Dem
51
Ties
3
GOP
46
In late 2025, the Missouri state legislature, under orders from Donald Trump, redrew its Congressional districts to break up a predominantly Black district around Kansas City and to spread its voters around to the neighboring, more conservative districts. This should have netted the Republicans one additional House seat. Missouri voters had another idea. Over 300,000 residents signed a petition to put a referendum on the ballot challenging the new map. By law, once the petition qualified for the ballot, the new map could not take effect until the voters had their say. But the state attorney general refused to sign off on the referendum and waited until after the primary, which used the new map, to object to the petition on some other manufactured basis. The petition's drafters sued and the state Supreme Court unanimously found in their favor, which meant that the new map had no force or effect and could not be used in the upcoming general election.
Cue the midnight run to the Supreme Court. Like clockwork, the Missouri attorney general filed an "emergency" application to the high court to nullify, or at least pause, the state Supreme Court's decision. But, in a surprise, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the request. Because this was an application on the Court's shadow docket, Kavanaugh, who handles emergency appeals from the 8th Circuit, which includes Missouri, did not have to refer it to the whole Court. Instead, he acted on his own and simply denied the application. Sometimes, the Court operates as it should—go figure.
There is no written order so we are left to surmise the reasons behind the rejection, but we can come up with a couple. If this were a normal Supreme Court that respects precedent and adheres to consistent procedures to avoid favoritism for certain parties, this would be a no-brainer. The case only involves state law and a unanimous state Supreme Court decision over election issues, which are the unique province of the states. And emergency applications should only be granted under the most rare and extraordinary circumstances, which this case does not present.
Given that this Supreme Court is more than willing to get involved even on the eve of elections to help Republicans, it's hard to be completely satisfied with that explanation. But let us add that the decision was rendered by a Missouri Supreme Court comprised of mostly Republican appointees, and was triggered by an AG who created this mess by waiting so long to object to the petition. No federal claims were raised originally in the litigation and those that were belatedly raised were weak. The upshot is that SCOTUS would have had to stretch, even more than in some of its real head-scratcher cases, to make a pro-Republican ruling. And all that for one House seat. So, we're not that stunned that Kavanaugh didn't want to wade into this morass.
But wait, there's more. No sooner had Kavanaugh rejected the application than a federal district court reinstated the new map in a different case brought by a GOP candidate who had prevailed in the primary under the new district lines. Stephen R. Clark, chief judge of the Eastern District of Missouri and a Trump appointee, ruled based on his concern that going back to the original map would create widespread confusion and "wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness" of the election in violation of the equal protection clause. Presumably, there will be an appeal to the Eighth Circuit and potentially another trip to see Kavanaugh. We should learn the outcome of all this pretty quickly.
In case one is tempted to try to divine from Kavanaugh's immediate rejection of Missouri's application a possible outcome in the USPS mail-in voting case, resist the urge. Unlike the Missouri case, the USPS case involves a federal court order that blocked a federal agency rule. So, the reason to deny Missouri's application—that it only involves state law issues—is not present. Plus, Solicitor General John Sauer has a remarkable track record in getting the Republican Justices to grant his stay requests on the shadow docket. He knows the buzzwords that will give the right-wing majority what it believes is a legitimate-sounding justification to get involved, a justification that just so happens to work in favor of Trump and the Republican Party.
One potentially intriguing tidbit is that Kavanaugh acted on his own in denying the application outright without referring it to the whole Court. Conceivably (and Supreme Court experts among our readers can correct me on this), Associate Justice Jackson who handles emergency applications from the First Circuit, which is where the USPS case is being litigated, could also have simply rejected the application. The fact that she referred the case to the Court could be an indication that she took the Court's temperature and liked what she learned. But that's pure speculation, and perhaps some wishful thinking. Stay tuned. (L)