Missouri state Rep. LaKeySha Bosley on Friday slammed proposed congressional redistricting as racist and an attack on Black political power.
“Let's call these maps what they are,” said Bosley, D-St. Louis. “They are racist. Period, full stop. And every one of you are going to probably sit there and pat ourselves on the back. ‘Oh, she's crazy.’ ‘Oh, she's fear mongering.’ ‘Oh, this is race baiting.’ No. You are the ones causing the race baiting. You're the ones getting people amped up and ready to go.”
Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session to engage in mid-decade redistricting, which centers around converting Cleaver’s Kansas City-based 5th District into a more Republican-leaning seat. Lawmakers are also considering requiring constitutional amendments and statutory ballot items placed before voters through the initiative process to pass in a statewide vote and in all eight congressional districts.
Both of these measures passed out of a House Rules Committee on Friday by a 7-3 vote. That means House members can debate both pieces of legislation starting on Monday.
Bosley said the map seeks to dilute Black political power by potentially forcing out Cleaver, who was elected as the first African American mayor of Kansas City.
In addition, she said, since Republicans are using census data from 2020, there’s no way to know for sure if Rep. Wesley Bell’s 1st Congressional District is still a minority-majority district. The new map adds a number of majority-white inner ring suburbs from St. Louis County to Bell’s district.
While Cleaver’s district is not majority Black and is not protected by the Voting Rights Act, the 1st District is covered by that federal law.
“Let's be clear, this is going to disenfranchise minority voters. This ain't just about Democrats and Republicans and independents and Green parties,” Bosley said. “This is about the soul of this state. And it is OK for each and every one of you to sign your name on the dotted line with the devil's blood. Because you essentially, you're selling the soul of Missouri.”
Rep. Richard West, R-Wentzville, who chaired a special redistricting committee, said he disagreed with Bosley’s characterization. He said it’s still possible that Cleaver could win in 2026 in the overhauled 5th District, especially if the national environment is favorable to Democrats.
“This is encouraging your public officials to get out and meet you, to talk to you, to work for it,” West said. “I think a lot of these districts are actually more competitive.”
West alluded to the likelihood that the map will face legal challenges, not only based on the Voting Rights Act – but also about whether the legislature can engage in mid-decade redistricting.
“If there's an argument on that, I encourage them to look at that and find the statistical data and bring that forward, and then we can challenge it at that time,” West said. “At this time, we can only go by law. And the law says we have to go off of the latest census.”
President Donald Trump has pressured Republican-led states like Missouri, Texas, Florida and Indiana to redraw their districts ahead of the 2026 election cycle. Some Missouri Republicans have openly said that they support this move because they don’t want Democrats to retake the U.S. House – and potentially open up investigations into Trump’s administration.
State Rep. Mitch Boggs, R-Lawrence County, said that detractors of the map insinuated that “President Trump maybe sat up at 2 in the morning and wrote these maps. And that wouldn’t aggravate me at all, because we're kind of a team effort.”
“I'm very proud of our president, very proud of the ability that he's stood up and he's given us some feet to stand on,” Boggs said. "And I like to think that our governor is a very strong, very standing Republican. And so I think it's a team effort. I don't think that it matters who wrote it.”
Democrats on the committee noted that Republicans rejected going after Cleaver in 2022, primarily because they feared that putting Kansas City voters in Reps. Mark Alford and Sam Graves districts would make those seats more competitive.
Initiative petition ballot curbs move forward
While the redistricting proposal will likely remain the same as it moves through the legislature, the initiative petition restriction proposal may not be set in stone.
West, for instance, said that his main interest is in making the constitution more difficult to amend – and he is not necessarily enamored of requiring statutory initiative petitions to pass in eight out of eight congressional districts.
But Rep. Ed Lewis, R-Moberly, defended one of the other major points in the proposal – that constitutional amendments and ballot items that the legislature put before voters would only need a majority vote. That means that, had the plan been in effect in 2024, a proposal known as Amendment 3 that protected abortion rights would have had to pass in all eight congressional districts. But the proposal that lawmakers placed on the 2026 ballot to repeal most of that measure, also known as Amendment 3, would only need a majority vote.
Lewis said that passing a ballot measure through the legislature is already difficult, as it needs to go through a number of steps and receive extensive public vetting before it goes to voters.
“So they get a majority in the House, they get a majority in the Senate, so they've got a majority, and that's just to get it put on the ballot for the first time,” Lewis said.
Republicans have sought to restrict the initiative petition process after the passage of a number of ballot items perceived as left-leaning besides the abortion rights measure, including expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana.
Rep. Keri Ingle, D-Lee’s Summit, said the contention that Missourians were “‘too stupid or too confused or too easily tricked to understand what they're voting for’ is not only offensive, you're wrong.”
“It could be that they're not tricked, that they're not stupid,” Ingle said. “They just disagree with you.”
In response to Ingle’s comments, Rep. Don Mayhew, R-Crocker, said voters likely don’t know the intricacies of ballot items, especially in the case of the marijuana initiative that was several dozen pages long.
“If you are going to make that check in that box, you ought to know what it is that you're voting for, and perhaps that requires a little more education,” Mayhew said. “But to suggest that the voters knew exactly what it was they were voting for? Well, there's probably a rare occasion when that does occur. But for the most part, these initiative petitions, they do not.”
