Missouri – Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is coordinating a massive effort across several states to fight what she calls judicial overreach in the ongoing Texas redistricting dispute. Twenty-one states, including Missouri, have sent an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. They are asking the Court to stop a lower court from throwing out Texas’s congressional map and giving five seats to the plaintiffs’ favored political party. Hanaway says that the federal district court went above its power by replacing decisions made by elected officials with those made by justices who were not elected.
“Redistricting is a duty entrusted to the people’s elected representatives,” said Attorney General Hanaway. “The district court in Texas cast aside that principle and gave partisan litigants a victory they could not earn through the democratic process. Missouri is standing with Texas because federal courts cannot be used to override the will of state legislatures.”
The main issue of the brief is that the Texas ruling went against the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. Anyone who says that racial gerrymandering is happening must show a plausible alternative map that shows that the state may design alternate district borders without changing its political goals. Missouri’s complaint says that this provision stops regular political disagreements from being turned into lawsuits for racial discrimination.
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In the Texas case, though, the plaintiffs failed to provide a different map. Their own expert indicated she could make “a million maps in a matter of seconds,” but they didn’t give any. Instead, the plaintiffs urged the court to restore a previous map that would give their party five more congressional seats. Missouri says that this method shows an attempt to utilize racial claims to get around election results and the power of the legislature.
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Hanaway’s office said that if lower courts may ignore Alexander, political activists in other states could attempt similar tactics. Missouri linked the matter to something that had happened recently in the state, when groups from other states tried to dispute the state’s congressional map through an illegal referendum. Hanaway says that letting this kind of intervention happen would make it harder for lawmakers to do their jobs, cause uncertainty, and lower people’s trust.
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The U.S. Supreme Court should promptly step in and block the district court’s order, Missouri and the twenty-one other states that support it say. This will make sure that Texas keeps control of its congressional map in 2026. The group comprises states from the South, Midwest, and West, which shows that there is a lot of agreement on the role of legislators in determining electoral maps.
