GOP’s failed Missouri power grab offers a nationwide warning 

The GOP’s assault on fair election districts has led them to defy court rulings and citizen-approved constitutional amendments across the country. In Missouri this week, Republicans tried to undermine the rule of law to do President Donald Trump’s bidding and get one more congressional seat for their party. But that was too far, even for the anti-democratic U.S. Supreme Court.

Still, the chaos in Missouri shows, once again, that Republicans will undermine state courts, defy laws approved by voters, and do whatever it takes to gerrymander election districts or otherwise gain an electoral edge. It also demonstrates how state supreme courts can act as crucial defenses for democracy.

In the end, it took the Missouri Supreme Court’s threats of contempt and the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention for Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) to finally relent and agree to comply with a court order to use the state’s pre-existing election districts for the upcoming vote.

It‘s long past time for Missouri Republicans to honor the will of hundreds of thousands of voters who have a right to vote on these election districts. Instead, Republican lawmakers threatened impeachment if the state Supreme Court held Hoskins in contempt for his defiance. Their letter, written before the U.S. Supreme Court acted, insisted that Hoskins had to comply with an order from U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, that revived the gerrymander. The lawmakers even questioned whether the Missouri Supreme Court understood that federal law is “supreme.” 

It’s unclear if Republicans had enough votes in the Missouri legislature to actually go through with their impeachment threat. But the letter follows similar GOP threats in other states, as high courts weighed challenges to gerrymandered election districts. In Utah and Pennsylvania, Republicans explicitly tied their threats to rulings to strike down their gerrymandered districts. 

Like lawmakers in those other states, Hoskins knew that the state Supreme Court has the final say on state law. And Clark’s ruling injected the federal courts into the matter without a good reason. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals initially refused to intervene, claiming that it somehow lacked jurisdiction. The panel that abdicated responsibility was made up of two Trump appointees and another Republican appointee. This left the decision in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, which blocked Clark’s ruling Thursday and referred the matter back to the 8th Circuit.

With federal courts out of the way for now, the state must deal with the aftermath of a defiant secretary of state and a primary election conducted under districts that were “never in effect” under state law. All of this could have been avoided if lawmakers there had not heeded Trump’s demand to redraw congressional districts to favor their party. 

After hundreds of thousands of Missourians signed a petition demanding a vote on the gerrymandered districts, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected Hoskins’ argument for blocking the ballot measure on the day of the primary election, after months of needless delay. It seemed like Hoskins was betting that if he delayed his decision until the primary election happened, the court wouldn’t disrupt the process. But the seven justices, five of whom are GOP appointees, stood strong and didn’t waver. 

Despite all of this—Hoskins’ defiance, the impeachment threats, and Clark’s baseless ruling—voters in Kansas City won’t have to cast their ballots in the new gerrymandered districts.

This wasn’t the first time that Republicans lashed out at courts that protect voters’ rights. In Utah earlier this year, they threatened to impeach a judge for enforcing a constitutional ban on gerrymandering. And when that didn’t work, they packed the state Supreme Court.

The scary part is that Missouri Republicans could have gotten away with it if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t stepped in. Something similar happened in Ohio in 2022. A bipartisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly struck down a map for violating a constitutional ban on gerrymandering. But a Trump judge ordered the state to use the districts anyway. 

The mid-decade redistricting war is finally coming to a close, as states begin printing ballots. The chaos in Missouri was really astounding, with elected officials threatening and defying the state Supreme Court, all to insist that a single federal judge get the final say on the fate of a ballot measure supported by hundreds of thousands of voters. 

Republican legislators once again tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court involved in a state-law redistricting issue. Fortunately, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his colleagues have so far refused, even as they give Republicans everything else they want. Despite a good ruling by the justices in Washington, the Missouri Supreme Court—and its counterparts in state capitals around the nation—remain our best defense for democracy.