Momentum is building for a special session of the Missouri Legislature to redraw the state’s eight congressional districts with the aim of gaining a seat for Republicans.
Democrats will fight it, but a united Republican majority with more than two-thirds of the seats in both chambers can force it through if they wish.
Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin, speaking Friday on KSSZ-93.9 in Columbia, said it is “likely” that lawmakers will be called in. She was in Jefferson City for discussions about a special session, but she had seen no map proposals and was unsure on the timing.
She first heard that President Donald Trump was urging Republicans to redistrict the state from discussion of social media posts by Republican members of Congress, O’Laughlin said.
“Lots of things run downhill,” O’Laughlin said. “So I thought, ‘well, this will be ending up in our neighborhood here before long.’ And it has.”
Nothing was settled during the discussions, O’Laughlin said in a text Saturday morning.
“We all agreed we’d continue working on the idea,” O’Laughlin said. “No decision made.”
Gov. Mike Kehoe would need to convene a special session. His office did not respond to an email inquiry asking for comment on Friday.
In a little more than a week, the idea of redrawing Missouri’s congressional district lines has gained enough momentum to seem inevitable, House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, said in an interview with The Independent.
Republican members are “gung-ho,” she said, while Democrats are looking for ways to derail it. The chances of that are slim, she added.
“I’m kind of just waiting, I suppose, but I fully expect it to happen,” Aune said. “Everyone I’ve talked to, especially on my side of the aisle, expects to go down and get steamrolled on the issue during a special session.”
Missouri has eight seats in the U.S. House, six held by Republicans and two held by Democrats — the same total and partisan division it has had since a seat was lost after the 2010 census. Of the eight members, only U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a St. Louis County Republican, has won with less than 60% support in the two elections since the maps were redrawn to reflect the 2020 census.
Wagner represents the 2nd District, which has portions of St. Louis, St. Charles and adjacent counties.
The target for Republicans is the 5th District, held since 2005 by U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat. He won his two most recent elections with 61% in 2022 and 60% last year. The two adjacent districts, the 4th and the 6th, are held by Republican U.S. Reps. Mark Alford and Sam Graves, who each received more than 70% of the vote for the past two elections.
A major hurdle for any special session on redistricting is that it will have a purely partisan intent, to gain an advantage for the Republican Party. This year saw a major break between Republicans and Democrats in the state Senate when partisan priorities were slammed through with a motion, rarely used in the upper chamber, to shut off debate.
The previous question, or PQ, was invoked to overturn the voter-passed initiative providing minimum standards for paid sick leave at most businesses and to send voters a constitutional amendment repealing the abortion rights measure approved in November.
It would almost certainly have to be used again to bring a redistricting bill to a vote because, otherwise, Democrats could use the rules that put no limit on how long a member can hold the floor to block it.
After the Senate adjourned at the regular session, Democrats vowed to punish Republicans by clogging up the chamber so little work can be accomplished as a way to prevent a repetition. State Sen. Stephen Webber, a Columbia Democrat, forced Republicans to bring 17 senators from their homes in late May for what was supposed to be a largely ceremonial day of final paperwork from the session.
A truce of sorts prevailed in the Senate during a special session in June that approved stadium financing for professional sports teams and aid to storm victims in St. Louis.
“The point is to discourage future PQs and get us back on track to functioning and working together,” Webber said. “The more times that the process is abused, probably the stronger the correction has to be, which would mean that, for a larger correction, you need more consequence, more intervention.”
Some Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about redistricting now. The only time Missouri lawmakers have revised maps between census-determined allocations was in the 1960s following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that districts must be nearly equal in population.
State Sen. Mike Moon, a Republican from Ash Grove, in 2022 was an enthusiastic supporter of drawing a map that made it likely Republicans would win seven of the state’s seats. He’s not sure he wants to vote for a bill to do that now.
“I started thinking about, what if the tables were turned and the Democrats had the majority?” Moon said. “If we’re honest with ourselves, I would say that we would not want the tables turned the other way. And you won’t get many people to say that publicly.”
The other danger, House Speaker Pro Tem Chad Perkins of Bowling Green said, is that voters the GOP takes for granted may not be so firm.
“I don’t know that a 7-1 map ever existed,” Perkins said. “I think a 7-1 map is easily a 5-3 map in a year that doesn’t go the way that conservatives want it to go.”
State Sen. Nick Schroer, a Republican from Defiance, said that is not something that worries him. Schroer, the leader of the Missouri Freedom Caucus, said he wants to change district lines on the eastern side of the state as well, to put all of St. Charles County into the 3rd District with portions of St. Louis County.
But cutting off discussion won’t make next year worse, he said.
“It’s politics. You’re going to have fighting no matter what. You’re going to have some strange moments,” Schroer said. “But look, the use of the PQ is not a new thing. I mean, it comes and goes. It’s like a roller coaster.”
Texas lawmakers are in special session looking at redrawing districts in that state to give Republicans an additional five seats. Democratic governors in California, Illinois and New Jersey have suggested they would do the same in response.
If Missouri Democrats are upset about a new redistricting plan at home, they should also be saying Democratic states shouldn’t do it, either, Perkins said.
“To someone on the left, your fury and outrage needs to be directed equally to Illinois and California for doing the same thing,” Perkins said
Vice President J.D. Vance, in a social media post, attacked the way California is currently drawn.
“The gerrymander in California is outrageous. Of their 52 congressional districts, 9 of them are Republican. That means 17 percent of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40 percent of the vote in that state,” Vance wrote. “How can this possibly be allowed?”
In the November election, no Democrat running statewide received less than 37.9% of the vote, and Democrats hold 25% of the U.S. House seats, which would fall to 12.5% if the 5th District became Republican.
Vance’s criticism of California could be applied to Missouri, Perkins said.
“Do I think that it’s ethical to be the same across the board, to have your opinion applied the same to all things?,” he said. “Yeah, I think it probably is right.”
With Republicans holding a slim majority in the U.S. House, Republicans at the state level have a responsibility to their voters to do what they can to shore it up, Schroer said.
“It’d be a disservice to them to not revisit this issue to see if we can make the Emanuel Cleaver spot a competitive seat,” Schroer said.
O’Laughlin, in the radio interview, said she understands the criticism from Democrats.
“The biggest concern that people have, first of all, is that the Senate doesn’t like to do something out of the ordinary like that, because it’s viewed as just not listening to the other side, not working with other people,” O’Laughlin said. “And I understand why they would feel that way.”
But with Democratic states preparing to redistrict, she said, Republicans need to rally to protect the Trump presidency and what they view as its achievements.
If Kehoe issues the call, Democrats intend to paint him as Trump’s puppet.
“I don’t think anybody that I’m aware of was talking about redrawing maps in the middle of the census until Trump started pushing it,” Webber said.
In a video shared on social media by the Missouri Democratic Party, Webber bluntly assessed the push for redistricting as a distraction from the biggest issue plaguing the president right now, the demands from his supporters to release files on child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“This entire thing is to make sure there (are) not investigations into the Epstein files,” Webber said. “Because if you’re a pedophile that raped kids on Epstein island, the biggest winner of this would be those people.”
Aune, who said Moon’s comments give her a small hope Republicans will resist Trump’s demands, said Kehoe’s actions will show who he is.
“Who needs a governor,” Aune said, “and even who needs a Republican super-majority legislature, when we have daddy Trump in the White House pulling the strings?”
