Missouri Republicans are moving to destroy the Missouri Plan because the state Supreme Court stopped their mid-decade gerrymander and made their secretary of state answer for defying it. Fourteen of them have threatened to impeach the judges responsible. The governor calls them “unelected.” The state party’s operative has pronounced the system “done.” This is not judicial reform. It is retaliation against an independent court, executed with the instruments of a political supermajority.
The thing they are trying to destroy is not a policy preference or an administrative arrangement. It is Article V, Section 25 of the Missouri Constitution — the nonpartisan judicial-selection amendment Missouri voters ratified in 1940 and have now protected for eighty-six years. The text prescribes the architecture directly: a judicial commission on which lawyers and non-lawyers both sit generates a slate of candidates, the governor appoints from that slate, and the voters themselves hold a retention vote that keeps or removes the judge. No party boss names the judge. No governor’s patronage network supplies the bench. The commission design was copied by roughly two dozen other states because it works — and Missouri has defended it longer than most of them have existed.
Voters crushed a repeal measure in 1942. They reaffirmed the system three-to-one in 2012, after Republican lawmakers tried to hand the governor more control over the commission. Twice the parties came for it. Twice the electorate refused.
The third attack is the one now underway, and the trigger is not a design dispute. The legislature, at President Trump’s instruction, redrew Missouri’s congressional map mid-decade to try to flip a sixth seat. Voters gathered signatures to force a referendum on the new lines. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins then tried to keep the referendum off the ballot. When the Supreme Court ordered the old map restored, Hoskins moved to defy that order anyway, relying on a federal ruling that had cut the other way. Chief Justice Brent Powell ordered him into court to answer. The court held Hoskins in contempt, found that he had disregarded a lawful order of the state’s highest court — and then declined to punish him, on the reasoning that backing down had been punishment enough. Hoskins caved. The old map stands.
That is where the constitution did its job. A court enforced the rules against the officials who broke them. And that, in the Missouri Republican Party, is the offense.
Fourteen Republican legislators responded by writing to the court and threatening impeachment of “responsible members of this Court” for “willful neglect of duty, incompetency and misconduct.” Read the charge against the conduct it describes. The judges’ misconduct was enforcing the state constitution against a legislative map and holding a statewide officer in contempt for refusing a lawful order. The letter treats the faithful performance of judicial duty as an impeachable offense, which tells you what the signers want a judiciary for.
Gov. Mike Kehoe went on X to denounce “unelected judges” and their “lack of respect for the legislative process” — a complaint about judges who are retained by statewide vote every twelve years, lodged by a governor who has discovered the issue only now. Kehoe admitted on a radio show that judicial selection was not something he had been thinking about until the courts got in the way, and then announced that “it’s definitely something a lot of people are going to start asking about.” State Republican Party executive director Miles Ross declared flatly that “the Missouri Plan is done.” U.S. Rep. Jason Smith called for electing judges outright — a system that would place every judicial race on the same ballot where the parties already spend fortunes. Dan Seitz, chief of staff to state Sen. Brad Hudson, proposed the alternative that hands the keys to whichever party holds the governorship plus a Senate majority. State Rep. Cathy Jo Loy has filed bills to dismantle the plan in each of the past two sessions and says she will file another on Dec. 1, explaining that the court fights have given her cause “more appetite.”
Count what the party holds. Every statewide elected office. Supermajorities in both chambers. Six of eight congressional seats. They are, by any honest measure, the most dominant political organization in Missouri. And they are behaving like a movement that has just discovered it is not permitted to win everything.
The proximate grievance is the ballot initiative. When Republican officials have written ballot summaries that misled voters — including the summary for the 2024 abortion rights amendment — the courts rewrote them, and the voters used the initiative process to do exactly what the constitution entitles them to do. Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin was already calling to scrap the system at the end of 2024, after the court kept the abortion-rights measure on the ballot; her replacement bill died in committee. The appetite has only grown since. That is the actual grievance: a party that controls every lever of state government has found that it does not control the constitution, and the courts are the branch that enforces the difference.
The steel-man deserves its airing. Reformers do make serious arguments about judicial selection — that appointment systems entrench a professional legal caste, that elections politicize the bench, that no single design is uniquely legitimate. Some of the legislators involved may believe versions of this. But the timing, the roster, and the language retire that defense. This is not a reform movement that encountered the Missouri Plan in the abstract. This is a legislative majority that lost a redistricting fight, watched its secretary of state held in contempt, and concluded that the institution which produced that result must be rebuilt to produce different results. Missouri’s courts are not what the letter-writers portray. Five of the seven Supreme Court judges were appointed by Republican governors. Chief Justice Powell was hailed as a “good conservative” by the then-chair of the state Republican Party before Gov. Eric Greitens picked him in 2017. This is a conservative court that remains a court. That is the defect being corrected.
This is the Missouri chapter of a national operation. In North Carolina the legislative majority stripped authority from a Democratic governor on inauguration. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators threatened to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court justice to protect their maps. In New York, Democrats attempted the mirror image and were rebuffed by their own state high court. The Missouri fight also runs through the federal courts, where the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the state’s gerrymander three times without producing a final answer — and where Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019), has already made partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable in federal court, leaving state constitutions enforced by state courts as the remaining check on exactly this kind of map. Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. 1 (2023), then confirmed that state courts exercising ordinary judicial review over state constitutional limits is the expected order of business, not an aberration. Missouri’s Supreme Court was doing what both decisions contemplate. The legislature’s answer is to abolish the mechanism.
The Missouri Plan can be killed only by the voters it was designed to insulate the courts from. Ed Dowd, the former U.S. attorney who has helped lead Citizens for Missouri Courts for two decades, says the group becomes “most active when the system is under threat” — and his firm just put $100,000 into the defense fund. Peverill Squire, the University of Missouri political scientist emeritus, thinks the bills will draw hearings and little more. Loy herself concedes that putting a constitutional amendment before the voters, after the party’s recent losses at the ballot, will not be easy.
The fourteen lawmakers who signed that impeachment threat should recall what Article V, Section 25 exists to prevent. It exists so that no future fourteen lawmakers could turn a court’s lawful ruling into an impeachable offense, and no future secretary of state could treat a court order as optional. The system has one job. In Missouri, this year, against this majority, it is doing that job. The courts have now bought it eighty-six years. Whether the voters buy it another one is the only question the legislature’s timetable leaves open.