Missouri’s Republican-Imposed Catch-22, and the Ballad of Denny Hoskins

Denny Hoskins, Agent of Chaos

Readers of The Brief are likely aware of what’s going on with Missouri’s election maps, and of a character at the center of that drama, secretary of state Denny Hoskins.

But as the chaos around a gambit he pulled off this year intensifies, reaching the U.S. Supreme Court twice in just a few days, and with Missouri’s state Supreme Court threatening to hold Hoskins in contempt, I wanted to look back at exactly what that gambit was and how it came to create the catch-22 now facing Missouri’s voters.

The story takes us back to last year, when the state, at President Trump’s urging, passed a new, heavily gerrymandered map that would likely eliminate one Democratic seat in Congress. Organizers gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to challenge the map, asking that voters be given a chance to affirm or reject it in a statewide referendum. And then Hoskins, whose job it was to assess such petitions for referenda, did … nothing.

Time passed. Spring turned to summer. As Kate Riga has been reporting, state Republicans were not secretive about what Hoskins was up to. “As long as the status quo is the new maps, delay works in our favor,” Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said.

Finally, primary day — Tuesday, Aug. 4 — arrived. The state held the election under the new, challenged map. That afternoon, Hoskins announced that he was finding the petition for a referendum on that new map to be insufficient — not because organizers didn’t gather enough signatures, but because the state constitution, which allows for referenda on any act of the state legislature, doesn’t explicitly name redistricting as one such act that voters can challenge.

On that day, Hoskins created a kind of catch-22: Voters chose primary candidates in the new, gerrymandered districts. Switching from the new map to the old map ahead of November would mean voters selected primary candidates they might not be able to vote for in the general election. A state court soon found Hoskins’ gambit to be an error, however, meaning primary voters cast ballots in districts that were invalid.

With that bizarre scenario as a foundation, things started to really hit the fan. When the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously found Hoskins’ explanation to be lacking, it ordered state officials to use the old map for the midterms and to allow a referendum on the new map in November. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected a challenge to that decision. But a federal district court judge, the Trump-appointed Stephen Clark, ordered the opposite outcome: that the new maps must be used, because voters voted under them in the primary.

Pointing to the federal district court order and ignoring the state and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Hoskins said the election would be held under the new maps. That led the state Supreme Court to consider holding him in contempt for violating its order.

The federal district court order requiring the new maps to be used is now back before the U.S. Supreme Court. And Hoskins has a busy day ahead of him. He must submit his brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on the federal district court order requiring the state to use the new maps. He’s also due in state Supreme Court “to show cause, if any, why he should not be held in contempt for violating this Court’s injunction,” which effectively required the state to use the old maps. (Clark, the district court judge, declined an effort by the state to block the contempt hearing.)

“I look forward to my day in court,” he said on X.

Census Citizenship Question 2.0 Emerges

A new Trump administration proposal for the census, a long time coming, was published to the federal register yesterday, Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky report for TPM.

• The proposal seeks to omit many categories of immigrants from the count which is used for apportionment — the distribution of congressional seats, which, in turn, also impacts the Electoral College. Such a change would likely shift power from blue states to red ones.
• It also calls for the exclusion of questions about race and ethnicity.
• The proposal is similar to one that has been circulating within the administration for months, and that TPM exclusively published a copy of in August. But it is in some ways more aggressive. This version explicitly proposes a question about immigration status on the census.
• The first Trump administration tried to add a question about citizenship to the census, but the effort was blocked by the Supreme Court, which found the Commerce Department had not followed the proper procedures to do so.
• This new proposal calls not for a citizenship question but for an immigration status question.
• Inquiring about status would add immense complexity to the process, Thomas Saenz, President and General Counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told TPM, forcing the bureau to “distinguish lawful permanent residents and asylees/refugees from all other immigrants.”

Tabs

• Deaths from ectopic pregnancies have spiked in recent years, with the most dramatic increase in states that ban abortion, ProPublica reports. “To treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is almost never viable, doctors must terminate it. But lawsuits and federal complaints have alleged that some medical providers are hesitating or flat-out refusing to do that in states where they face criminal penalties for performing an abortion.”
• During his appearance at the RNC’s midterms convention last night, Trump had this offer for the American public, Hunter Walker reports. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate — both of them,” he will “issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” he said. That could cost over $1 trillion. For context, the country’s current deficit is $1.8 trillion.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), appearing at the Republican convention by video following rumors he’s considering defecting from his party and a damning portrayal of his apathy about his job in the Wall Street Journal. (Fetterman, in a statement last night, attempted to put that rampant speculation to rest. “I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party — and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the 51st vote that I ran on,” he said.)