Missouri House halts congressional map approval as candidate filing expires
The Missouri House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to hit pause on the latest attempt to approve a new congressional map, leaving the state without new district boundaries as candidate filing ended.
The decision came after Rep. Dan Shaul, an Imperial Republican and the chairman of the House Redistricting Committee, urged lawmakers to send the map to a conference committee, where House and Senate negotiators would develop a final proposal.
“Let’s go take one more shot at it,” Shaul said.
The Senate last week ended weeks of infighting between GOP leaders and a faction of hard-right members by passing a compromise proposal that would preserve the current partisan mix of six Republican and two Democratic members of Congress. The breakthrough came after the faction abandoned an effort to oust Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver — and add an additional Republican member — by gerrymandering his Kansas City-area district.
But in the House on Tuesday, unhappiness with the map was a bipartisan proposition. It voted 115-19 to reject the Senate’s map and ask for negotiations. During the debate, both Republicans and Democrats said they were worried about different parts of the proposed lines and the haphazard way in which the Senate approved them.
“I’m just a little frustrated with this bill, with these maps,” said Rep. Jerome Barnes, a Raytown Democrat. “We sent this over to the Senate back in January and they waited two days before the filing deadline to send it back to us. They read books. They did everything but do their job.” Barnes was referring to filibusters in which members of the hard-right faction passed the time by reading aloud from books by conservative authors.
Barnes said the map should more closely match the state’s political split, with about 40% of voters supporting Democrats in 2020.
Rep. Nick Schroer, a St. Charles Republican and one of the 19 votes against Tuesday’s motion, however, said he worried that sending the map back to negotiations would lead to more filibustering. The Senate as of Tuesday afternoon had not taken up the House’s motion.
The House vote to reject the Senate’s map comes amid the looming possibility of court intervention. At least two lawsuits have been filed — one by a group of voters and another by a St. Louis-area congressional candidate — asking state court judges to take action after legislative inaction.
Candidate filing also ended Tuesday, a deadline seen by some as a Rubicon of sorts because without a map in place candidates don’t know what voters they’re courting.
The map approved by the Senate consolidates the 5th District — held by Cleaver — into the Kansas City area and eliminates its rural communities, which currently stretch into central Missouri.
It also significantly redraws the St. Louis-area 2nd District, held by Republican U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner. Instead of the blob that it is today, its new claw-like shape stretches from the St. Louis metro into southern Missouri, in hopes of making it more Republican.
And it places Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base in the same district.
