The Missouri Supreme Court turned aside a trio of challenges to the state’s new congressional map Tuesday, paving the way to use the legislature’s new map in this fall’s elections. The trio of rulings came a few hours after oral arguments over appeals of lower court decisions that upheld the new map and allowed state officials to move forward with it. The Republican-led state legislature passed the map last fall targeting one of the two Democrat-held House seats in the state, amid a nationwide redistricting arms race. The justices ruled unanimously in all three cases — including two challenges to the map itself and one arguing to keep it on hold until a ballot measure on rejecting the map can be voted on — that the challengers could not overturn the map for this fall’s elections. “This Court’s review of the Missouri residents’ appeals is limited to determining only the legality – not the prudence or popularity – of the map,” Chief Justice W. Brent Powell wrote in one of the decisions. The challengers to the map had argued that the new plan violated the state constitution by stretching the Kansas City-area seat, currently held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, across much of the state. Earlier Tuesday, Abba Khanna, attorney for one of the challengers, argued that the state constitution requires that districts be compact and any deviations from that compactness be minimal. Khanna argued that the new 5th District, which stretches hundreds of miles across the state, violates that standard. “There is nothing minimal about the dramatic and unprecedented distortion of District 5 that sprawls across the state,” Khanna argued. The state has defended the new map. State Deputy Solicitor General Kathleen Hunker pointed out that the lower court had found that the spread of districts in the 2025 map was within the range of previous maps passed by the state legislature. Hunker said the challengers to the map were effectively asking the court to weigh the same kind of policy judgments about communities of interest that are supposed to be the legislature’s responsibility. “There is no such thing as a perfect map or a perfect district,” Hunker said. Powell wrote that the challengers “failed to show the 2025 Map departs from the principle of compactness,” and there was no reason to overturn the lower court judgment upholding the map. Another case came from backers of a ballot initiative seeking to overturn the map. Shortly after the legislature passed the new map, groups including People Not Politicians Missouri pursued a ballot initiative and collected signatures. Missouri has a law allowing ballot initiatives to overturn some laws passed by the legislature, and the state constitution has language requiring the law be frozen once it is referred for a public vote, according to court filings. However, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins declined to freeze the law until the signatures are certified, and a lower court agreed. Jonathan Hawley, arguing on behalf of the referendum backers, said state officials should not be able to use the certification process to let the new map go into effect.“The referendum right is the people’s veto. It is their check on the legislative power,” Hawley said. The state defended officials’ role in the process, and state Solicitor General Louis J. Capozzi III argued that a “delivery of an unverified box of signatures” to the secretary of state should not freeze the application of an otherwise proper law. In ruling in favor of the state, Justice Ginger K. Gooch wrote that state law does not automatically become frozen because state law specifies that the secretary of state must certify a ballot initiative before it is deemed “referred to the people.” Missouri was the second Republican-held state to redistrict following President Donald Trump’s push for more Republican congressional seats nationwide. Overall, about a half-dozen Republican states have sought to redistrict, targeting a dozen or more Democrat-held seats in the House since last summer.
