Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is representing a group of Missouri voters to block the state from redrawing Missouri’s congressional map and replacing it with an unrepresentative and extreme gerrymander.
Back to topLawmakers in states across the country have continued to jump into a nationwide gerrymandering arms race. And voters, who will have fewer opportunities to make their voices heard and elect representatives who will fight for their communities, will be harmed as a result.
Pushed by the Trump administration, the Missouri Legislature joined this race to...
In June 2025, the Trump administration began urging certain Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, to redraw their congressional maps in ways that would benefit the Republican Party in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
Missouri Governor Michael Kehoe responded by calling the Missouri Legislature into a special session to adopt a new congressional map in the middle of the decade — a departure from Missouri’s usual redistricting process going back almost a century.
The new congressional map’s most significant changes were made to the former Congressional District 5, the district that contained much of Kansas City.
Under Missouri’s previous map, and going back nearly six decades, Kansas City was represented by a single congressional district. This ensured that the city’s residents, including its sizeable minority population, had a unified voice in Congress that accurately represented their needs and could fight to solve the unique problems they faced.
But under the new map, Kansas City is split among three different districts, erasing that unified voice and instead expanding to include far-flung rural areas. As a result, neither the voters in these rural areas nor the residents of Kansas City will have a member of Congress that can fully dedicate themselves to the distinct needs of these diverse groups.
CLC, along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) and the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project (ACLUP VRP), filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Missouri voters.
The lawsuit argues that the new map violates the Missouri Constitution’s compactness requirement for its congressional districts, which is meant to keep together communities that share similar interests and face similar challenges. Adhering to this provision helps ensure that Missouri’s congressional maps are truly representative of its people.
The lawsuit also alleges that the act of redistricting in the middle of the decade in and of itself, regardless of what the new map looks like, is a violation of the Missouri Constitution. The relevant constitutional provision requires redistricting to be done only after a census (which occurs at the beginning of each decade) to ensure that the new maps are being drawn in response to actual shifts in population and demographics rather than for political gain.
The plaintiffs have asked that the court rule that redrawing Missouri’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade is a violation of the state’s constitution, and to block the implementation of the new gerrymandered map.
