Missouri Supreme Court stopped Denny Hoskins' power grab

By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit · September 11, 2026

I grew up in a zip code where "the rules" were things used to keep us in line, not things that protected us.

I grew up in a zip code where "the rules" served to keep us in line, not to protect us. In Flint, we learned early that when the people in charge find a law inconvenient, they don't just bend it—they break it, and they leave the people at the bottom to breathe the fumes. When Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins runs a shell game with congressional maps, I don't see a "fluid situation" or a "constitutional crisis." I see the same old story: concentrated power treating the law as a suggestion and the voters as obstacles.

The Convenience of a Purged Contempt

On Thursday, September 10, the Missouri Supreme Court did something that should be routine but now feels radical: it forced a high-ranking official to answer for his actions. As reported by kansascity.com and STLPR, the court held Denny Hoskins in contempt for directing local election officials to use a 2025 congressional map (HB 1) that the court had already declared illegal.

The GOP spin casts Hoskins as a man caught in a storm of conflicting orders. His attorney, William Seidleck, claimed he stood "between a rock and a hard place" due to a federal temporary restraining order and ballot deadlines. Chief Justice W. Brent Powell saw through the performance. Powell noted that Hoskins had a third option: he could have simply told local authorities to take no action until the courts cleared the air. Instead, Hoskins chose the door that served his party.

The 2025 map was no clerical error; it was a weapon. It aimed to maximize the odds of ousting Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a move that mirrors the spirit of Rucho v. Common Cause, where federal courts washed their hands of partisan gerrymandering and left the vulnerable to the mercy of the map-makers. Hoskins didn't just "pick a door"; he tried to lock the voters out of the room. He "purged" his contempt only after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay that blocked the 2025 map, forcing him to concede and return to the 2022 map for the November 3 general election.

The Only Door That Matters

This is no mere spat over lines on a map; it is a fight over who actually runs the state. The mechanism at play is the very spine of our legal system, established in Marbury v. Madison. That 1803 decision did more than grant courts the power of judicial review; it codified that the Constitution is law, not a set of polite suggestions for the executive branch. When the Missouri Supreme Court found Hoskins in contempt, they weren't just correcting a map—they were asserting that the executive cannot unilaterally decide which court orders to obey based on political expediency.

The attempt to bypass this authority is a recurring fever dream for the current GOP establishment. It appeared in the failed "independent state legislature" theory discussed in Moore v. Harper, which argued that legislatures are exempt from judicial review. It lives in the way Citizens United v. FEC turned the electorate into a marketplace for the highest bidder. The goal remains the same: insulate power from accountability.

Hoskins argued he was following the law, but as attorney Chuck Hatfield noted, the judiciary "held tight" against an attempt to alter what the law has always been. In my world—the world of union halls and student loan debt—we know that when the powerful claim "confusion," they are usually hiding the money or the votes.

Impeachment Threats and the Primary Lie

The aftermath is where the gall reaches its peak. According to the Missouri Independent, fourteen Republican state lawmakers sent a letter to Chief Justice Powell vowing to impeach state judges if Hoskins was held in contempt. This is the bully’s playbook: if the referee calls a foul, threaten to fire the referee. It is a blunt attempt to signal that the judiciary should function as a subsidiary of the party in power.

But the damage is already etched into the record. The August primary ran on the gerrymandered 2025 map. Now, as we head toward a general election using the 2022 map, we are left with a democratic farce. Representative Bob Onder has already hinted that the voters are the ones "harmed," but the GOP engineered that harm while claiming to protect them.

A collision looms. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will likely uphold the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling on September 17, but the GOP will likely spend the next cycle trying to legislate away the court's authority over elections. They will point to Proposition A on the November ballot as a mandate, regardless of whether the map it approves is legal. This is the same playbook used in United States v. legislatures—treating the map as a tool of conquest rather than a reflection of the people.

Denny Hoskins does not walk away from this with a simple "purge" of contempt. You cannot "purge" the act of trying to disenfranchise thousands of citizens to protect a party line. The fact that he obeyed the law only after he ran out of higher courts to appeal to proves that his commitment is not to the Constitution, but to the leverage. If we allow the executive to treat court orders as optional, we are not living in a republic; we are living in a fiefdom where the only law is the will of the man holding the pen.

Missouri Supreme Court stopped Denny Hoskins' power grab

The Convenience of a Purged Contempt

The Only Door That Matters

Impeachment Threats and the Primary Lie

Sources