every previous instance when a referendum petition was filed with an apparently sufficient number of signatures, the law being challenged has been suspended from taking effect until the vote. On redistricting, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, relying on an opinion from Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, contended that the law is in effect until the signatures are checked and verified to show it meets the minimum threshold to appear on the ballot.
Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe ruled in favor of Hoskins.
The requirement that a referendum have a minimum number of valid signatures from registered voters “would be rendered meaningless if automatic suspension occurred based on mere physical delivery of petition boxes,” Stumpe wrote in his late March decision.
Local election authorities have processed enough signatures to show it does meet the threshold but state law does not require Hoskins to rule on whether there are enough until at least late July.
The court must decide if past practice, or Hoskins’ view, is the correct one, attorney Tori Schaefer of the ACLU of Missouri wrote in the appeal brief.
“This case presents a narrow legal question and rests on only a few stipulated facts,” Schafer wrote. “The issue is not how or when Secretary Hoskins verifies the signed referendum petitions; Appellants do not seek to control that process. Instead, the dispositive question before this Court is straightforward: What is the status of HB1 in the meantime, while the signatures are being verified?”
Attorneys for the state contend the plaintiffs do not have standing — the right to sue — and that the case is not ready for the courts because the verification process for the petition signatures is still underway. In his brief for the referendum case, Solicitor General Louis Capozzi also argues that the decision on whether a law is suspended by a referendum is essentially a political one, and the courts should stay out of it.
And even if the state loses on all other points, Capozzi wrote, court precedents mean it is too late to change the districts now that candidates have filed.
“Both the U.S. Supreme Court and this court have held that it is too late for courts to order changes to voting districts during candidate filing,” he wrote.
Capozzi also made the argument that it is too late to change the districts even if the court accepts that the districts violate the constitutional guidelines
If the court wants to throw out the map, he wrote, it should stay the decision until after this year’s election.
“Across Missouri, candidates are actively campaigning and raising money in the congressional districts established in (the new map),” Capozzi wrote. “Changing the congressional map so late in the game would be extraordinarily disruptive and harm candidates, election officials, and the voting public.”
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, in an amicus, or “friend of the court” brief, argued that it is not too late to use the district map created in 2022. The date when all voter assignments need to be final, she said, is June 2, nine weeks before the Aug. 4 primary.
If Hoskins had done as his predecessors had and suspended the law, it would have avoided a lot of confusion, Lennon’s attorneys, Nina McDonnell and Mike Wolff, wrote.
Instead, by departing from this practice, and inviting litigation, the secretary has left clerks in the dark,” they argued. “As it stands, clerks have no way of knowing which set of districts they will ultimately need to use.”
And People Not Politicians, which also filed an amicus brief in the referendum case, said the state’s experience in 2022 shows district boundaries can be changed after candidate filing.
The map used for the 2022 elections was not passed by lawmakers until mid-May, she noted, long after candidate filing had ended and campaigns were underway.
“Thus, candidates in 2022 filed to run in congressional districts that later changed,” the brief filed by People Not Politicians states. “Yet, the election went just fine.”
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