The Missouri Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday morning in three consolidated challenges to the state’s new congressional map, known as the Missouri First Map, which Gov. Mike Kehoe signed into law following a special legislative session in September 2025. The map, drawn as part of President Trump’s broader mid-decade redistricting push to secure additional Republican congressional seats ahead of the 2026 midterms, splits parts of Kansas City into three districts and adds Republican-leaning areas to the district of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, one of the state’s two Democratic House members. The Republican-led legislature passed the map last fall, targeting one of the two Democrat-held House seats in the state, and lower courts upheld the map and allowed state officials to move forward with it, decisions the challengers are now appealing. Two days before Secretary of State Denny Hoskins declared the map in effect on December 11, 2025, he received 691 boxes of referendum petitions from the political action group People Not Politicians, which publicly claimed that submitting the petitions froze the Missouri First Map and required a statewide vote before the new districts could take effect.
The three cases before the court break into two distinct legal tracks. The first two, Healey v. State of Missouri and Wise v. State of Missouri, both from Jackson County and consolidated for argument, challenge whether the new map meets the state constitution’s requirement that congressional districts be “compact,” with plaintiffs arguing the redrawn Kansas City-area districts are a “significant departure from any reasonable understanding of the word compact.” The third case, Maggard v. State of Missouri from Cole County, addresses whether the referendum petition process legally suspended the map pending a public vote. The justices asked few questions across the arguments, and the challengers urged the court to act as soon as possible before the state’s August 4 primary. A ruling against the map on any of the three tracks could halt its use in this fall’s midterm elections and restore Missouri’s previous congressional boundaries, preserving Cleaver’s Kansas City-anchored district and leaving Missouri’s Democratic seats intact.
Watch the oral argument videos here: Healey and Wise video, Maggard video
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