Hours after the Supreme Court declines to save Missouri's blocked map, a federal judge orders it used anyway.

…(cont) They sent me from the annex to a satellite office downtown, because it turns out the annex doesn't handle whatever category my renewal falls under, and at the satellite office there was a radio on the counter, and the man ahead of me in line was talking with the clerk about how the state had gone over that court's head two days later and asked the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn the block — an emergency filing, the Attorney General's office calling what the state court had done a "federal-election-administration disaster." Is a "federal-election-administration disaster" the same map a federal judge would order into use a few days after that filing?

From there they sent me to the courthouse basement, for reasons I no longer remember, and the deputy at the metal detector had it on his phone: the Supreme Court had rebuffed the state's request, left the block standing, declined to get involved at all. That was the morning's news. By that afternoon, a federal judge had ordered Missouri to use the new map anyway — the one the state court had blocked, the one the U.S. Supreme Court had just refused to save — for November. Same map. Same week. Was it days between those two rulings, or was it hours?

On the way between all these buildings there's a toll plaza, and my car doesn't love hills, so I was already easing off the gas when the arm went up for me, green light, go ahead — and then it came back down before I'd cleared it, and I sat there with a truck behind me leaning on his horn, trying to decide what a person is supposed to do with a gate like that. Up, then down. Same gate, same car, same ten seconds. Do you back up, or do you go through?

The last stop was the actual courthouse window everyone had been sending me toward all day, and the clerk there mentioned a separate matter — the state's own Supreme Court weighing whether to hold the state's top election official in contempt, and an appeals panel that had already refused to halt the federal order from taking effect. Is a court that is weighing contempt against the state's top election official the same court whose own ruling a federal judge just told them to set aside?

I finally had my renewal in hand when the woman behind the glass said, oh — before you go — one more thing. Which district did she want me registered under? The one the state's court had blocked, or the one the federal judge had just ordered used? I did not know. Do you?