Gov. Mike Kehoe on Sunday signed the new Missouri congressional district map intended to bring Republicans another seat, and opponents responded with a new lawsuit challenging the plan.
Lawmakers, acting at the insistence of President Donald Trump, finished a special session on Sept. 12 by passing a bill targeting the 5th District in Kansas City and placing a constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot to make it more difficult to pass constitutional proposals by initiative petition.
The new lawsuit, like others filed previously, contends that no authority exists in the Missouri Constitution allowing lawmakers to revise congressional districts in the absence of new census data. The new case also argues that the districts are not legal because they stretch for hundreds of miles across the state.
The law will take effect Dec. 11, in time for candidate filing in the 2026 elections, unless blocked by the courts or a referendum petition.
To bring enough voters into the 5th District, which currently includes portions of only Jackson and Clay counties, the drafters destroyed the idea that districts should be as compact as possible, the new lawsuit filed in Jackson County contends.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, has represented the 5th District since 2005.
Kehoe, who has said the courts will decide if what lawmakers did was legal, said in a news release that he signed the bill to make the state’s districts align with voter views overall.
“We believe this map best represents Missourians, and I appreciate the support and efforts of state legislators, our congressional delegation, and President Trump in getting this map to my desk,” Kehoe said.
Opponents have argued that the new map disenfranchises a large portion of Missouri voters. Democrats currently hold two of the state’s eight districts, or 25%, while statewide elections show about 40% of voters support Democratic candidates.
Filed by the National Redistricting Foundation, the legal arm of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the lawsuit enlists voters from around the state as plaintiffs, raising objections to changes in other districts as well the lines in the Kansas CIty area.
“Missouri’s mid-decade gerrymander is in clear violation of the state constitution,” Marina Jenkins, executive director of the foundation, said in a news release. “It was not prompted by the law or a court order; it was the result of Republican lawmakers in Missouri following partisan directives from politicians in Washington, D.C.”
The constitutional standards for redistricting include districts that are compact, contiguous, as equal as possible in population and do not split communities of interest.
“Every redistricting plan since the 1950s has placed as much of the Jackson County portion of Kansas City as possible in a single district, and more recently, also brought in a substantial portion of the Clay County parts of Kansas City as well,” the lawsuit states. “In fact, the Jackson County portion of Kansas City has not been split in more than 50 years.”
Under the new map, the lawsuit states, Kansas City’s central business district is in three separate districts. The new 4th District stretches from downtown Kansas City to Fort Leonard Wood in Pulaski County, 200 miles away.
Eastern portions of the city that remain in the 5th District are now in a district with Rolla, in southeast Missouri, also 200 miles away, while the remaining downtown portions are part of the 6th District, which runs across northeast Missouri to the Mississippi River.
“The configuration of congressional districts in the Kansas City area under (the redistricting bill) violates the mandatory compactness requirement on nearly every level,” the lawsuit contends.
The National Redistricting Foundation lawsuit is the fourth filed since Kehoe announced plans for the special session.
The first was filed by the NAACP of Missouri, which contends that Kehoe did not have authority to call lawmakers into session for redistricting or to change initiative majority requirements. That case is in the hands of Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh, who heard arguments Sept. 15.
The other lawsuits are in their early procedural stages.
One, filed Sept. 12 in Jackson County makes similar arguments to the new case about the compactness of the new districts, while also questioning whether the bill mistakenly places the same precinct in two different districts.
Another, filed Sept. 12 in Cole County, is based on an argument common to all four cases — that the state constitution doesn’t allow mid-cycle redistricting.
Only once since the current constitution was written have lawmakers altered congressional districts between censuses, and that was in the 1960s when a U.S. Supreme Court decision forced a national reexamination of districts to balance populations.
The redistricting provision of the constitution says that after receiving census data, lawmakers “shall by law divide the state into districts corresponding with the number of representatives to which it is entitled…”
The section is silent on the power to do it at any other time and that, the new lawsuit contends, means it is prohibited.
“The General Assembly ignored the state constitution’s procedural limitation authorizing congressional redistricting to take place only when new decennial census results are certified to the governor,” the lawsuit states.
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.