Attorney General Hanaway Leads Multistate Effort To Rein In Judicial Overreach In Texas Redistricting Case

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Today, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced that Missouri has filed an amicus brief, leading twenty-one states, in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal district court’s ruling that threw out Texas’s congressional map and handed five seats to the plaintiffs’ preferred political party. The brief explains that the lower court ignored clear Supreme Court rules and inserted itself into a political battle that belongs to elected state lawmakers, not unelected federal judges.

“Redistricting is a duty entrusted to the people’s elected representatives,” said Attorney General Hanaway. “The district court in Texas cast aside that principle and gave partisan litigants a victory they could not earn through the democratic process. Missouri is standing with Texas because federal courts cannot be used to override the will of state legislatures.”

Missouri’s filing centers on a straightforward point: the district court refused to follow the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, which requires anyone accusing a State of racial gerrymandering to offer an alternative map showing the state could draw districts differently without changing its political goals. This safeguard prevents political groups from disguising ordinary partisan disagreements as racial discrimination claims.

But the plaintiffs in Texas did not submit any alternative map, despite their own expert testifying she could generate “a million maps in a matter of seconds.” Instead, they asked the Court to reinstate an old map that just so happened to give their political party five more congressional seats.

Missouri also noted that if courts can ignore Alexander whenever they want, national activist groups will be emboldened to use racial gerrymandering claims as a political weapon anywhere in the country. That concern mirrors Missouri’s own recent litigation, where out-of-state groups attempted to overturn Missouri’s new congressional map through an unlawful referendum effort. The Attorney General’s Office has repeatedly argued that congressional redistricting belongs to the legislature and that letting out-of-state activist groups disrupt the process would create chaos and damage public trust.

“Just as Missouri is defending our own map from outside interference, we are standing with Texas to protect the constitutional line between courts and legislatures,” concluded Attorney General Hanaway. “If an unelected judge can throw out a state’s map without following Supreme Court precedent, no State’s elections are safe.”

Missouri is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to immediately stay the lower court’s order so that Texas, not a federal judge, controls its 2026 congressional map.

Missouri is joined in this amicus by attorneys general from the following states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

The full amicus brief can be read here.