The Supreme Court on Friday refused yet again to back Missouri Republicans’ preferred congressional map, marking the high court’s third action this month against the state GOP’s bid to further increase its partisan control in the midterm elections.

It’s the latest Supreme Court order ensuring that Missouri’s congressional delegation will be decided this fall with the state’s existing map, which is poised to favor Republicans over Democrats by a 6-2 margin, rather than with a map passed last year that could have widened that gap to 7-1.

Voting is already underway with the existing map, which was passed in 2022.

“In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map — not the
2025 map — must be used in the 2026 congressional
election,” the justices said Friday, without any noted dissents, in an opinion that should definitively settle the matter.

Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled in early September that the 2022 map is the lawful one for the midterms and that voters will decide with a November ballot measure whether to approve the 2025 map going forward. In reaching that conclusion, the state court sided with Richard von Glahn, who backed the referendum with his group, People Not Politicians. It was a loss for the state, which had sought to use the 2025 map for November while trying to block the ballot measure from going to voters.

In its first high court loss in this litigation, the state sought to upend the Missouri Supreme Court ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is the justice assigned to field emergency litigation from Missouri, rejected that attempt on Sept. 8.

Yet, immediately after the Trump-appointed justice’s rejection, a Trump-appointed federal district judge in Missouri, Stephen Clark, said the state had to use the 2025 map, issuing an order in a separate case brought by GOP congressional candidates. That led People Not Politicians and von Glahn back to Washington, seeking to halt Clark’s order. The full Supreme Court agreed to do so on Sept. 10, in an unsigned and unexplained order without any noted dissent. Although the justices have been providing some explanation in their emergency rulings over the summer, they do not always do so.

And though the full court’s rejection in the Sept. 10 order seemed to settle the matter, a new ruling in the federal case sought to revive it. On Monday, a three-judge federal appellate panel of GOP appointees said the state had to use the 2025 map for the November election because the state had used it for the August primary. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit panel said that it wasn’t reviewing the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision, which was based on the state constitution. Rather, the panel said it was guided by the federal constitution. (When Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled against the state, it said the state’s own delayed actions led to the 2025 map being used for the primary even though it shouldn’t have been.)

Importantly for practical purposes, while it told the district judge, Clark, to issue a new injunction for the state to use the 2025 map, it also said to put that new ruling on hold for a week, to give the Supreme Court another chance to weigh in.

In the emergency filing that brought the case back to the justices for a third time, People Not Politicians and von Glahn said the circuit panel was trying to get around the Supreme Court’s Sept. 10 order. They urged the high court to clarify that its prior order “means what it says: the Eighth Circuit cannot evade it by directing entry of a permanent injunction requiring exactly the same thing.” They noted that voting was already underway with ballots printed under the 2022 map, and they said the circuit ruling would inject “unprecedented disruption” if the justices didn’t step in.

Opposing high court intervention, a group led by Rep. Bob Onder, a Missouri Republican who is running for re-election, said the circuit opinion simply answered a question left open by the Supreme Court’s unexplained Sept. 10 order. State officials likewise opposed the emergency application, arguing, among other things, that People Not Politicians and von Glahn lacked legal standing to press the challenge when the state didn’t support it.

The state told the justices “the honest truth” is that whatever they decide, “Missouri will not be able to run an orderly 2026 General Election.”

It said that if it has to use the 2025 map, then that would avoid disenfranchising people who voted in the primary election with that map, but that the state would then be violating legal deadlines for sending ballots to military and overseas voters.

On the other hand, the state said that granting the application from People Not Politicians and von Glahn would continue voter and candidate confusion while voters are disenfranchised and candidates have to run in new districts in which they hadn’t been campaigning.

“Of course, that assumes those candidates remain the candidates — as there are already challenges to the validity of Missouri’s Primary Election results based on the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling,” the state said, adding: “Although no option is ideal, the State believes that voting under the 2025 map better advances the public interest.”

In a final reply brief, von Glahn and his group maintained that the greater threat came from the 8th Circuit’s “unprecedented intrusion requiring Missouri to change maps after voting has begun.” They said that state officials “have their marching orders from both the highest court in the state and the highest court in the nation — the November election will proceed under the 2022 map — and those instructions are being followed.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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