GOP cites court defeats over redistricting as fuel for new effort
Missouri Republicans are pressing to dismantle the Missouri Plan, the 86-year-old nonpartisan system for selecting the state’s appellate and Supreme Court judges, in the wake of a series of confrontations between the state’s Republican-controlled government and the state Supreme Court over redistricting and ballot measures.
The latest calls are coming from state legislators, party officials and members of the state’s congressional delegation. U.S. Rep. Jason Smith has called for the state to switch to electing its Supreme Court judges. Miles Ross, the Republican Party’s executive director, declared on X: “The Missouri Plan is done.” Dan Seitz, chief of staff to state Sen. Brad Hudson, has called for replacing it with a system in which the governor could nominate judges directly, subject to Senate confirmation.
State Rep. Cathy Jo Loy, a Carthage Republican who has introduced legislation in each of the past two sessions to replace the Missouri Plan with gubernatorial appointment and Senate confirmation, said she intends to file a new proposal on Dec. 1, the first day lawmakers can file bills for next year’s session. Loy said her opposition to the system predates the recent clashes with the Supreme Court but that those clashes could give the proposal new momentum.
“There will probably be more appetite because there are several senators that feel the same way,” she said.
The current wave of GOP criticism traces to a fight over redistricting. Republican lawmakers, at President Donald Trump’s behest, redrew the state’s congressional map in a mid-decade gerrymander intended to give the party a chance at picking up a seventh of Missouri’s eight congressional seats. Voters gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, putting the new map on hold.
Then came Hoskins. The former state representative and senator from west-central Missouri took office as secretary of state in January 2025 and brought a more combative approach to overseeing elections and ballot measures. Hoskins made a bright-red sport coat his sartorial trademark, often posing with a wood baseball bat and speaking about politics as a series of battles and himself as a conservative warrior.
Hoskins tried to keep the referendum off the ballot. The Missouri Supreme Court overruled him and ordered the old map restored until voters decided on the new one. Hoskins, citing a federal court ruling that contradicted the state Supreme Court, directed officials to use the new map anyway. Chief Justice Brent Powell then demanded Hoskins appear in court to show why he should not be held in contempt.
Fourteen Republican lawmakers responded by threatening to impeach “responsible members of this Court” for “willful neglect of duty, incompetency and misconduct” if the justices held Hoskins in contempt. The court held Hoskins in contempt anyway; Hoskins backed down and instructed local election officials to distribute ballots using the old map. The justices decided not to have him arrested.
The redistricting fight is one of several in which Missouri courts have pushed back against the Republican agenda. In 2024, after the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a last-minute effort by Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists to keep an abortion-rights initiative off the ballot, Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin called for repealing the Missouri Plan. Her bill, which proposed replacing the system with nonpartisan elections, stalled in committee.
Courts have repeatedly rewritten ballot summaries prepared by Republican state officials that they found unfair or misleading. Voters have rejected multiple ballot measures championed by the legislature and governor, including an effort to weaken their power to bypass the legislature by amending the constitution or putting laws passed by lawmakers to a statewide vote.
Despite holding every statewide elected office, supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature and six of the state’s eight congressional seats, Missouri Republicans have encountered repeated setbacks in the courts and at the ballot box.
Gov. Mike Kehoe also weighed in after the redistricting ruling, posting on X that “unelected judges” have shown a “lack of respect for the legislative process.” On a radio show the next day, Kehoe acknowledged that altering how judges are selected had not been on his radar before the ruling.
“But I think it’s definitely something a lot of people are going to start asking about,” he said. “And I’m not sure the judges across our state, whether Supreme Court or other judges, really wanted that on people’s radar screen.”
Hoskins did not respond to questions sent to his office. He has previously said he disagreed with any suggestion that he and Republican leaders were defying the will of voters. He has not publicly called for changing how Missouri selects Supreme Court judges, though his office’s official X account reposted Smith’s message calling for the end of the Missouri Plan.
Kehoe’s office said it would not respond to questions from ProPublica, which first reported the renewed effort. Powell declined to comment for that report.
The Missouri Plan was adopted by voters some 86 years ago to remove political influence from the courts, and has become a model for some two dozen states around the country. Rather than electing top judges, as Illinois does, or giving the governor primary responsibility for choosing them, like California, Missouri selects its appellate and Supreme Court judges through a commission made up of three lawyers elected by lawyers in each appellate district, three non-lawyers appointed by the governor and a state Supreme Court judge selected by the court. The commission chooses a slate of three candidates for each judicial vacancy, and the governor must appoint from that slate. After appointment, judges face retention votes at the first general election after one year in office and every 12 years thereafter.
The commission’s current chair is Powell, whom the then-chair of the state GOP hailed as a “good conservative” before Republican Gov. Eric Greitens selected him in 2017. In remarks on September 17 to the joint annual meeting of the Missouri Bar and the Judicial Conference of Missouri, Powell warned of “threats from those who seek to detract from the ideals of our republic and to undermine faith in our sacred institutions — including our legal profession and our courts.”
“It is incumbent on all of us as lawyers and judges to rise up and defend our constitutions and the rule of law,” he added.
Although some Republicans have derided the state Supreme Court as a bastion of liberal activists, five of its seven judges were appointed by Republican governors.
The Missouri Plan has faced previous repeal efforts. In 1942, voters decisively defeated a repeal measure championed by party bosses who said the system gave too much power to lawyers. In 2007, conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates; Blunt resisted and chose one of the three from the approved slate. In 2012, a proposed overhaul that would have given the governor more control was rejected by voters by a 3-to-1 margin.
Whether there is enough support to repeal the Missouri Plan now remains to be seen. Peverill Squire, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri, said some of the bills that would eliminate the Missouri Plan might get committee hearings, “but my guess is there probably won’t be enough appetite among enough Republicans to really want to put it on the ballot.”
Any change to the system would ultimately have to be approved by voters, something Loy acknowledged could be difficult after recent Republican losses at the ballot box.
The renewed attacks have also mobilized the system’s longtime defenders. Ed Dowd, a former U.S. attorney who for two decades has helped lead the Citizens for Missouri Courts, said the campaign has historically become most active when the system is under threat. Dowd’s St. Louis-based firm, Dowd Bennett, recently contributed $100,000 to the campaign.
“It’s something that we take very, very seriously and don’t want to take any chances on losing something that we have that works so well,” he said.
The drama in Missouri has played out against similar confrontations elsewhere. In North Carolina, the Republican-dominated General Assembly stripped authority from Democratic governors. In Wisconsin, Republicans threatened to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court justice to protect gerrymandered maps. And in New York, Democrats bypassed an independent commission to pass a gerrymander that favored them; the state’s highest court struck it down.