Missouri’s embattled, Trump-backed congressional map returns to Supreme Court for a third time

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — A quixotic legal battle over whether Missouri may use a GOP-friendly congressional redistricting plan for November’s election returned to the Supreme Court for the third time late Tuesday night, forcing the justices to once again review an effort the court unanimously rejected less than two weeks ago.

The emergency appeal will — once again — decide if Republicans can flip an additional House seat in the November midterm election. It’s also part of an extraordinary push by Republicans to continue to fight for the seat after the conservative high court has signaled it is uninterested in getting involved in the messy, months-old dispute over the state’s map.

A group opposed to the map filed the emergency case at the Supreme Court late Tuesday a day after a federal appeals court ruled that Missouri must use the Republican-friendly map in November, rather than a map created in 2022, because voters had already selected nominees based on the newer map in the state’s primary election.

“Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed, and absentee voting, both by mail and in-person, began today,” the group told the Supreme Court in its appeal. “Those ballots cannot be reassigned to new districts now.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles appeals arising from Missouri, requested a response in the case by Wednesday afternoon.

Missouri’s new map targeted the 5th Congressional District, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, by breaking up its Kansas City base and stretching it into rural and Republican-leaning parts of the state. There would be seven conservative-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning, a change from the current 6-2 split.

The whipsaw case of Missouri’s congressional map may be merely an appetizer for the banquet of election appeals that are likely to reach the justices tied to this year’s midterms.

The justices have already shut down an effort by President Donald Trump to give the US Postal Service more power to screen mail ballots. The court has also already juggled a series of other redistricting disputes this year, including in Texas, California, Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia.

University of Chicago law professor William Baude said Tuesday that it was “a hundred to one” likely that the court would reject the GOP map again. He described the case as a “taste of what’s to come.”

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the 7-1 Republican map adopted by the legislature at Trump’s behest last year could not be used because of a referendum challenge brought against it under the state constitution. State Republicans challenged that, appealing all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, a conservative, declined that request, which appeared to settle the matter.

But minutes after that decision, a federal district court stepped in with a ruling in favor of the GOP map. And the case was once again appealed to the US Supreme Court, which once again sided against reviving the GOP map. In that instance, the full court reviewed the case, and no justices noted their dissent. The court also did not explain its reasoning.

The conservative 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals read the boilerplate language from the Supreme Court, and its lack of reasoning, as an invitation to rush through its own ruling. In an unsigned opinion, the court concluded that “the Constitution does not permit Missouri to use a different congressional district map in the November 2026 general election than it used in the August 2026 primary election.” And it ordered a federal trial court to once again require that the state move forward with the 7-1 map.

It is that decision that has prompted the third round of appeals.

Even though the 8th Circuit ruled in favor of the GOP, it ordered the lower court to pause the impact of that decision until Monday to give the appeals a chance to play out. That means the Supreme Court is likely to either settle the dispute before Monday, or issue a short-term extension of that deadline to give the justices more time to decide.

CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.

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