KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe on Friday called state lawmakers into a special session to gerrymander the state’s congressional map, thrusting Missouri into a national redistricting fight spearheaded by the Trump administration.

Kehoe, in an announcement Friday afternoon, ordered lawmakers to return to the Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City next Wednesday at noon. In a stunning move, the Republican governor also called on lawmakers to weaken the state’s initiative petition process, a more than a century-old mechanism for direct democracy that allows citizens to put measures on the ballot.

“Today, I am calling on the General Assembly to take action on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform to ensure our districts and Constitution truly put Missouri values first,” Kehoe said in a statement Friday afternoon.

The announcement sets up a potentially volatile special session in which Republican lawmakers will take aim at representative and direct democracy in the hopes of maintaining their party’s firm grip on Missouri politics.

The redistricting effort is unprecedented, with Kansas City as the presumptive target. Kehoe’s inclusion of the initiative petition process comes as Missouri Republicans have attacked the process in recent years after voters passed a series of policies seen as liberal, such as abortion rights, paid sick leave and Medicaid expansion.

The mid-decade redistricting push comes as Trump’s political team has pressured Republican-led states to redraw their U.S. House maps so Republicans can maintain a majority in Congress. Republican-led Texas passed a Trump-backed map last week, sparking a retaliatory response in Democratic California.

The plan in Missouri and other states would be an overt use of partisan gerrymandering, a term used to describe the practice of redrawing electoral district boundaries to favor one party over another.

Kehoe’s announcement included a copy of a proposed congressional map, which he called “the Missouri First Map.” The map appears to carve up the Democratic-leaning 5th District, which includes Kansas City’s urban core and nearby suburbs. That could effectively force out of office U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Kansas City’s longtime Democratic congressman.

Republicans currently control six of Missouri’s congressional districts while Democrats hold the 5th District in Kansas City and the 1st District in St. Louis, under maps lawmakers passed in 2022. Congressional districts are typically only redrawn once every decade based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“The governor has made the call,” said House Speaker Jonathan Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican. “I’m going to talk with our members this weekend and get their opinions and then get a plan for next week.”

Opposition to the effort has been mounting in Kansas City and across the state for weeks as the Trump administration pressed for a new map in Missouri.

House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Democrat, issued a blistering statement condemning the move a day before Kehoe officially made his announcement.

“The governor’s complete capitulation to the president’s will proves that Donald Trump – not Mike Kehoe – calls the shots in Missouri,” Aune said, “while the man Missourians elected to lead our state is a mere puppet responding to his master’s commands.”

Cleaver and scores of Kansas City lawmakers have attacked the idea, framing it as an undemocratic power grab. Sen. Barbara Washington, a Democrat, pointed out that Kansas City was being targeted despite being a major economic driver in Missouri.

“Kansas City is the largest city in the state,” Washington said. “Without Kansas City and the St. Louis area, this state does not survive.”

Others cast it as an attempt by Trump to either divert attention away from, or maintain GOP control in spite of, his administration’s unpopular moves, such as its handling of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Legal experts also contend that the Missouri Constitution bars lawmakers from redrawing the state’s congressional districts mid-cycle, putting the state at risk of losing a long, drawn-out legal fight. Emails obtained by The Kansas City Star showed that top Missouri officials weighed the legality of the move late last month.

Two attorneys heavily involved in state government issues, Chuck Hatfield and Alix Cossette, also sent a legal memo to House Democrats this week, emphasizing that the move would be illegal.

“The plain language of the Missouri Constitution and the Missouri Supreme Court’s precedent make clear that mid-cycle congressional redistricting is prohibited,” the memo, obtained by The Star, said. “Any attempt to do so will draw a substantial legal challenge which will likely succeed and invalidate any map adopted by the General Assembly.”

Last week, as Missouri appeared likely to enter the redistricting fight, more than 500 people crammed into a union hall in Kansas City to protest the effort. Another protest is scheduled for Monday. The city’s two leading business advocacy groups, which had previously endorsed Kehoe’s bid for governor, also came out against the plan.

Phone calls, letters and messages from people living across the state have flooded the Missouri Governor’s Office. An internal staff report from Kehoe’s office, obtained by The Star, listed opposition to the redistricting attempt as the No. 1 “hot topic” among Missouri residents who contacted the Republican governor late last month.

Gerrymandering is also unpopular nationally. In a recent YouGov poll of 1,116 Americans, 69% of respondents said it should be illegal to “draw electoral districts in a way that makes it harder for members of a particular party to elect their preferred candidates.”

The poll showed that 75% felt that lawmakers redrawing districts to favor one party was a “major problem.”

Despite the opposition, Kehoe repeatedly expressed interest in the plan over the past several weeks. The Republican governor gathered the state’s top legislative leaders to discuss the idea at a private meeting earlier this month, The Star previously revealed through public records.

“Our goal, if we move forward, and there’s no decision to move forward…is to make sure Missouri’s values are reflected in Washington, D.C.,” Kehoe told reporters last week.

However, critics point to the fact that Republicans are already over-represented in Missouri’s congressional delegation compared to how Missourians voted in recent election cycles. In the 2024 election, 58.5% of Missouri voters elected President Donald Trump, the Republican, while 40.1% voted for Kamala Harris, the Democrat.

Meanwhile, Republicans currently control six of the state’s eight congressional districts or 75% of Missouri’s representation in Congress. If Missouri lawmakers redraw another seat for the GOP, Republicans could make up 87.5% of that representation.

Speculation reached a fever pitch last week when Trump appeared to suggest that Missouri was on board with his plan. Kehoe remained noncommittal at the time, however.

“The Great State of Missouri is now IN. I’m not surprised,” Trump wrote on social media last week. “It is a great State with fabulous people. I won it, all 3 times, in a landslide. We’re going to win the Midterms in Missouri again, bigger and better than ever before!”

Despite Kehoe’s announcement, it remains unclear how exactly Republicans would split up the districts. But, U.S. Rep. Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican who had spoken with Trump’s political team, previously told The Star that voters in the Kansas City area could be divided into three GOP-leaning districts.

Over the past several weeks, speculation ramped up in Missouri GOP circles that national Republicans were drafting the map in Washington, D.C. Kehoe said on Friday that the proposed map was “drawn and created by his team in Missouri.”

Missouri lawmakers will likely return to the Capitol in Jefferson City next week for a series of public hearings on redistricting and whether they want to override any vetoes Kehoe enacted over the summer. Lawmakers will then decide whether to send a proposed map to the state House and Senate floors for final debate.

Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers and could approve a map without Democratic support or even attendance — undercutting any effort by Democratic lawmakers to leave the state and block a vote on the map (a tactic Democrats employed in Texas).

Missouri Democrats have, at times, successfully blocked legislation using one tool at their disposal in the state Senate: the filibuster. They say they’re prepared to use it.

“You can guarantee Democrats will filibuster any attempt to redistrict mid-decade,” said Washington, the Democrat. “You can guarantee that the 10 Democrats will stand tall and protect the voices of all Missourians.”

©2025 The Kansas City Star. Visit at kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.