For the second time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh has slapped down Missouri Republicans, siding with advocates who want to block a Trump-ordered gerrymander until voters get a say on it. The Supreme Court has taken a hard line on Missouri state officials’ inability to accept high court rulings.
But that still doesn’t settle the issue, or sort out the congressional districts Missourians will vote in less than two months. And if the mess is any indication of how the midterms will be fought from courthouse to courthouse, we’re in for an exhausting fall.
“All concur.” Those were the last words in the clear, concise, and unanimous decision by seven Missouri Supreme Court judges directing the secretary of state to place a redistricting referendum question on the state’s general-election ballot. The referendum question, Proposition A, would ask Missouri voters to weigh in on a new congressional map, one gerrymandered by state Republican lawmakers to satisfy President Trump’s mid-decade redistricting quest.
But in 2026, nothing is clear, concise, or unanimous.
The new map, drawn in 2025 to eliminate a majority-Democratic seat in Kansas City and hand that seat to Republicans, had been used in the state’s August primary. But People Not Politicians, the Missouri advocacy group behind the redistricting referendum, argued that under the state constitution, Missourians had the right to weigh in on whether the new map should become law. They gathered over 300,000 signatures, more than enough to enable Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to move the referendum to the ballot.
Securing this one seat would turn a 6-2 Republican congressional delegation into a 7-1 lineup and provide some breathing room for Republicans.
The only question was whether the state constitution allowed a referendum on congressional redistricting. The seven justices ruled that it did and ordered Hoskins to therefore use the old congressional map for the general election, until the voters weigh in on the new map. They pointed out that Hoskins caused his own predicament by delaying a decision on the referendum question until the deadline to do so. That happened to be the day of the state primary, which was held using the gerrymandered maps.
“Given these undisputed facts,” the judges concluded, “the secretary’s arguments about confusion, expense, and practical difficulties are wholly unpersuasive.”
The state high court’s decision should have been case closed. But Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) went for a nuclear option, requesting an emergency stay from the U.S. Supreme Court. Using one map in the primary and another in the general election, Hanaway said, would “disenfranchise voters.”
Richard Von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians, has argued that the Supreme Court had “repeatedly” ruled that referendums on congressional redistricting are permissible, including the Roberts Court in Moore v. Harper (2023). And indeed, the Supreme Court did not intervene. On Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency cases involving Missouri, overruled the request.
But it lasted all of a few minutes.
Almost immediately after Kavanaugh issued his decision, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri ruled in a lawsuit filed by Rep. Bob Onder (R-MO), state Sen. Rick Brattin (R-Harrisonville), and two voters over the decision to use the 2022 map. Clark decided that the map to be used in the general election would be the 2025 map, the same one used in the primary. And Hoskins immediately declared that he would use it.
That ruling set up another lawsuit from referendum advocates. They argued that Clark’s ruling, which differs from the Missouri Supreme Court verdict from just days earlier, “places Missouri’s election officials in the impossible position of choosing which court’s order to violate.”
The emergency appeal from People Not Politicians went to Justice Kavanaugh again on Thursday. And this time, he granted the stay on Judge Clark’s ruling, pending action in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. That invalidates the judge’s order to use the new maps.
Since the appeals court will have to do its business, the matter could come back to Kavanaugh again.
Advocates upped the ante by asking that Hoskins be held in contempt of court for violating the Missouri Supreme Court’s injunction.
Brattin, one of the plaintiffs in the federal case, has a significant interest in the outcome. He’s the one running in Missouri’s Fifth Congressional District against Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D), and the choice of maps will determine whether Brattin has a chance or not, and whether Black Kansas City voters will be spread out over three predominantly white Republican areas to vote for a member of Congress.
Securing this one seat would turn a 6-2 Republican congressional delegation into a 7-1 lineup and provide some breathing room for Republicans fearful of losing control of the House in 2027.
Which court will finally decide the case, whether old maps or new ones will be used, and how much future legal wrangling the secretary of state faces is still entirely unclear. What’s certain is that President Trump and the Republican Party plan to keep state and federal courts very busy with novel applications of state and federal law—all in service of the national GOP’s interest to inject more chaos into the midterms.
Writing for Election Law Blog, Travis Crum, a professor of law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, noted that Judge Clark ignored Kavanaugh’s denial to go ahead and issue his decision, which mentions the justice’s order.
Crum indicated that he believed that Justice Kavanaugh would make a similar decision again—and he did. Under the Purcell principle, Kavanaugh could simply say that the general election is only weeks away and that the state supreme court ruling must be upheld. But he also might want to drive home his reasoning more strongly for the litigious Missourians in the back.
The past month’s developments surrounding the congressional maps could spell a bigger backlash for Missouri Republicans. There was widespread dismay with state lawmakers’ decision to move two ballot questions to the August primary, thinking a light turnout would doom them.
It didn’t. Missourians crushed their attempts to end the state income tax and devise an almost impossible set of calculations to pass citizen-initiated ballot questions. The GOP’s never-ending machinations will end up forcing Missourians to pay closer attention to how the mid-decade congressional mapmaking meshes with the party’s attacks on direct democracy.
But the lesson of the saga for the national political scene is murkier. As challenges to how ballots are sent to voters and counted by election officials mount, the relentlessness of the GOP crusade to win in the courts what they may not be able to win through elections will proliferate.
Contradictory rulings like the one in Missouri could become the norm, especially if the Supreme Court declines to act. And a president who doesn’t want to relinquish a scrap of power could grow more defiant in the face of rulings that fail to cement his authority. Missouri is a train wreck, and a few more states may just line up to pile on.
