Missouri’s attorney general had bipartisan support. Then redistricting happened
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Hanaway adopted aggressive legal moves to defend Missouri’s new congressional map.
- Critics say her actions mirror partisan precedents set by prior Republican AGs.
- Hanaway defends constitutional role while pursuing fraud, crime and asset suits.
When Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway came into office this year, she brought decades of legal and political experience that suggested she might be different.
Prior to becoming the first woman to ever hold the office, Hanaway served as a federal prosecutor, Missouri House speaker and Republican candidate for governor. Outside of politics, she led one of the state’s most prominent law firms, Husch Blackwell, as its first female chair.
Hanaway’s sterling credentials and pre-Trump era reputation came with a belief that she would take a more pragmatic and traditional approach than her predecessors. Former Attorneys General Andrew Bailey, Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley built national profiles with highly-publicized lawsuits, incendiary online posts and rarely-used legal actions that pushed the boundaries of the office.
For some, Hanaway signaled a change of course. Then redistricting happened.
Ten days after Gov. Mike Kehoe appointed Hanaway as attorney general, he called a special session to gerrymander the state’s congressional map under pressure from President Donald Trump. Missouri immediately embarked on a hyper-partisan effort to carve Kansas City voters into three GOP-leading districts and lawmakers passed a new map a month later.
The legal fallout from that vote — and a series of actions Hanaway’s office has since deployed to crush a citizen-led campaign seeking to strike down the map — have raised eyebrows from critics who argue Hanaway has continued the aggressive and partisan techniques wielded by her predecessors.
“All indications were that she was going to be a reasonable, objective, fact-based, fair attorney general and that she was not going to engage in unnecessary and inflammatory rhetoric,” said Chuck Hatfield, an attorney embroiled in litigation with Missouri over the map. “It turns out our expectations were misplaced.”
Throughout her first 100 days in office, Hanaway has used a series of tactics to halt Missourians from holding a statewide referendum on the map that some legal experts have called unprecedented.
She filed a federal lawsuit to block the campaign in October, claiming that voters do not have the power to hold a referendum on the state’s congressional districts. She alleged — without evidence — that the campaign was working with undocumented immigrants. Her office argued in court filings that nearly 90,000 of the campaign’s signatures should be invalid. And, most recently, she claimed that the state’s new map should remain in effect before voters have a say next year, defying decades of precedent.
Hanaway has also staked out positions that have appealed to her conservative base on a host of other issues in recent weeks. She criticized Kansas City officials over a decision not to include religious symbols in holiday decorations. She helped carry out a rule enacted by Bailey that shut down Pornhub. And she has sought to seize assets from China in response to a headline-grabbing lawsuit filed by Schmitt.
Over the past several months, some Democrats appear to have soured on Hanaway. When Kehoe picked Hanaway, House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, referred to her as a “solid upgrade” and “vast improvement” over Bailey, whom she called incompetent.
Three months later, Aune took to social media to call Hanaway an “Unelected, ultra partisan attorney general.”
At least one Democrat suggested this week that Hanaway has gone further than her predecessors. During a press briefing organized by the campaign against redistricting, Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state, criticized Hanaway’s argument that the map was still in effect despite the campaign turning in signatures to force a statewide vote.
“There have been some pretty political attorneys general in this state,” Kander told reporters. “Look, I’m not Josh Hawley’s doctor, but I’m pretty sure he’s 50% water and 50% politics and he did it the correct way.”
Kander inferred that Hanaway’s actions in defense of the map could be due to pressure from the Trump administration.
“When you are demonstrating less political courage than Josh Hawley, then you really have to look yourself in the mirror and ask some really serious questions,” he said.
Supporters push back
Hanaway’s supporters said in interviews with The Star that her actions should come as no surprise and framed criticism of the attorney general as strictly partisan. Collectively, they touted her legal and political experience and the ways in which she has defended Missouri.
“I think she’s doing a bang up job,” said James Harris, a prominent GOP consultant in Missouri who said he’s known Hanaway for more than two decades.
Harris said the role of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office has shifted over the past ten years from being the prosecutor of the state to serving as a defender of state law and the Constitution.
“As Republicans hold office longer, you will find from — I call it the insider-crotch-sniffer crowd of…special interest Democrat lawyers — and they always want to go talk about the way things were 30 years ago,” Harris said. “And it’s just not how things are.”
Some Democratic-leaning lawyers, like Hatfield, may be surprised by the ways in which Hanaway has handled the office, but Harris said he was not.
“She’s always been, you know, leading on conservative issues from her time in the state legislature and just since then,” he said.
Jean Evans, a former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, also championed Hanaway’s brief time as attorney general and said she appears to be leading the office in a strong manner.
“Catherine is doing a great job,” Evans said. “She’s taken on a lot of different things. There haven’t been any scandals…It seems like she stepped in and immediately picked up the ball and started running with it.”
Hanaway defends time in office
Hanaway, in an interview with The Star, made no apologies for the way she’s handled her new position or the protracted redistricting fight.
Inside her office in the Missouri Supreme Court building, which overlooks the state Capitol in Jefferson City, she framed her role as a defender of the Constitution and “the integrity of the voting process.”
“If we don’t have free and fair elections, we lose our republic, right?” Hanaway said. “So, it’s very important and that’s why I’ve been so aggressive about it.”
When asked about critics who have expressed surprise at the way she’s led the office, Hanaway emphasized that she has been focused on a wide-range of issues that affect Missourians beyond just the headline-grabbing fights over redistricting.
Over the past several months, Hanaway’s office has promoted a series of legal maneuvers and courtroom victories that have garnered less national attention than the controversies surrounding the map. Those actions include a slate of criminal convictions, an investigation into unregulated hemp products and a push to crack down on Bitcoin scammers.
“It’s hard for me to speculate about what they were expecting and what they think they’re getting,” Hanaway said in response to critics, acknowledging that her fights over constitutional issues tend to draw more headlines. “What I know I’m focused on is that this is a job and really trying to give the taxpayers their money’s worth.”
Hanaway said she’s focused on the “everyday” aspects of the office, including fighting against fraud, and has tried to promote those efforts to the public. Her No. 1 priority is pushing back against violent crime, she said.
Still, Hanaway was unapologetic about her multi-pronged approach to keeping Missouri’s new congressional map in place. One by one, she defended each of her office’s actions that have faced a bevy of criticism in recent months.
“These are the congressional districts — it’s how we select our representation in Congress,” she said. “Nobody should be surprised that we’re going to fight very hard to uphold the Constitution here.”
As her time in office surpasses 100 days, Hanaway said she plans to continue serving out her remaining three years in office, the rest of Bailey’s term after he resigned to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If she has voter support, she said she would then run for a full term.
In the meantime, she emphasized that redistricting wasn’t the only thing her office was working on.
“Look, redistricting is a big national issue, right?” she said. “So, I’m not driving that, right? I’m doing my job, which is to represent the state. At the same time, the things I’m spending my, you know, time on are related to preventing violent crime and fraud and all those things.”
