For almost four hours Tuesday, Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe heard arguments on what it means to turn in signatures for a referendum. Opponents of the redistricting plan said allowing it to take effect renders the right of referendum meaningless
BY: RUDI KELLER
Missouri Independent
A Missouri judge is being asked to decide which congressional district map — the one passed in 2022 or the one passed last year — will be in effect when candidates line up to file for office later this month.
For about four hours Tuesday, Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe listened to arguments over the meaning of constitutional provisions governing citizen referendums. He wanted to know why he was being asked to make a decision now about what happens when petitions are delivered when the deadline for determining if there are enough signatures to force a vote is months away.
The first important date on this year’s election calendar is the opening of candidate filing on Feb. 24, said Jonathan Hawley, an attorney representing the Jackson County residents who filed the lawsuit.
If the gerrymandered map passed last year by Republicans is used during candidate filing, he said, it will be difficult if not impossible to change when signature-checking is complete in July. That is just days before the Aug. 4 primary.
“If a law could take effect before the people have their say, it would make the referendum power meaningless,” Hawley said.
Attorneys for the state argued the earliest date a law can be suspended by an initiative is when the petitions have been found to include enough signatures to make the ballot.
“Do we assume that submitting an unverified petition and unverified signatures suspends a law passed by the people’s representatives?” asked Louis Capozzi, state solicitor general.
Stumpe asked attorneys to make their final filings by next Tuesday.
Redistricting has become the biggest political war in Missouri in decades. Republicans muscled a gerrymandered congressional map through the Legislature last year under pressure from President Donald Trump. The new plan carved up the 5th Congressional District, represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City since 2005, in an attempt to flip it to the GOP.
A political action committee, People Not Politicians, began gathering signatures to force a statewide vote and turned in more than 300,000 signatures on Dec. 9 to Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office.
By then, several court cases were underway and more would follow, including the case that went to trial on Tuesday. Hoskins, going against a century of precedent, declared that the new law took effect Dec. 11 despite the submission of signatures.
For all past referendums, the filing of a petition with enough apparent signatures to make the ballot was all that was needed for a new law to be put on hold until the vote or the signatures count was verified. That is what happened in 2017 after a referendum petition challenging right to work was filed.
Stumpe noted the intensity of the political and legal fights when he asked the attorneys to restrain their rhetoric in court.
“This is an emotionally charged case,” he said. “This is a politically charged case.”
The key legal question Stumpe will have to resolve is whether delivering referendum signatures is enough to prevent a law from taking effect.
The Constitution says that when a law is referred to voters, it does not take effect until they approve it, Hawley said. The filing of the petition pages with an apparently sufficient number of signatures is enough to suspend the law.
Every decision made by Missouri courts on the referendum power, back to one of the earliest decisions in 1914, backs up that argument, he said.
“For the past 100 years, Missouri courts at all levels have safeguarded that right,” he said.
In the 1914 case, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that refusal by the secretary of state and the attorney general to do their duties “did not defeat the referendum so as to prevent the suspension of the act, since the constitutional provision for the referendum is self-executing.”
But the law in 1914 was that petitioners certified the signatures they gathered, Capozzi said. The law hasn’t been referred to voters until the signature verification process approved in 1980 is complete, he said.
The petition must have about 110,000 signatures representing 5% of the 2024 vote for governor in six of the state’s eight congressional districts.
A PAC called Put Missouri First intervened in the case to back up the state’s arguments. Marc Ellinger, attorney for the PAC, said it is unknown whether the petition will have enough signatures.
“Don’t jump to the conclusion that a box of papers stops a law in Missouri,” Ellinger said.
A referendum rests on three legs, Stumpe said: timely filing, legal form and sufficient signatures to make the ballot. He asked Hawley to explain why he should act while signatures are being checked.
“We have to presume the third leg of the stool or the referendum process falls apart,” Hawley said.
It is uncertain what Hoskins has done other than say the law is in effect. As part of the redistricting plan, Democratic voters in predominantly Black areas of Kansas City were shifted into the Republican 4th District and heavily Republican areas stretching along the Missouri River to Boone County were added to the remaining Kansas City portions.
In the map passed in 2022, Boone County was split between the 3rd and 4th districts.
Hoskins’ office has not delivered the information needed to reassign voters to new districts, Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said Tuesday in an interview with The Independent. Local election authorities cannot change voters to new districts until after the April election, she noted.
Hoskins’ office delivered 2,450 pages with signatures to Boone County.
“We’re almost done” with signature verification, Lennon said.
The case heard Tuesday, while directly about the date the new map takes effect, has side issues that include accusations that it was engineered by People Not Politicians.
After hearing arguments over demands by the state for more information, Stumpe denied the request.