Common sense might suggest that Missouri Republicans would be pleased by their political control over the state. While the state used to be a competitive bellwether — Bill Clinton won the state twice in the 1990s — Missouri has since become a GOP stronghold, with Republicans controlling all of the levers of power.
This includes, of course, a dominating position in the state’s congressional delegation, with GOP lawmakers holding both of Missouri’s two U.S. Senate seats and six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats.
Donald Trump and his team decided that wasn’t quite enough.
At the president’s behest, the GOP-led state House recently advanced a partisan scheme to eliminate one of the state’s two Democratic congressional districts. Trump wrote via social media soon after, “The Missouri Senate must pass this Map now, AS IS, to deliver a gigantic Victory for Republicans in the ‘Show Me State,’ and across the Country. I will be watching closely.”
The party’s state senators promptly obeyed. The Associated Press reported:
Missouri Republicans handed President Donald Trump a political victory Friday, giving final legislative approval to a redistricting plan that could help Republicans win an additional U.S. House seat in next year’s elections. The Senate vote sends the redistricting plan to Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe for his expected signature to make it law.
There is no reason to think Kehoe would even consider vetoing the new, rigged map.
“Missouri is now poised to join North Carolina and Texas as among the most egregiously gerrymandered states in the nation,” former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., the chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. “Missouri Republicans have ignored the demands of their constituents in order to follow the demands of a power-hungry administration in Washington.”
Holder added, “Missouri Republicans rejected a similar gerrymander just three years ago. But now they have caved to anti-democracy politicians and powerful special interests in Washington who ordered them to rig the map. These same forces ripped away health care from millions of Americans and handed out a tax cut to the very wealthy. Republicans in Congress and the White House are terrified of a system where both parties can compete for the House majority, and instead seek a system that shields them from accountability at the ballot box. … It is not only legally indefensible, it is also morally wrong.”
For those who might benefit from a refresher, for generations, states have redrawn congressional district lines after the decennial census. There were exceptions, but in nearly every instance, mid-decade redistricting only happened when courts told states that their maps were unlawful and needed to be redone.
The idea that politicians would engage in such abuses as a matter of will was practically unheard of — for the most part.
Texas Republicans broke radical ground with a mid-decade redistricting scheme in 2003, and GOP officials in the Lone Star State last month completed a similar gambit, creating a new map designed to give the party five additional U.S. House seats.
The developments helped launch a partisan arms race of sorts, with California Democrats moving forward with a comparable plan that attempts to give their party five more seats of their own.
Following the president’s orders, Missouri Republicans are nearly done carving up Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s district, and the White House has also been aggressively lobbying Republicans in Indiana to follow the same script — even threatening primary campaigns against those who resist — despite the fact that the GOP already controls seven of the state’s nine U.S. House seats. Meanwhile, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we’ll see related efforts in some blue states, including Illinois and Maryland, and other red states, including Louisiana, Ohio and Florida. Kansas and Nebraska are reportedly also in the mix to redraw their state congressional maps to ensure GOP victories before voters cast ballots. Why go to all of this trouble to shift a handful of votes on Capitol Hill? Because the Republican majority in the House is already tiny, and if historical patterns hold true, Democrats are likely to make meaningful gains in the 2026 midterm cycle. And so a multifaceted partisan scramble is underway, with Trump and his allies targeting mail-in ballots, voter-ID laws, the census, voter registrations and gerrymandering — not because it’s responsible, and not because it’ll benefit the public, but because of Republicans’ desperation to hold onto power and prevent Democrats from gaining a toehold that might lead to some degree of accountability for the president. The stakes, in other words, are high, and if the redistricting arms race can result in a net gain of a half-dozen or so seats for the GOP — in effect, ensuring wins before voters can even cast ballots — it might very well keep Republicans in power for the rest of the decade, no matter what the American people actually want. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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