Supreme Court Orders Missouri to Use Its 2022 House Map for November
It was the justices' second intervention this week, overriding a federal judge and halting a Republican plan that would have erased a Kansas City Democratic seat.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered Missouri to hold November's congressional elections under its 2022 district map, stepping in for the second time this week to block a Republican-drawn plan that would have eliminated a Democratic seat in Kansas City.
In an unsigned order with no noted dissents, the justices directed Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to use the existing lines rather than the map the Republican-led Legislature approved in a mid-decade redistricting push. The new map targeted the district of longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and was expected to shift the state's House delegation from six Republicans and two Democrats to seven Republicans and one Democrat.
The order takes a likely Republican pickup off the board in the fight for a House majority so narrow that a handful of seats will decide which party controls the chamber next year.
A week of dueling rulings
The dispute turned on a citizen referendum. A group called People Not Politicians, led by activist Richard von Glahn, gathered signatures to force a statewide vote on the new map before it could take effect. Hoskins, a Republican, refused to certify the petition.
Earlier this month, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that he had been wrong to reject it. The state's highest court found the petition legal, sufficient and timely and held that redistricting plans are subject to voter referendums under state law, which meant the new map could not be used until voters weighed in.
Missouri Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to set that decision aside. On Tuesday, the high court declined, leaving the state ruling in place.
The same day, the case took a sharp turn. U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, ruling in a federal lawsuit brought by Republican candidates including Rep. Bob Onder, ordered that the new map be used. Clark found that reverting to the old lines would violate the Constitution's equal protection guarantee and its provisions governing House elections, and he refused to put his decision on hold. Gov. Mike Kehoe and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway then announced that the redrawn map would govern the November vote.
People Not Politicians returned to the Supreme Court with an emergency request. Thursday's order blocks Clark's ruling while the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers it.
A calendar with no slack
The legal fight ran headlong into election deadlines. Missouri's cutoff for finalizing ballots fell at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, and the first ballots are due to go out on Sept. 19.
State officials had urged the courts to leave the new map alone, arguing that switching districts after the August primaries would be "extraordinarily burdensome" and risked disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters. The justices did not explain their reasoning.
Part of a national map war
Missouri's map was one of several drawn in the middle of the decade ahead of the midterms, a break from the usual practice of redrawing districts once every 10 years after the census. Republicans redrew lines in Texas and North Carolina to gain seats, and Democrats in California answered with a map of their own.
Critics of the Missouri plan said splitting up Cleaver's Kansas City district would dilute the voting power of urban and Black voters. Republicans argued the Legislature was acting within its authority. The referendum petition gave opponents a tool that did not exist in most other states caught up in the redistricting battles.
What happens next
Unless the courts intervene again, Missouri voters will elect their House members this fall in the same eight districts used in 2022 and 2024, and Cleaver will run in the district that has sent him to Washington for two decades. The 8th Circuit's review of Clark's ruling continues, and the underlying referendum will decide whether the Republican-drawn lines are ever used. Election officials, meanwhile, have little more than a week to make sure the ballots going out match the map the Supreme Court has ordered.
Image: Farragutful via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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