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On Monday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals further confounded Missouri’s ongoing mid-decade redistricting debacle. The three-member federal panel sided with a lower federal court and directed the state to use a new map gerrymandered in 2025 and specially designed to propel Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver into retirement—part of President Trump’s effort to secure the largest possible advantages for Republicans in the midterm elections.
In early September, the Missouri Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that the 2025 map could not be used without first being approved in a voter referendum, especially since People Not Politicians, the Missouri referendum advocacy group backing the map question, had met all of the constitutional requirements to secure a slot on the ballot.
But using an older map, the appeals court warned, is at odds with Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which establishes the timing for selecting members of Congress. They also argued that the 2022 map violates the “Purcell principle,” an inconsistently applied Supreme Court precedent holding that election procedures should not be changed close to an election—even though the Eighth Circuit was doing precisely that by imposing a map change of its own, leading one legal analyst to argue that the decision interjected “a reverse-Purcell issue” into a perplexing collection of decisions.
The appeals court’s ruling further complicated the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision on the 2022 map that also relied on Purcell, for the moment. But there’s a strange aspect to all these maneuvers that the Eighth Circuit set aside: The Supreme Court has already backed up the state high court not once but twice.
The Trump administration’s election-rigging exercise isn’t quite panning out, but Missouri Republicans have tethered themselves to it just the same.
On Tuesday, the curtain went up on the third act of the melee, the U.S. Supreme Court vs. Missouri Republicans vs. the Missouri Supreme Court vs. the Eighth Circuit. People Not Politicians and its executive director Richard von Glahn turned right around to the U.S. Supreme Court again, asking for clarification of their September 10 decision that failed to clear up this ball of confusion.
Though these decisions have been universally described as “a mess,” what is clear is this unusual clash between state and federal courts is the product of an inept series of own goals by the Missouri Republicans who effectively control all three branches of state government.
Committed as they are to the Trump administration’s egregious mid-decade redistricting power play, protecting the current Republican majority in Congress remains Missouri’s primary objective. But it’s one that most Republican and Democratic states declined to take up for fear of exactly what’s now backfiring in real time for Missouri: massive confusion.
The Trump administration’s election-rigging exercise isn’t quite panning out, but Missouri Republicans have tethered themselves to it just the same. The legal debacle, electoral payback, and surging voter fury over everything from the affordability crisis to another Middle East war, and now this, should send the administration’s massive calculation off to die a natural death.
“Missouri has, in some ways, been a test case of ‘Can all of these branches of government really check one another to be coequals?’ And when the answer was yes, some politicians’ response to that is, well, then we need to eliminate this idea of coequal branches of government,” von Glahn told the Prospect.
“Even where conservative members of the judiciary,” he adds, “are asserting their role in protecting equal branches of government, and you have seen some Republicans as response to that say we need to eliminate [the state’s] nonpartisan court plan and we need elected judges.”
At the Supreme Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Missouri’s designated interlocutor, compounded this crisis by failing to offer more precise reasoning that might have dissuaded the appeals court from going so far out on a limb, especially since the state supreme court’s decision was an unequivocal 7-0 decision. Five of the Missouri judges were appointed by Republicans and two by Democrats.
Yet Allen Rostron, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, doesn’t see the high court changing direction to support the Eighth Circuit’s decision. This situation, he says, “is not ideal, but if you step back from it, this whole thing was driven by a desire not to let the people of Missouri vote on the referendum. If [state lawmakers] had just said, ‘All right, let’s get this referendum voted on, and then we’ll change the districts,’ none of this would have come up in the first place.”
The debate over the state supreme court’s conclusion—it “was legally improper” to use the 2025 map in the primary—“has settled down,” he says. As for the Eighth Circuit’s reasoning, “the U.S. Supreme Court is already well aware of all the arguments.”
But the Supreme Court’s “cryptic” instructions to the lower courts didn’t help, Rostron surmises. Even so, the justices might be perturbed that their Eighth Circuit brethren didn’t get the memo the first two times—and then set a deadline for the high court’s own response, a move which Rostron says is “presumptuous.” “They could see a sentence or something from the Supreme Court that reminds them essentially of who’s the higher court, and that they need to be careful to respect the spirit as well as the letter of what the Supreme Court’s telling them to do.”
There will undoubtedly be some post-election jockeying in the courts. Losing candidates, voters, and others could file suits alleging that they were disadvantaged by using the 2025 maps in the primary and the 2022 maps in the general. Could those kinds of suits prevail? “I would be skeptical that anybody’s going to succeed on a lawsuit in court after the election because the issues have been litigated,” says Rostron.
Several dominoes have fallen during these displays of judicial one-upmanship. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins was found in contempt of court for defying the state supreme court and directing state election officials to use 2025 maps—before the issue was definitively settled—after another federal judge ruled in favor of those maps. He also is directly responsible for all the Purcell back-and-forth, because while the referendum petition was completed last December, he deliberately sat on it for eight months and then certified it literally one hour before his legal deadline.
Ultimately, with the threat of penalties hanging over him, Hoskins switched back to the 2022 maps. There will be a spotlight on him for the rest of the election season, but now that beam is even brighter.
Meanwhile, local election officials haven’t received any further instructions from the secretary of state’s office since they were notified that old maps were back in play. Military, overseas, and absentee ballots are all being mailed out.
A voter backlash is also brewing against the Missouri GOP’s imperial impulses. During the August primary, not only did voters reject referendums to phase out the state income tax (83 percent voted no) and to switch to congressional district majority votes instead of a statewide majority vote to approve initiative petitions (80 percent voted no), but they also punished their legislative proponents.
Republican state Sen. Curtis Trent, the sponsor of the income tax referendum, lost his primary race. He was on track to be the next majority floor leader in the Senate. State Rep. Ed Lewis, the sponsor of the initiative petition change, also lost.
Beyond Missouri, voters realize that mid-decade redistricting is a farce. A recent Common Cause national poll of 2,000 registered voters nationwide and 400 to 500 more voters in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas revealed that striking majorities of Democrats, Republicans (including Trump 2024 supporters), and independents want mid-decade redistricting banned. The alternative? Voters support independent redistricting commissions and removing state lawmakers from the process altogether and replacing them with average citizens who will set the parameters to select their representatives, rather than the other way around.
