Top red state election official hauled before court to face contempt over defied map order

The Missouri Supreme Court ordered Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to appear in person Thursday and explain why he should not be held in contempt for directing election officials to use a congressional map the court has barred him from implementing.

In the unusual late order Tuesday, the court gave Hoskins until noon Wednesday to answer a motion for contempt from People Not Politicians, a political action committee that forced a referendum on a map gerrymandered in 2025 to favor Republicans. The court scheduled an in-person hearing for 10 a.m. Thursday.

The contempt fight erupted hours after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Missouri officials’ emergency request to stay the state court ruling. Minutes later, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri issued a temporary restraining order barring Hoskins from using any congressional map other than the 2025 version.

Hoskins then sent local election officials a copy of Clark’s order along with his official certification of the November ballot. In the email, Hoskins said Clark’s order “takes precedence over the Missouri Supreme Court’s order.”

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the referendum on the 2025 map was legal, sufficient and timely and ordered it onto the Nov. 3 ballot. Because the referendum petition was filed before the new map took effect, the court held, the 2025 districts never became law and the map used in 2022 and 2024 remains in effect for the November election.

The decision also permanently enjoined Hoskins and those acting in concert with him from implementing or using the 2025 map unless voters approve it in November. In Tuesday night’s order, Chief Justice W. Brent Powell directed Hoskins to answer three questions:

Why “(1) his e-mail on September 8, 2026, instructing use of the (2025) map is not an affirmative violation of this court’s injunction; (2) how this court’s injunction is not still in full force and effect in light of the Supreme Court of the United States’ overruling of Respondent’s emergency application for stay and administrative stay pending appeal; and (3) if he is not willing to comply with this court’s injunction, he should take no action in all things related to the congressional district map until guidance is received from a higher court…”

Powell also directed that the court “will not allow filings from any other parties on this matter.”

Clark’s order says not to use any map but the 2025 map, attorney Chuck Hatfield wrote in the motion. The Missouri Supreme Court’s order says not to use the 2025 map. Both orders are in effect and leave election authorities no map at all, Hatfield wrote.

Clark’s order “does not purport to overrule this court’s injunction and does NOT mandate the Secretary to use (the 2025 map), although on its face it enjoins the use of any map other than (the 2025 map),” Hatfield wrote.

By directing local election authorities to implement the 2025 map, Hoskins is violating the court’s orders, Hatfield wrote.

“This court should make clear that regardless of other orders (except from the United States Supreme Court) the Missouri Secretary of State must comply with this court’s injunction,” Hatfield wrote. “The court should instruct all local election authorities that (the 2025 map) is not the law and has never been the law.”

Clark’s action came in a lawsuit filed Friday by U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin and two voters. They want to keep in place the map drawn in 2025, which shifts territory around Onder’s home into the 3rd District and redraws the 5th District to make it more favorable to Republicans.

Had Clark not acted, Kavanaugh’s denial would have left the state court order in place and Missouri on course to use the 2022 map for the November election.

The dueling orders created immediate confusion, with Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issuing a news release saying the state would comply with Clark’s order. Attorneys for People Not Politicians said during a news conference that the conflicting orders could leave election officials unsure which one they must follow.

Hatfield said local election officials are being directed by Hoskins to use the 2025 map even though the Missouri Supreme Court injunction bars Hoskins and those acting with him from implementing it.

“I think they’re probably not sure what map they should use, and they need to talk to their lawyers about that,” Hatfield said.

Abha Khanna, the Seattle attorney who was People Not Politicians’ lead lawyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, said Clark’s order “is something that we will deal with to figure out on appeal.”

A referendum on the 2025 redistricting plan will be on the Nov. 3 ballot as Proposition A.

The 2025 map was drawn with the goal of making seven of Missouri’s eight congressional districts favorable to Republicans, principally by reshaping the Kansas City-based 5th District held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. The map used in 2022 and 2024 produced a delegation of six Republicans and two Democrats.

Onder is the Republican nominee in the 3rd District, seeking a second term in a district drawn more to his favor in the 2025 redistricting plan. Brattin is the Republican nominee in the 5th District, where the district was designed to generate a GOP victory that ousts veteran Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City.

