Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed the last-chance appeal late Friday night with Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Missouri Republican officials filed a last-chance appeal late Friday night to get the U.S. Supreme Court to allow this year’s congressional elections to be held in districts gerrymandered in 2025.
The application to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees the Eighth Judicial Circuit, was filed just before midnight Friday. No immediate action was taken.
The application asks Kavanaugh to stay the effect of the Missouri Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling that a referendum will take place on the map pushed through by Republicans in an effort to flip the 5th District from the Democratic Party.
The application, written by Missouri Solicitor General Lou Capozzi, starts with a grim warning.
“A federal-election-administration disaster is unfolding in Missouri,” Capozzi wrote.
Capozzi then makes a fact error in the second sentence when he informs Kavanaugh that the new map was passed in August 2025. The map was actually passed Sept. 12, 2025, when Republicans in the state Senate voted to shut off debate before Democrats could attempt to amend the bill.
The application says Kavanaugh should grant the stay because the Missouri Supreme Court ruling violates the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution by allowing the referendum to suspend its use in the Nov. 3 election. Missouri would face irreparable harm if the map is used for the November election after candidates were nominated from districts in the 2025 map.
The filing makes many of the same arguments considered, and rejected, by the Missouri Supreme Court.
“Looking backwards, the order renders a completed federal primary election utterly pointless — disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters who will now be moved into new districts and forced to vote for candidates they had no role in selecting,” Capozzi wrote. “Looking forwards, the State is genuinely unsure whether it can switch its governing congressional map in time to run a timely federal election.”
County clerks and election authorities disagree. County clerks 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.
In the application, the state asked for a decision by Sept. 14, which would allow time for ballots to be mailed for overseas military voters by Sept. 19. Kavanaugh directed Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians, to file a response by noon Monday.
The filing capped a long day of waiting for the appeal Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said was coming after the Missouri Supreme Court issued its decision placing a referendum on the gerrymandered congressional map passed by Republican lawmakers in 2025 on the November ballot.
The Missouri Supreme Court on Friday morning denied a request from Hoskins to pause its order requiring the Nov. 3 congressional election to be conducted using the districts in place for the 2024 election.
Hoskins asked for a decision by noon to allow for an “emergency appeal” to the U.S. Supreme Court. His request did not ask the court to block its decision placing a referendum on the gerrymandered congressional map passed by Republican lawmakers in 2025 on the November ballot.
The court denied the request without comment.
In the request for the stay, Hoskins said the order is unprecedented by directing him to use the congressional maps that controlled the 2022 and 2024 elections instead of the gerrymandered plan muscled through the General Assembly by Republicans.
“The court’s order violates federal law in several serious respects,” Capozzi wrote in the application for a stay.
The main argument made to the court — and rejected in its Thursday ruling — is that reverting to the map used previously is logistically impossible and that changing the map disenfranchises the 1.2 million voters who participated in the Aug. 4 primary.
“This court’s injunction now asks the secretary of state and Missouri local election authorities to do what is technically impossible,” Capozzi wrote.
In its ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned Hoskins decision the U.S. Constitution forbids a referendum on congressional redistricting and that the referendum petition filed by the political action committee People Not Politicians would not be on the ballot. That decision put the referendum on the November ballot as Proposition A.
Under the Missouri Constitution, a referendum that is certified to the ballot suspends the effectiveness of the legislation it puts before voters. The referendum was filed Dec. 9 and the court ruled that the legislation passed in a special session was never legally in effect even though it was used for the primary election.
The argument that it would be impossible to revert to the previous maps was countered in a filing to the Missouri Supreme Court from two county clerks, one Democrat and one Republican. They said the switch can be made simply by changing which district map is the controlling one in the state’s voter database.
And in a footnote to the decision, Judge Ginger Gooch said the logistical problems Hoskins cited were largely of his own making.
“The secretary devotes a significant portion of his briefing to discussing the confusion, expense and practical difficulties that may result from not utilizing the congressional redistricting in (the 2025 map) for the November 2026 election,” Gooch wrote. “Besides being irrelevant to the secretary’s sole basis for declaring the referendum petition insufficient, these arguments are particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains.”
Chuck Hatfield, attorney for People Not Politicians, told reporters Thursday that Attorney General Catherine Hanaway’s immediate statement that Hoskins would appeal is a violation of her duty to defend Missouri legal precedent.
Hatfield noted that Jim Layton, former solicitor general of the state, also was surprised by the announcement.
“For an attorney general of our state to question the Supreme Court of our state on what the law is and to appeal that to the Supreme Court of the United States is unprecedented,” Hatfield said. “Attorneys general are supposed to stand up for Missouri law, not try to overturn it.”
In the application to the Missouri Supreme Court, Capozzi wrote that Hoskins expects to prevail before the U.S. Supreme Court and therefore a stay is a proper step.
The state Supreme Court’s decision, Capozzi wrote, violates the rights of primary voters by changing the districts between elections and violates the Uniformed and Overseas Absentee Voter Act, which directs states to get ballots out 45 days before the election, because complying would be impossible.
“The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision puts the state in an impossible situation,” Hoskins said in a declaration accompanying the application for a stay. “Unless that decision is stayed, I am confident Missouri will be forced to violate federal law. And I am gravely concerned that Missouri’s ability to hold timely congressional elections in 2026 will be jeopardized.”
The appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court had not been filed as of 4:30 p.m. Friday.
A new case was filed Friday in federal court for the Eastern District of Missouri seeking to block the use of district map crafted in 2022 and used in the past two elections.
Paul Berry III, Republican nominee in the 1st District, argues that instead of Sept. 8, the final “hard deck” deadline for changing districts is Sept. 19, because that is when ballots must be mailed to overseas military voters.
Berry’s petition calls the action of the Missouri Supreme Court an “administrative review” of the referendum and asks for a three-judge panel to be formed. The petition does not challenge the legality of the referendum or ask for it to be thrown off the ballot.
Berry, who is not an attorney and is representing himself, asks the court to block the Missouri Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the map used for the 2022 and 2024 elections. It violates the Voting Rights Act, Berry states in his petition.
He asks for an order that “the General Assembly to draft and enact a new Missouri congressional district map for use by Missouri to conduct the Missouri 2026 Congressional General Election.”
State Sen. Rick Brattin, Republican nominee in the 5th District, issued a statement in support of Berry’s lawsuit.
“This filing is about protecting Missourians’ constitutional rights and ensuring federal law is followed in the upcoming general election,” Brattin said.
- 10:54 pmThis article was updated to report the filing of the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.,
- 4:28 pmThis article has been updated to report that no appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court had been filed by Friday afternoon and a new case in St. Louis seeks to undo part of the Missouri Supreme Court decision.