Sky York Journal
The Supreme Court will weigh in a third time on Missouri Republicans’ attempts to ram through a maximal gerrymander after twice rejecting those efforts.
An 8th Circuit Court of Appeals panel circumvented the Supreme Court’s temporary restraining order blocking the state legislature’s 2025 map Monday evening. The aggressive gerrymander would likely give Republicans 7 seats in Congress and Democrats only one. The appeals panel — composed of two Trump appointees and one H. W. Bush — directed the lower court to enter a preliminary injunction blocking the use of the 2022 map, a 6 Republicans to 2 Democrats gerrymander that the Missouri Secretary of State told election officials to use for the midterms last week.
“Missouri’s 116 local election authorities are implementing the 2022 map — the only lawful map under Missouri law,” said People Not Politicians, the group leading the charge against the 2025 gerrymander, in a Monday request for the appellate judges to stay their order. “Voting has already begun: military ballots were transmitted 3 September 18 as required by law, and absentee voting begins tomorrow, September 22.”
People Not Politicians appealed that decision to the Supreme Court late Tuesday. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh told supporters of the 2025 map to file responses by Wednesday afternoon.
The appellate panel had found that asking Missouri voters to vote under a different map in the general election than they did in the primaries violated the Constitution. Of course, the reason that the primaries were conducted under the 2025 map was that Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) purposefully dragged out not certifying the effort to challenge the new map until primary day, giving its opponents no time to challenge his decision.
In terms of the glaring Purcell principle problem, where federal courts are dissuaded from interfering with voting laws on the eve of an election, the appeals court judges contorted their way to a conclusion that the principle actually favors their ruling amid an ongoing election.
“The Missouri General Assembly ‘set the status quo,’ the Missouri Supreme Court ‘upset it,’ ‘and it is our duty, consistent with Purcell, to at least preserve the possibility of restoring it,’” they wrote.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the 7-1 gerrymander had never become law and was not legally used in the primaries, due to the state’s referendum process that lets petitioners freeze new legislation (including the map) until it can be put to a statewide vote.
The first time the Supreme Court weighed in, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Missouri Republicans’ effort to stay a lower court decision blocking the 2025 map without even referring the question to the full Court. The second time, the Court handed down a temporary restraining order against a different lower court decision that mandated the use of no other map but the 2025 one.
Missouri Republicans’ and their allied judges’ extraordinary attempts to revive the 2025 map reflect a growing desperation to put even one extra House seat safely in the GOP’s column. But it also reveals the complacency of Republicans who, after the Supreme Court’s killing of the Voting Rights Act, believed they were free and clear to craft maps that gave Democrats as little a chance of winning as possible, no matter the will of the voters. It must be particularly galling for Missouri Republicans to look to their counterparts in red states like Florida, where fully partisan state Supreme Courts would never reject an effort to give their party an artificial advantage.
Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly asserted that there were dissents from the Supreme Court’s temporary restraining order on use of the 2025 map. TPM regrets the error.