Clark wrote that without a temporary restraining order, “many Missouri voters would have to cast their general-election votes for candidates whom they had no role in nominating.”

“Candidates who had no choice but to campaign and raise money in the (2025) districts that Missouri’s highest election authority presented to them, have spent their funds and campaign efforts in districts that would no longer exist,” wrote Clark, who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump.

Clark also found that the public interest favors using the same map for the primary and general elections.

“Disenfranchising voters across the state and denying them their constitutional right to have their primary votes counted significantly harm the public interest,” he wrote.

The center of both Clark’s ruling and the appeal to Kavanaugh is the Missouri Supreme Court decision that enjoined Hoskins from using the gerrymandered congressional map drawn.

Kavanaugh did not elaborate on his decision.

In turning down the emergency application for a stay, Kavanaugh created no precedent on the issues raised by the state. But the decision does show that he did not find enough convincing argument that the state would likely prevail in a hearing by the full court or that the state would suffer “several irreparable harms” as claimed in the application.

People Not Politicians on Sunday had urged Kavanaugh to reject the state’s application and uphold both parts of the ruling from the state Supreme Court.

In the opening paragraphs of the filing, attorneys for People Not Politicians write that the only reason the case was at the nation’s highest court is the decisions to delay made by Hoskins during the signature verification process.

Hoskins “waited as long as possible to manufacture the present dispute” and held the congressional primary using the 2025 map, they wrote, “in the hopes of running out the clock on the judiciary’s tolerance for a last-minute reversion to the 2022 districts.”

Now, they wrote, Hoskins wants “this court to deliver him the political victory to which he was never entitled under the Missouri Constitution. This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law, and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting applicants the extraordinary relief they seek.”

A key point made by Missouri Solicitor General Lou Capozzi in the state’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was that the mechanism for changing between districts is too time-consuming and difficult to complete before ballots must be delivered starting Sept. 19.

County clerks, however, told the Missouri Supreme Court that switching voters to the map used in 2022 and 2024 is a relatively simple process. And the Jackson County Board of Elections told the Kansas City Star it would be ready to hold the election in the 2022 boundaries.

The redistricting story began in the summer of 2025, when Onder, of Lake St. Louis, got the ear of President Donald Trump to tell him that Missouri, like Texas, could provide additional GOP seats to bolster the party’s thin majority in Congress.

Since Missouri lost a seat after the 2010 census, it has sent six Republicans and two Democrats to the U.S. House each election.

Onder, then a state senator, was among members of the chamber’s conservative caucus who were outmaneuvered in 2022 as they tried to force a congressional map that would tilt the 5th District, based in Kansas City, to the GOP. He was elected to Congress in 2024.

And, despite initial misgivings, Republicans got in line behind Trump. Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session inflamed with partisanship, including a state Senate rule change that effectively silenced Democrats, which forced through what the GOP majority wouldn’t do in 2022.

The legal and political backlash that followed has not yet spent its full force. It began when People Not Politicians began circulating the referendum petition and intensified as it became clear there would be more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Legally, the battle has upended the consensus on the effect that filing a referendum petition has on legislation as well as delivered strong new precedent upholding the governor’s power to select subjects for a special session and the General Assembly’s power to redistrict at any time.

Politically, the climax will be written in November, when voters decide on both the referendum and the congressional candidates selected in the primary.

The flurry of filings over the weekend shows the intense national interest in the outcome of the Missouri case.

Republican attorneys general from Florida, Texas and 18 other states filed in support of Missouri, arguing it is not legal to change voting districts between the primary and the general election.

Meanwhile, in Texas, that state’s Supreme Court is deciding whether local voting districts can be changed after the primary to dilute voting strength of minorities.

The American Center for Law and Justice also sent a brief to the court urging it to rule for Hoskins.

On the other side, the Campaign Legal Center, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation joined forces to file a brief supporting People Not Politicians, as did the two Missouri voters who tried to get the 2025 map suspended while signatures were being checked.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.