The Supreme Court of Missouri suspended the state's 2025 congressional map on Thursday 3 September. Judge Ginger Gooch wrote for a unanimous court in Von Glahn v. Hoskins, No. SC101805, decided en banc, meaning by the full court rather than a panel of it. "All concur," the opinion records. The suspended act is HB 1, Missouri's 2025 congressional-redistricting law, passed by the Republican legislature to redraw the state's eight districts mid-decade.
the Court held that "because the plain language of ... the Missouri Constitution authorizes a referendum as to 'any act of the general assembly' and no exception applies, the referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely. This Court reverses the circuit court's judgment."1 Article III, section 49 of the state constitution carries no redistricting carve-out. A congressional map is therefore an act of the legislature like any other, and a petition with enough signatures can suspend it until the voters have spoken.
The injunction carries the part every summary has dropped. Denny Hoskins, the secretary of state, "and all of those acting in concert with him are restrained and enjoined from implementing, using, or mandating the use of the congressional redistricting in HB 1 for the November 2026 general election or at any other time thereafter unless and until HB 1 is approved by the voters at the November 2026 general election and takes effect 30 days thereafter".2 A struck-down map never comes back. This one does, on 3 December, if Missourians approve it as Proposition A, the ballot measure asking whether HB 1 should take effect.
November therefore runs on the 2022 map, in the Court's own words "the only map in effect".3 Those lines were used at both the 2022 and the 2024 elections, so a reader meeting the other label elsewhere is meeting the same document under a second nickname. Missouri had already voted once under HB 1. The 4 August primary ran on its boundaries, and the Court left the results and the certified nominees alone, so a nominee chosen by one electorate now faces a different one. A three-judge federal panel had used Louisiana v. Callais in July to leave Tennessee's mid-decade redraw standing. Missouri's court has gone the other way, and it has done so after the primary rather than before it.
