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Missouri’s redistricting drama renews focus on direct democracy … and ‘Air Bud’
Buddy and Josh in the spotlight in the 1997 Walt Disney movie, Air Bud.
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When I first read about how Texas Republicans were preparing to engage in mid-decade redistricting, I sent a text message to a Republican aide in state government, jokingly wondering if Missouri would get in on the fun.
It’s no secret that my interest in Missouri redistricting borders on obsession. Some of my love for the subject stems from its importance. The lines and where they are drawn can determine which party has a better shot at winning any given district. But I also have a lifelong interest in cartography, including nearly winning my middle school geography bee and getting to talk to a National Geographic mapmaker while tagging along on a work trip with my dad.
Still, at the time I sent that text, I thought there was no way that Missouri Republicans would plunge back into congressional mapmaking in 2025 — especially after redistricting in 2022 sparked a bitter schism within the Missouri legislature.
I was wrong.
Very wrong.
Missouri ended up becoming the second GOP-led state behind Texas to redraw congressional lines at the behest of President Trump. And Missouri Republicans were upfront about their rationale: They wanted to oust Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City to help prevent Republicans from losing control of the U.S. House in 2026.
And Missouri Republicans didn’t just pass a new map: They broke all sorts of legislative norms and precedents to push it to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s desk.
But in the rush to obtain a short-term victory for Republicans in Washington, D.C., Missouri Republicans may have ushered in the new map’s doom from at least two different directions.
EnterAir Bud
Redistricting detractors have filed a slew of lawsuits — including a particularly important one around whether it’s even allowed for Missouri lawmakers to redraw congressional boundaries in the middle of a decade. That case is still in its early stages, but the Missouri Supreme Court is expected to decide sometime next year.
On the surface, redistricting foes seem to have a solid case — a constitutional amendment that they say only allows for congressional redistricting after a census. But Missouri Republicans appear to have a secret weapon to counter that contention: The Air Bud Rule.
In the 1997 Walt Disney film, a referee allows Buddy the Dog to play basketball because, after searching frantically through a rule book, “there ain’t no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball.”
Flash forward to 2025: Defenders of the Missouri redistricting plan have rallied behind a similarly constructed argument: “There’s nothing in the Missouri Constitution that says lawmakers can’t redistrict mid-decade.”
Air Bud analogy is a slam dunk
When I first heard this argument, I started to ask Missouri lawmakers if they’d seen Air Bud.
Some, like Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, had seen it — and acknowledged that the GOP defense of the map was basically the Air Bud Rule. (When he was a state senator, Hoskins successfully sponsored a bill designating two legendary canines, Old Drum and Jim the Wonder Dog, as Missouri’s official Historical Dog and the state’s official wonder dog.)
“Other states have different processes as far as when they can redistrict for congressional seats. But in Missouri, there’s nothing, in my opinion, that says that we cannot do this,” said GOP Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who then joked that the new map should be named the “Air Bud Clause” if judges uphold it.
The analogy gained popularity among those entangled in redistricting.
Democratic state Rep. Mark Boyko mocked Republicans by citing the Air Bud Rule on the House floor. And during arguments earlier this month in Jefferson City, Chuck Hatfield, an attorney representing plaintiffs trying to strike down the new congressional lines, said in court this month, “we don’t do Air Bud rules in Missouri for very good reason, but that’s essentially what the argument is from the state.”
“It’s like if my children ask me: ‘Can we have ice cream tonight?’ And I say, we’re going for ice cream tomorrow,’” Boyko said. “And they say: ‘Well, you haven’t said we’re not having ice cream tonight, so we’re having ice cream tonight, too.’ No.”
Although Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway had never seen the film, in an interview with me, she said the “ain’t no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball” principle is “not a bad analogy” in describing the state’s main argument.
“The Constitution says that redistricting shall happen after the decennial census. It doesn’t say that it shall happen immediately after; that it should happen only once per decade; that it can’t be revisited,” Hanaway said. “I don’t know what happened to Bud. I’m guessing he probably didn’t get to play basketball since you’re using that analogy. But I think our chances of prevailing are pretty good.”
When I informed her that Buddy not only got to play basketball, but he also played football in the classic film Air Bud: Golden Receiver, Hanaway said: “Man, I have missed a whole genre. I really got to catch up on that.”
A surprise referendum
But the biggest threat to the Missouri redistricting plan may not be the lawsuits.
One day, after the draining first week of the redistricting special session in September, I took a walk near my house in St. Louis. That’s when a question popped into my head: If lawmakers managed to pass the map, were there enough members in the Missouri House to make the map go into effect right away? If not, Republicans wouldn’t be able to avoid Missouri’s very robust referendum process.
