The Supreme Court rejected a brazen plot by Missouri Republican officials to hold the state’s upcoming congressional elections under an illegal map on Thursday morning, ending a week-long jumble of dueling court orders that disrupted the state’s election processes.
In an unsigned order, the justices effectively blocked state officials from using an extremely gerrymandered map passed last year that would have likely given Republicans an additional House seat this fall. Missouri voters will instead elect their representatives under a slightly less gerrymandered map enacted in 2022 instead. Those voters will also have the chance to decide whether to enact the 2025 map for the rest of the decade in a ballot initiative this fall.
The order in People Not Politicians v. Onder largely hinges on peculiar questions of Missouri law that are not generally applicable in the other forty-nine states. It does not reflect a reversal of the conservative majority’s enthusiasm for gerrymandering, whether partisan or racial in nature. But it does offer a modicum of hope that the Supreme Court will not blatantly allow contrived right-wing plots to disrupt this year’s elections.
Missouri redrew its congressional maps in 2022 to account for the results of the 2020 Census. The result was a familiar map with six safe Republican seats and two safe Democratic seats. In the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump pressured many Republican-led states to gerrymander their congressional maps even further to favor GOP candidates. Multiple Democratic-led states responded with their own gerrymanders in turn.
Last September, Missouri lawmakers passed House Bill 1 to repeal the 2022 map and impose a new one. The revised map would break apart the state’s existing fifth congressional district centered on Kansas City and split its voters among three safe rural Republican seats. The likely result, barring a seismic electoral shift, would be seven GOP seats and a single Democratic seat in St. Louis, with a net gain in the House of one Republican seat.
Missouri’s constitution allows voters to put “any act of the general assembly,” aside from two exceptions not relevant here, on a statewide ballot in the following general election. Once a petition for a ballot initiative is certified, the law is frozen from going into effect until Missourians approve or reject it. A citizen group named People Not Politicians gathered more than 300,000 signatures last December to put HB 1 on this November’s ballot. Organizers submitted the 691 boxes containing the signatures to Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office on December 9.
Under Missouri law, Hoskins had to formally approve or deny the petition by August 4 at 5:00 PM—a span of more than eight months. One hour before the deadline, Hoskins denied the petition, arguing that it was “insufficient under the Missouri Constitution because the Missouri Constitution does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting plans passed by the general assembly.” As noted earlier, this is plainly incorrect. The state then held primary elections under the 2025 map the following day.
Organizers accused Hoskins of running out the clock on potential legal challenges by rejecting the petition at the last possible moment. Courts are typically (but not unequivocally) reluctant to allow last-minute changes to state election laws on the eve of an election, a doctrine often known as the Purcell principle for the Supreme Court case that established it. By delaying until the last minute on clearly illegal grounds, Hoskins and his allies may have hoped that the courts would allow the 2025 map to be used, following Purcell.
They were wrong. The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously rejected Hoskins’ gambit last month, ruling that the petition wasn’t prohibited under the plain text of the state constitution. The court ordered him and the state to do two things: use the 2022 congressional map for November’s election and allow HB 1 to be referred to state voters on that ballot. “The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” it concluded. “HB 1 did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters.”
In response, Hoskins sought an injunction from the Supreme Court last week to block the state supreme court’s ruling from taking effect. To call this a long shot would be underselling it: State supreme courts have the final say in interpreting their own state constitutions, and the Supreme Court traditionally defers to their judgment unless a federal law or federal constitutional right is implicated. To that end, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Hoskins’ request in his capacity as circuit justice without referring the matter to the entire court—a signal that Kavanaugh thought the motion was not worth the other eight justices’ time.
That is where the legal battle should have ended. Instead, less than an hour after Kavanaugh’s decision, a federal district-court judge in Missouri granted a surprise temporary restraining order that instructed Missouri to use the 2025 map instead. Representative Bob Onder, a GOP member of Congress, filed a lawsuit last week in response to the state supreme court ruling alleging various violations of federal constitutional provisions. Effectively, he argued that it would be unconstitutional to essentially throw out the results of the primary elections held under the 2025 map.
The Missouri Supreme Court had considered this very argument and rejected it outright. Under the state’s rules for ballot initiatives, HB 1 could only take effect if approved by the voters and could not go into force before then. “HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law,” the court explained. “There is only one valid congressional redisticting in effect—the congressional redistricting the general assembly established in 2022.” It had rejected Hoskins’ claims of practical difficulties by noting that he had done everything he could to run out the clock on a valid petition. In short, the court refused to give Hoskins credit for holding what was essentially an illegal primary election.
Despite this, Judge Stephen Clark stunningly granted Onder’s motion to force HB 1 to go into effect. He concluded that it didn’t matter whether the HB 1 map was legal because the state had already used it. “Whether or not HB 1 was the governing law during the primary election, voters—including Plaintiffs—voted in primary elections within the congressional districts drawn by HB 1,” Clark wrote. “And they didn’t do so of their own accord. Instead, they did so based on the parameters set by Missouri’s highest election authority, the secretary of state.” In ruling as such, the judge effectively rewarded Missouri officials for holding illegal primary elections in defiance of their state constitution.
There were strong signs earlier this week that the Supreme Court was closely monitoring the situation and was not thrilled by this turn of events. People Not Politicians, the group that had originally gathered the petition signatures, asked Kavanaugh to stay Clark’s ruling on Wednesday. Only eleven minutes passed after the group filed its motion before Kavanaugh ordered Onder and Hoskins to file reply briefs. He set a deadline of ten o’clock Eastern time on Thursday morning, giving them less than 24 hours to weigh in.
The high court almost never acts this fast outside of death-penalty cases for pending executions. The two men filed their reply briefs overnight, and the Trump Justice Department (unsurprisingly) also filed its own brief that urged the court to reject the motion and side with the HB 1 map. It didn’t work. A lightning-quick sixteen minutes after Kavanaugh’s deadline expired this morning, the Supreme Court—this time acting collectively—blocked Clark’s stay until further action from the justices while litigation continues.
In practical terms, the justices’ intervention guarantees two things. First, Missouri voters will elect their representatives in two months based on the 2022 map instead of the 2025 map. That will boost the chances of longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, to hold the state’s fifth congressional district. Second, voters will also decide whether HB 1 will go into effect for the 2028 and 2030 elections. (Assuming, of course, that the state legislature doesn’t try this all again before then.) Recent polling provides few clues as to how Missourians will vote on the matter.
Beyond the implications for Missouri, the Supreme Court’s approach to the dispute is also somewhat heartening. The justices unambiguously rejected efforts by state officials to hold November’s midterm elections under an illegal congressional map, even after those officials illicitly engineered a status quo where they hoped to take advantage of the courts’ election precedents. As Trump and his allies consider similar anti-democratic plots against the American electoral system later this year to maintain his grip on power, the justices’ clarity and alacrity is encouraging. Hopefully it extends to the imminent mail-voting case and future election disputes as well.
