Dear Attorney General Catherine Hanaway,
I write to express my deep dissatisfaction and concern with the way you have handled the congressional redistricting matter from beginning to end. Your legal strategy and your public rhetoric surrounding this process have been abysmal and have created unnecessary confusion for Missouri voters, county clerks and candidates alike.
The decision to aggressively litigate to block a citizen-led referendum petition — which only sought to allow Missourians to vote on the legislature's newly drawn maps — undermines the principles of direct democracy. Your assertions that the Missouri Constitution bars voters from weighing in on congressional districts, while simultaneously engaging in a complex and expensive multi-court
legal battle that has bounced between Missouri's high court, federal judges and emergency applications to the U.S. Supreme Court, has thrust our electoral process into unnecessary turmoil just weeks before an election.
What is worse, except for the Trump-appointed federal judges' (Judge Clark and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals) politically-motivated (and ultimately determined to be legally wrong) efforts to uphold an unlawful and illegal Republican-redrawn map, your faulty legal acumen throughout proved to be so far wrong, as shown by both the unanimous Missouri Supreme Court opinion and the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision issued Sept. 25, that it has been totally embarrassing to all members of the Missouri bar that Missouri could even have an attorney general both this politically-motivated and also this ignorant of her own state's laws and constitution.
Furthermore, using highly-charged language to label the Missouri Supreme Court rulings as "catastrophic" and declaring a self-inflicted procedural bottleneck a "full fledged constitutional crisis" damages public trust in our judicial and electoral systems. Rather than providing a stead hand to guide the state through a standard legislative dispute, your approach has weaponized the map-making process, resulting in an environment where Missourians are left uncertain about which boundaries define their communities.
You also misled the Missouri Secretary of State into believing he could engage in sneaky and nefarious tricks to delay acting until the last moment and get away with using an illegal map to win another congressional seat for Trump. You and your reputation will ultimately pay the price for all you have done in this matter.
I urge you and your office to pivot toward honesty and transparency, respect the role of the state judiciary and prioritize the clarity and disenfranchisement concerns of Missouri voters above the partisan legal maneuvering.
Donald E. Woody is a retired attorney in Springfield.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Missourians deserve better from the state's top attorney | Opinion