While getting my kids ready for bed, I realized the answer was … no. The new map that Trump and Missouri Republicans wanted so badly could be subject to a statewide vote. If signature gatherers just got enough names collected before Dec. 11, the map couldn’t go into effect for the 2026 election cycle, defeating the entire purpose of the redistricting special session.
My story for St. Louis Public Radio was published before members of the House ended up giving first-round approval to the redistricting bill. Lawmakers ended up passing the map anyway, without much trouble — even though voters could end up wiping out their work.
After the special session ended, though, it was clear that a lot of lawmakers had no idea that the map could potentially be nullified through a statewide vote.
Opponents of the map have been scouring the state to collect signatures to put the plan up for a statewide vote. State Rep. Bryant Wolfin said he was unaware the map could go up for a statewide vote — adding “I guarantee the majority of the caucus did not as well.”
Whether the Trump White House realized that Missouri’s new map could be put up for a vote is unclear. Officials did not reply to a request for comment. But there’s no debate that the referendum generated a lot of excitement among despondent Missouri Democrats who suffered through yet another bad election cycle in 2024.
“I don’t even like politics, OK? I just know we need transparency,” Jefferson City resident Frida Tucker told me in September. “We need to stop the power grab. We don’t need to do it every three years, OK? Like, something’s not right here.”
So what did I learn from following along on this wild Missouri redistricting saga?
For one thing, it’s important to pay attention to seemingly insignificant details, like the vote count of a bill that was always expected to pass.
And other takeaway? Maybe revisit 1990s Disney films before a redistricting cycle, because you never know when a throwaway scene could inspire a legal theory that sinks or saves a nationally-watched proposal.
Jason Rosenbaum is a political correspondent for St. Louis Public Radio.
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
transcript
transcript
Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
April 20, 2026
In this photo illustration, The Onion website is displayed on a computer screen, showing a satirical story titled Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’, on November 14, 2024 in Pasadena, California.
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The satirical website, The Onion, has a new deal to take over Infowars, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s far-right media company. If approved by a Texas judge, the deal would take away his Infowars microphone, and allow The Onion to resume its plans to turn the website into a parody of itself.
Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They’re still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgement they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children in order to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones’s followers to harass and threaten the families for years.
The families are also eager to take away Jones’s platform for spewing such conspiracy theories. The deal not only would divorce Jones from his Infowars brand, but it would turn the platform against him by allowing The Onion to mock his kind of conspiracy mongering and advocate for gun control.
The families “took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others” by using “his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattei, one of the attorneys for the families. “When Infowars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
A mourner visits the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial on the 10th anniversary of the school shooting on Dec.14, 2022 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot and killed, including 20 first graders and 6 educators, in one of the deadliest elementary school shootings in U.S. history.
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For its part The Onion called it a “significant step in an effort to transform one of the internet’s more notorious misinformation platforms into a new comedy network for satire.” The company says it could announce its new rollout of Infowars in a matter of weeks if the judge approves the deal.
“Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money,” said Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion. “This is a chance to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”
On its website Monday, The Onion posted a satirical message from the fictional CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” stating a “dream is finally coming true.”
Jones’s posted on X Monday that “The Onion Has Fraudulently Claimed AGAIN That It Owns Infowars!!!” adding that “The Democrat Party Disinformation Publication Is Publicly Bragging About Its Plan To Silence Alex Jones’ Infowars And Then Steal & Misrepresent His Identity!”
On a podcast in March, Jones alluded to the impending demise of Infowars, saying, “We’re getting shut down. We beat so many attacks. But finally, we’re shutting down like the middle of next month,” before insisting, “We’re going to be fine.”
Jones suggested Monday he would appeal any court decision to approve the leasing deal. And even if he loses control of Infowars, Jones could continue to broadcast from another studio, under another name.
Jones’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a year ago, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected The Onion’s first attempt to buy Infowars through a bankruptcy auction, saying the process was flawed. Since then, the bankruptcy court clarified that because Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, is not itself in bankruptcy, its property should be handled instead by a Texas state receiver. That cleared the way for the new pending deal to lease Infowars to The Onion, with the hope that a future sale could be approved.
In papers filed in state court, the Texas receiver said he “determined that licensing the Intellectual Property is in the best interest of the receivership estate.”
The deal calls for The Onion to pay $81,000 a month to license the Infowars.com domain and brand name, which the receiver says will “cover carrying costs to preserve and protect the assets of the receivership estate” until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for a sale.
Jones’s personal bankruptcy case is proceeding in federal bankruptcy court, where a trustee continues to sell off Jones’s personal property, including cars, homes, watches and guns, with proceeds intended for the families.
A memorial to massacre victims stands near the former site of Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2013 in Newtown, Connecticut, one year after Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school.
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